At a recent wine conference, I was talking to some friends who own a winery. I know they own a little Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptos, so I asked them what they thought about the dystopian future painted by one of the speakers.

The speaker, in his 60s, was pretty pessimistic. My friends blamed his outlook on generational theory. I asked if they’d read The Fourth Turning, and surprisingly, they had!

I told them how optimistic I was for the future—after a big crash, of course. I explained that to succeed through the hard times ahead, you only need to denominate your life in something scarce.

I was obviously referring to Bitcoin. But they took it to mean wine.

"It's great," they said. "Wine just goes up in value over time." When I brought up Bitcoin, they looked at me like I was crazy.

Sure, wine does go up in value over time. And if you age red wine for 2 years before selling it, you can definitely outperform Bitcoin's 44% CAGR. But here’s the problem: unless you’re an insanely sought-after producer, wine is losing value at an incredible rate in Bitcoin terms after that. Wine aging does not out-pace Bitcoin.

These next few years present a simple test that most will fail. What are you going to use as a denominator for your life's work. If your answer isn't Bitcoin, you'll lose.

Going to these wine conferences is frustrating. There are all these amazing winemakers running incredible businesses, yet they’re missing this one simple fact.

Meanwhile, I’m going to out compete all of them—not because I have more training, employees, or resources, but because I chose the right denominator.

Bitcoin is the key.