If you're like most of us, you had grandparents (or great-grandparents) who worked hard, saved their money, and improved their situation in life. It was normal in those days. But you work just as hard and make far less progress. And there is good reason for this: When Great-gramps worked hard, he kept the money.

In those days before mass-taxation and fiat currency, young men would go out to make their fortune. (“Fortune” being enough money to finance your future.) They’d go to where money was being made, work hard, cooperate, learn from the older men, save, learn how to succeed, then return home as a prosperous adult. 

Not every young man went out to build a fortune, and some certainly failed, but these things were much easier than they are today. Gathering a fortune was common enough that it was built into the mating strategy of the time. Many women would agree to marriage only after the young man had “made something of himself.” This was generally a far healthier strategy than what developed in its wake.

Here is a graph depicting the difference between you and your great-grandfather:

The top line shows how many years of living expenses your great-grandfather would have accumulated as a hard-working young man. The bottom line shows what you can save. (And yes, this graph is based on actual data, but I won’t go through it all here.)

After working for five years, Great-gramps had seven years of living expenses in the bank. Doing the same things, you’d have less than two.

In the modern world, everyone’s fortune is taxed away as it is being formed, and what is saved is eroded by the profligate creation of currency. Nowadays nearly everyone works all their lives, just to stay even.

With surplus removed from individuals, people can’t really save, and so they survive by taking an endless stream of loans. And that’s not healthy.

Grandpa wasn't really better than you… you’re more or less the same.  

This affects everything including charity. And only does the system make it almost impossible for you to give, but they insult you for it. Then they give a small portion of the money they skimmed from you to the poor and call themselves morally superior.

Your great-grandparents were proud to help their friends and neighbors. They felt good about themselves, they felt compassion for others, and they were proud to make the world a better place. Being robbed of this heritage was far worse than the loss of surplus.

Now is the time for you to reclaim your moral confidence.

Where Virtues Still Thrive

Please don’t waste your time trying to reform a system gone mad. Such things need to fail on their own, and Buckminster Fuller was ever so right when he wrote this:

You never change anything by fighting the existing. To change something, build a new model and make the existing obsolete.

And I’m pleased to tell you that something better is here. I’m talking about the realm of Bitcoin… a realm in which saving still pays, and mightily. The crypto-economy is still a place where reputation, honest dealing and good choices still make all the difference.

Silver and gold are fine too, by the way. But you have to use them: You have to buy and sell with them. Stacking them on a shelf and looking at them won’t build the kind of world you want to live in.

So, if you want to reclaim the honest world of our grandparents, crypto will get you there. But I’m not talking about getting rich on a speculation, I’m talking about using it in your daily life.

You can find out how to do this if you want to. They’ve got half a million grannies in El Salvador doing it, for goodness sake. Get a Bitcoin wallet, get a Lightning wallet and start doing business. If the grannies can do it, so can you; you only have to try.

In the crypto-economy, there’s no one with a monopoly on the money supply, and no one who can distort everything by printing money as they like. In the crypto-economy things are honest, and that breeds virtues… just like it did in Great-Grandpa’s time.

So, if you want to work in a virtue-based economy, if you want to build an honest and less unfair world (it still won’t be perfect), if you want to actually matter in the world… then the answer is sitting right in front of you.

So, how badly do you actually want this?

Paul Rosenberg is the author of A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, as well as Production Versus Plunder, The Breaking Dawn, and the online newsletter Free-Man's Perspective