System Dynamics + History = Inevitability

Michael Saylor on The Peter McCormack Show, 30 April 2026
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Peter McCormack's first question to Michael Saylor in two years was straightforward: why do people feel poorer when they cannot quite explain why? It is not an abstract enquiry from McCormack. He runs real businesses that carry real costs — a football club, a bar, and a coffee shop on Bedford High Street — employs staff, deals with suppliers, and knows what his costs are doing month to month, and what the official figures say they are doing. The gap between those two things was what he put to Saylor.

Saylor's answer was blunt. The dollar supply has expanded at around seven percent a year for the past century, financing whatever governments need to finance: wars, welfare, deficits, political programmes of every variety. None of this is new. "It's been going on for thousands and thousands of years. The last two years have been no different."

Has it ever worked any other way? Saylor said he did not know of an alternative. Fifty thousand pages of history had not produced one. Babylon, Egypt, Carthage, Rome, every American colony before independence — each debased its currency or defaulted on its debts when political pressure required it. The United States was partly constituted to absorb those colonial defaults. The pattern has not broken.

Where does Britain sit in this? McCormack asked the question from the position of someone watching it from his own high street rather than a trading floor. Saylor's answer was his currency tier framework. The dollar loses roughly seven percent a year against genuinely scarce assets. Sterling and the other major second-tier currencies lose ground slightly faster, producing what he called "bureaucratic malaise and economic stagnation." Further down the tiers, currencies deteriorate rapidly or collapse outright. Britain is second tier: stable in appearance, stagnant in substance.

McCormack observed that doctors and teachers are now watching their real incomes fall. Saylor's response was immediate: "You're just describing political metabolic disease. Everything gets too big. Big government, big charity, big bank, big education, big medicine, big defence. Everything just gets too big and somebody's got to pay it."

His analogy was biological. Nature imposes limits on scale; no land animal exceeds the mass of an elephant. Political systems face the same constraint, and the warning sign is always the same: the state can no longer honour its obligations to those who depend on it. In Rome it was the legions. In contemporary Britain, McCormack suggested, it is the public sector, whose nominal wages rise while real ones fall, a covenant whose fracture lines are visible to any small business owner trying to trade through it.

The civilisational pattern Saylor traces is consistent. Societies rise through discipline, reach a peak, then persuade themselves they can afford everything. Entitlements become mandates, mandates require extraction, extraction produces collapse. Rome, Carthage, Paris, London — all followed the same arc. The exceptions, Singapore and the Emirates, escaped it by doing the opposite: low taxation, free trade, sound monetary policy, rule of law, building from nothing rather than spending accumulated wealth into dissolution.

For individuals the logic is the same. McCormack framed it as two necessary steps before Bitcoin makes any sense: understand debasement first, then understand scarcity. Saylor illustrated the second with a thought experiment that has particular resonance for a British audience: You are in London in 1600. You can own a square mile of the city, or its finest buildings, or its best manufactures, or its currency, or any vehicle of the age. What is still worth something in 2026?

The answer is: the land, and only the land. Everything else was overtaken by technology, the ships rotted, the currency debased, the goods superseded. The English landowning class understood this and acted on it across four centuries. Bitcoin, Saylor argues, is the contemporary equivalent: fixed in supply, outside the jurisdiction of any political authority, and resistant to the cycle that has eroded everything else.

The formula is not a forecast. System Dynamics identifies the feedback mechanism through which monetary systems expand and eventually fail. History confirms that the mechanism has operated across every civilisation on record. Together they do not produce a probability — they produce an inevitability. Saylor puts the window for responding to it at around ten years, before artificial intelligence and automation complete their restructuring of the economy. McCormack, asking these questions as someone who runs businesses, employs people, and watches margins compress, brings something to this conversation that no influencer posting from a Dubai rooftop can replicate — and why, within this framework, the answer is always Bitcoin.

This article was originally published on X: https://x.com/sciencetao/status/2050140435637493760

Worth saying clearly before the usual dismissals start.

For anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K-oX9mWYXNA

Keen isn't Schiff and he doesn't have a predictable agenda. He's a complexity theorist who built dynamic models of the economy and called 2008 before almost anyone in his profession did, so his argument deserves a serious answer rather than ridicule.

His case is straightforward. Bitcoin's security model requires proof-of-work to be expensive, because it has to cost more to attack the network than to defend it, and that means sustained, large-scale energy consumption. His contention is that climate policy will eventually make that politically untenable.

The difficulty is that he's treating Bitcoin's energy use as though it were a fixed quantity, and it isn't. When energy becomes expensive or heavily regulated, miners operating on thin margins leave the network, hash rate falls, and the difficulty adjustment mechanism recalibrates automatically. The network reaches a new equilibrium at lower energy consumption, which is a straightforward consequence of how the protocol is designed, not a theoretical possibility.

There's a second thing his argument doesn't account for. The renewable energy transition he's pointing to as the threat is simultaneously generating vast quantities of stranded power, meaning electricity produced at times or in locations where it simply cannot reach the grid, and miners are already the natural buyer of that energy. The same policy environment Keen believes will strangle Bitcoin is, through a different pathway, providing it with some of its cheapest and most abundant fuel.

Keen has precisely the analytical background needed to understand Bitcoin properly, particularly feedback loops, non-linear dynamics and complex adaptive systems, and the frustrating thing is that he's applied those tools to the wrong model of what Bitcoin actually is.

I've been working through this in some depth in a book published this month, The Satoshi Strategy, which applies System Dynamics formally to Bitcoin's economic architecture. Interested to hear whether anyone here has a formulation of the energy argument that actually survives this kind of analysis.

(My book available in paperbook and ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Satoshi-Strategy-Bitcoin-Dynamics-Architecture/dp/B0GXSTGYTB/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

u/ChrisBattle2000

System Dynamics + History = Inevitability