Fiat currency will always go to zero. I think pretty much everyone reading this knows that. With the US dollar, inflation is out of control right now, giving us a very clear picture of this process of falling to zero.

But let's look at a more concrete example of how bad this really is.

In 2008, the US dollar compared to now was 43.2% lower. That is to say, something that costs $1 in 2008 would cost roughly $1.43 today, or in other words something that costs $1 today would have been roughly 70 cents in 2008. That's just a little bit nuts.

You should all know what happened in 2008. Bitcoin was created! As we all know, it slowly climbed in value, then exploded in value creating a lot of Bitcoin Millionaires, and has gone up and down since, but trending up.

The standard BTC chart looks pretty amazing.

But what happens if we flip this and price the dollar in terms of BTC? Well, we get another picture.

The USD started strong, but look how it fell to nothing. 99.36% down! Looks like just another shitcoin, doesn't it?

Let's see... what has a 27 trillion supply, 25% of which was minted in the last few months, no supply cap, only one node, and less than 1% owns nearly half of it? Oh yeah—that's the US dollar.

Don't feel smug if you don't live in the US. Almost every fiat currency in the world is doing just as bad, if not worse. I'm in Japan and you don't even want to see how badly the yen is doing. I don't even want to see that. It's sad and depressing and makes me wish I were being paid in BTC instead of a shitcoin.

If you are scared to put too much of your money in BTC, start buying precious metals too. Silver, gold, and platinum may not see as dramatic increases as BTC did (ahem that is, I mean, fiat may not fall against them as dramatically as the USD has fallen against BTC), most certainly because of market manipulation, but they will still secure your wealth in a way that fiat will not.

Case in point: 1 troy oz of gold in 2008 was around $1000. Today that is just past $2000. If you had bought some back then, you would have preserved your buying power instead of losing it.

^{Gold trend of the past few years}

Anyway, I know I'm preaching to the choir here. I just thought that chart setting the USD against BTC was funny and a good way to look at the coin instead of the standard way we do.

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.