The Ontological Violence of Fiat Systems

“The money is dead, but it still kills.”

There is a violence that cuts deeper than war, more subtle than theft, more persistent than empire. It is the violence of the fiat order—not just a system of currency, but an entire metaphysics, a mode of being, an ontological regime. Fiat is not merely paper made legal by decree; it is the very medium by which reality is priced, categorized, and consumed. It is the decree that creates the real.

Fiat money—born of nothing, backed by force—asserts itself as a god over man and matter. It carries no inherent value; rather, it projects a hallucinatory sovereignty by command. That command is the root of its violence: it does not persuade, it declares. It does not emerge from mutual relation or discovery—it is imposed. Thus the fiat system does not just distort markets; it distorts the world, it disfigures being itself.

This is the first wound: value severed from truth.

Where once gold or goods bore weight from the labor of bodies and the consent of communities, fiat emerges ex nihilo through the alchemical ritual of central banking. It is the creation of “something” from nothing—and it demands your everything in return. Not simply your productivity, but your time, your attention, your belief. Fiat makes a mockery of consent: taxation without choice, inflation without representation, debt as inheritance.

Each dollar printed is not neutral—it is a claim on the future, a theft pre-authorized. The child yet unborn already owes. The citizen who resists already bleeds. The world that cannot speak—forests, oceans, silence—already burns.

This is the second wound: time enslaved to abstraction.

Fiat temporalizes existence into linear obligation. It turns the eternal now into a ledger. It reconfigures human life not as presence, but as yield. One’s worth becomes measurable by one’s ability to serve the machine—one’s capacity to extract more from less, forever. And when the curve flattens, when the returns diminish, when the body breaks, you are discarded, discredited, and replaced. Fiat does not believe in humans. It believes in motion, leverage, liquidity. It believes in infinite growth, even on a finite planet.

We are taught to forget the origin of value. It is not labor. It is not gold. It is not decree. It is being. The true source of value is presence, relation, trust. Fiat systems wage war against all three. It replaces presence with digital metrics, relation with contract, and trust with enforcement. It offers no sacredness, only security; no mystery, only models. It is not just unjust—it is ontologically incorrect.

This is the third wound: the commodification of the soul.

Fiat systems induce schizophrenia in the human psyche. We become split between what we know is real and what we are told is valuable. We love what we cannot afford. We sell what we cannot live without. We perform ourselves for survival. The “free market” becomes not a space of liberation, but of performance—an eternal audition for worthiness before the tribunal of capital.

Meanwhile, the masters of fiat—central bankers, economists, institutional asset managers—float above the groundless ground. Their words move mountains, their spreadsheets define famines. They do not produce; they decree. The fiat priesthood lives outside consequence, but their rituals govern all. And the rest—us—become the meat, the kindling, the fuel. We burn for their warmth.

Every empire built on fiat collapses. Not because of corruption, but because it forgets the real. Fiat systems depend on a shared hallucination—faith not in God, not in law, but in liquidity. And when the hallucination fails, when the velocity slows, when the feedback loop breaks—the center cannot hold.

But long before the collapse of the system, comes the collapse of the soul.

This is the final wound: reality becomes simulation.

In the fiat world, nothing is itself. Everything is collateral, everything is speculation, everything is downstream of price. Truth is no longer unveiled; it is marketed. Beauty is no longer beheld; it is tokenized. Love is no longer encountered; it is purchased, or worse, invested in. The world is not known—it is consumed.

And thus, what fiat destroys is not just economics, but ontology. Fiat does not merely impoverish your wallet. It impoverishes your being. It says: nothing is sacred. Everything is for sale.

But there is a resistance. A remembering. A remnant.

The refusal to participate in this ontological lie is the first act of sovereignty. To say no. To exit. To return to the real. To seek systems where value arises from reality, not decree. Where truth does not need enforcement. Where relation is sacred. Where time is not enslaved. Where love is not priced. Where being is enough.

That is the new task before us: to dethrone the hallucination of fiat and restore value to its rightful place—in the presence of the real.

⚡️🚨 NOW - Downdetector reports widespread outages for major platforms like Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare.

Nothing to report for Nostr 😉

I'm not trying to be a jerk... I just want to get to the heart of the issue.

If Bitcoiners and Bitcoin companies persistently don't want to spend much (if any) of their bitcoin to help pay for large conferences--but crypto companies generally do--maybe there is a lesson to learned.

What is the value-for-value proposition?

