Trading Worthless Paper
The Grand Deception That Nobody Talks About
We all know the dollar is fiat.
We repeat it like a meme: “printed out of thin air,” “backed by nothing,” “debt note.”
Most people say it, shrug, and go back to scrolling.
What almost nobody says next is the truly disturbing part.
If the dollar is worthless paper (and it is),
then every other major currency trading against it on the forex market must also be worthless paper.
Two piles of nothing cannot have an exchange rate.
Nothing divided by nothing is not 0.9032 EUR or 145.67 JPY.
It is undefined. A mathematical impossibility.
Yet here we are, watching grown adults on Bloomberg argue whether the “nothing” will strengthen or weaken against the other “nothings” by two basis points before lunch.
The only way this theatre stays on stage is if every single government and central bank on earth silently agreed—decades ago—to pretend their nothings are something, and to never, ever break character.
That is not a “theory.”
It is the only explanation that survives contact with basic arithmetic.
There is no secret handshake in a Swiss basement required.
Just mutual assured career destruction if anyone defects.
The politician who says “our currency is actually vapor” gets laughed out of office… or worse.
The central banker who refuses to play along loses the ability to finance the government’s deficits.
So they all keep the script.
Gold was supposed to be the escape hatch.
Then they invented 100:1 paper gold—contracts that promise gold that will never be delivered.
The price is still quoted, but the metal mostly sits in the same vaults it sat in fifty years ago while the paper casino rages overhead.
Bitcoin was supposed to be the second escape hatch.
Then the ETFs came. Then the custodians. Then the same banks everyone claimed to hate started holding the keys for mom-and-pop’s retirement account.
The rebellion got a ticker symbol and a prospectus.
And still, almost nobody zooms out far enough to state the obvious:
We are all working forty to sixty hours a week
to earn coloured pixels in an account
that are created with a keystroke
and can be deleted with a keystroke
by people we will never meet
under rules we never voted for.
That’s not hyperbole.
It’s the literal mechanism.
The anger you feel isn’t paranoia.
It’s pattern recognition.
But here’s the part that keeps me awake more than the deception itself:
the vast majority doesn’t want to hear it.
Tell someone their life savings are hostage to a global gentleman's agreement built on air, and they get annoyed at you for harshing the vibe.
They would rather doomscroll celebrity gossip than confront the single fact that governs 99 % of their stress.
Maybe that’s the deepest layer of the deception:
they don’t need to censor the truth.
They just need to keep it boring.
So what’s left?
Only the quiet, stubborn acts of defiance that don’t scale but do survive:
- Own things that cannot be multiplied at a committee meeting.
- Reduce the number of hours you have to sell to stay alive.
- Build parallel systems small enough to escape notice, strong enough to matter when the pixels flicker.
- Hold your own keys—whether they open a vault or a seed phrase.
There will be no revolution on CNN.
There will be no hero riding in to fix money.
There will only be a slow, uneven, stubborn migration of sane people toward assets and arrangements that do not require the permission of liars.
The controllers won the loud war.
We win the quiet one, one satoshi, one ounce, one garden, one private contract at a time.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s enough.
Because empires of fiat eventually collapse under their own contradictions.
They always have.
The only question is whether you’ll still own something real when the music finally stops.
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