We’ve separated church and state.
Time to separate money and state.
Think about why we separated church and state in the first place. When religious institutions controlled government, they abused that power. They taxed people to build cathedrals. They declared wars in God’s name. They enriched themselves while claiming divine authority.
The solution wasn’t reforming the church-state relationship. It was ending it.
Now look at the government-money relationship.
Governments control the money supply. They print currency when politically convenient. They inflate away debts. They finance wars without direct taxation. They bail out connected industries while regular people lose purchasing power.
Sound familiar?
The problem isn’t which party controls monetary policy. The problem is that any party controls it at all.
Gold almost solved this. For thousands of years, gold’s physical properties limited government monetary manipulation. You can’t print gold. You can’t inflate its supply significantly. You can’t create it through accounting tricks.
But gold had weaknesses. It’s heavy, difficult to divide, hard to transport, and impossible to verify remotely. So governments centralized gold holdings, issued paper receipts, and eventually severed the link entirely.
Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. Since then, the dollar has been backed by nothing except government decree and military power.
Bitcoin completes what gold started.
Like gold, Bitcoin has a fixed supply that no government can inflate. Unlike gold, Bitcoin is: Digital (infinitely portable), Divisible (down to 100 millionth of a coin), Verifiable (anyone can audit the blockchain), and Decentralized (no single point of control).
This makes Bitcoin the first form of money that governments can’t co-opt.
They can’t inflate it. They can’t print more when they need to finance spending. They can’t bail out failed banks by creating Bitcoin from thin air.
This is threatening to governments for the same reason separation of church and state was threatening to religious authorities. It removes a source of power.
When money is controlled by political authorities, they can fund projects without direct taxation (just print money and create inflation). They can reward allies and punish enemies through monetary policy. They can maintain power through financial manipulation.
Bitcoin removes these tools.
A government can still tax Bitcoin. They can still regulate businesses that use it. But they can’t control its supply, inflation rate, or fundamental properties.
That’s the separation of money and state.
Not the end of government. Just the end of governments controlling the rules of money itself.
History shows that concentrating power leads to abuse. We learned this with religion and government.
Now we’re learning it with money and government.
Bitcoin isn’t just a better payment system. It’s the completion of a separation that should have happened long ago.