I think that Bitcoiners and Bitcoin companies are probably better served by supporting new and improved Bitcoin infrastructure... as a genuine (and better) alternative to the existing fiat-based monetary and financial system.

Meanwhile, since proof of stake (PoS) crypto is simply an extension of the existing PoS fiat system, it is likely best served by marketing to the largest players, politicians, and honeypots within the existing fiat system.

Comments?

I was at the 2023 conference in Miami... I have to say that while I enjoyed the experience, as far as value goes, I'd rather see more money going to Devs and virtual conferences - leave networking to local meetups and orange pill app. More user friendly UX and more utility is key in the long run, and a virtual conference has all of the information and none of the scam-party vibe at a much lower cost.

"Monetary activity will out compete spam for block space."

This is a baseless assertion made by the moderates. (They are moderates because they are at least prepared to admit spam exists and that it is bad).

You can get 85 thousand computers to store your data for free. Forever! Or at least until they get sick of doing it.

Unless Bitcoiners work *extremely hard* to make leeching off the network as cumbersome and expensive as possible, spammers *will* turn Bitcoin's blockchain into a mechanism for storing unwanted data on the computers of unpaid volunteers.

The fact that we can't even update spam filters without a fight tells anyone paying attention that Bitcoin is being stewarded by people who don't understand how it can be attacked, let alone how they might go about defending it.

If you care about Bitcoin, run a node.

Welcome, how are you finding it ?

Anyone here using Windows as every day operating system?

Why do you choose it?

#asknostr

if there's at least one miner who doesn't have autism, you'll store the valid transactions that you don't like regardless, and meanwhile your fee estimation will be wrong. you have a terminal case of having your cake and eating it too. go and fork off and create your own network where transactions you don't agree with are invalid.

Hey there Bitcoin folks! New to Nostr! Let's connect introductions

pays fee = not trash

if you don't think that the blocksize limit and fee market are good enough to deter abuse, maybe you can switch to XRP

if you aren't prepared for perpetually full segwit blocks, find another hobby

GM , some cause and effect examples ⚡

it is still a matter of debate if full segwit blocks will suffice to cover the security budget in the near future. fees are the bottom line. nobody is going to make the whole world stop for you because you won't upgrade your crappy computer or your crappy internet. you're not special.

I wonder what happens with ETFs at forks. Do you know how ETFs define bitcoin?

The use of arbitrary data isn't really relevant to decentralization - that's what the block size limit is for.

A much bigger threat to decentralization is things like ETFs and the normalization of just letting an institution hold your bitcoin.

Do you hold the view that monetary demand will persistently remain low enough that JPEG inserters will be able to outcompete monetary transactors and/or take up basically unused space (and by extension, that there will continue to be otherwise cheap and unused space from monetary transactors)?

And do you view node-level filtering for what entities are willing to pay for as being likely successful at any point over the next several years?

I think JPEGs on the timechain are stupid.

But the idea that they're going to hurt Bitcoin seems so weak to me. Like the US dollar can withstand people scribbling on it but Bitcoin can't?

In fact, the idea of Bitcoin as a glorious digital monument with some graffiti scribbled on it represents humanity pretty well. That's kind of us in a nutshell. Seems on-brand. Perfectionists trying to keep their little gardens tidy while trolls come in and find ways to mess with them anyway.

NFTs and memecoins already had their peak fad moments. People now know that they're non-scarce gambling toys rather than investments. It's just echoes of that peak now. The only thing that concerned me about the ordinals/runes period was the rapid UTXO bloat, not the blockspace usage, since the latter already has a consensus limit on it.

And if Bitcoin transactions can't outprice JPEGs in the long run, then it's just not that valuable. Bitcoin currently does about 1% of the gross settlement volume of Fedwire. That's peanuts. Imagine if it reaches a point where it does even like 10% of Fedwire. What would you pay to move a full bitcoin globally, permissionlessly, in 10 minutes, in a world where it's no longer a niche thing?

After using Nostr for a long time, I found that we don't actually need algorithmic recommendations. The chronological display of content makes people feel relaxed. When all the apps in the world are full of algorithmic recommendations, we actually have no shortage of good content. In the era of information explosion, we don't need so much content either. What we lack is pure trust and sincere exchange of ideas between people. Good content will be recommended and forwarded by trusted people, and Zap is the best way to reward it. And those who can join Nostr are already the best people selected by Bitcoin and Freedom ideas.

The longer I am in Nostr, the more I love #Nostr 🫂💜🤙