Money is a promise somebody can break

Why I write about this at all

I left Zimbabwe in 2004, as the economy was starting to come apart. The worst of it arrived after I'd gone. By 2008 the money my family held was worthless — not devalued, not weakened, worthless — and savings that represented decades of work had simply ceased to exist. Nobody stole them. No bank failed. The number in the account stayed the same and stopped meaning anything.

I'm not going to tell you Bitcoin would have saved them — it barely existed, almost nobody had internet access, and I don't deal in comfortable counterfactuals. What that experience did was make me permanently interested in a question most people never have to ask: who has to keep their promise for my money to keep working, and what happens if they don't?

What you won't find here

• Price predictions. Nobody knows, and the people who sound most certain know least.
• Recommendations to buy. I'm not regulated to give financial advice and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
• Affiliate links. No exchange, wallet or hardware company pays me anything.
• My own holdings. Not relevant to you, and publishing it would only be a way of making an argument by implication.
• Contempt for the sceptics. The strongest objections are good ones and I'd rather engage with them than sneer.

What you will find

Explanations of how the thing actually works, written by a physics teacher who is professionally allergic to hand-waving. The honest case against. And the perspective of someone from a country where the question "what if the money stops working?" isn't hypothetical.