A senior finance director once told me, “I hate Bitcoin.”
He wasn’t a fool. One of the sharpest finance professionals I’ve met—decades of experience, fluent in markets, balance sheets, and risk. And yet, he hates Bitcoin.
When someone from that generation says “I hate Bitcoin,” they don’t mean “I hate money” or “I hate innovation.” They mean: “I hate that young people found an exit.”
The System They Built
The Boomer generation mastered a simple formula: buy stocks, buy bonds, buy real estate. Repeat for forty years.
It worked. The money supply kept expanding, and everything they owned inflated in price. Wealth came not from creating value, but from owning assets during a century of credit expansion.
Now they’re retiring. And they need someone to buy those inflated assets: the stocks at record valuations, the bonds trapped in a massive sovereign-debt bubble, the homes priced at years of wages for a single down payment.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Under the gold standard (1873-1933), American equities traded at an average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to Robert Shiller’s long-term market data. Today, that ratio has nearly doubled to 27.
Real estate tells an even starker story. In 1920, the average house cost $6,296 while average income was $3,269—a ratio under 2:1, according to research by Aronson and Linden. Today, after nine decades of monetary premium accumulation, that ratio has exploded to nearly 8:1.
These aren’t just inflated prices. They represent a fundamental shift: assets have become savings vehicles because currency cannot be trusted to hold value. By comparing current valuations to gold-standard baselines, we can estimate that roughly 48% of equity valuations and 75% of real estate values are pure monetary premium—wealth stored in assets not because of their utility value, but because fiat currency loses purchasing power by design.
The Game Has Changed
Then Bitcoin appeared.
Young people looked at the board and saw a rigged game. Stocks at all-time highs with absurd P/E ratios. Real estate increasingly unaffordable. Pension systems operating as Ponzi schemes—the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates total unfunded US government liabilities at $162.7 trillion.
They looked at this setup and said, “No thanks.” They chose a fixed-supply digital asset instead.
This isn’t irrational speculation. It’s a rational response to buying the top of a century-long credit bubble. Young people aren’t looking backward at what worked for their grandparents—they’re looking forward at what might work for them.
The Counterargument
Traditional finance professionals have ready objections: Bitcoin is volatile. It produces no cash flows. It’s speculative.
These criticisms miss the point.
Bitcoin is volatile as a $2 trillion asset. It won’t be volatile as a $200 trillion asset. Volatility decreases with scale and liquidity—the same pattern every major asset class has followed.
As for cash flows: they’re only necessary when an asset is being diluted. Bitcoin has approximately 5% monetary expansion remaining until its supply cap is reached. Compare that to the US dollar, which—based on Federal Reserve money supply data—has expanded at an average rate of 6.4% annually over the past fifty years.
Bitcoin isn’t an investment seeking yield. It’s a savings vehicle that preserves value across time and space by being non-dilutive. That’s its cash flow: protection from monetary debasement.
What Happens Next
The real threat isn’t Bitcoin’s volatility or lack of dividends. It’s the exit itself.
If the next generation opts out—if they refuse to absorb the inflated prices of traditional assets—Boomers will hold the bag. That monetary premium stored in equities and real estate will need to find a new home.
Bitcoin’s $2 trillion market capitalization represents capital flows that didn’t go into stocks, bonds, or real estate. It’s already happening. The transfer has begun.
This is a global phenomenon. Young people in Europe and Asia are making the same calculation, though Americans are years ahead in adoption.
The Unspoken Truth
Boomers aren’t villains. They were lucky to be born at the right time and benefited from a system that inflated asset prices for decades. But that system is outdated now. It worked for a specific historical moment—a century of credit expansion that can continue only until a better form of money is found.
The generational hand-off nobody talks about is this: a slow, silent transfer of trust from inflated paper claims to a digital bearer asset that can’t be diluted or censored.
When my colleague said “I hate Bitcoin,” what he really meant was: “I hate that you found an alternative before I could sell you my overpriced assets.”
That shift—from dependency on inflating assets to self-custody of non-dilutive money—is the story of our time. It’s also an unavoidable conflict. Those who control the printing presses won’t surrender that power willingly.
The question isn’t whether this transition will happen. It’s whether we’ll manage it gracefully—or let the system collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
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I’m writing more about this wealth transfer in “Broken Prices: The Road to Sound Money”.
