International Man: For over 2,500 years, gold has been mankind’s most enduring money. However, with the emergence of Bitcoin there is a new hard money option. How do you see the two as governments worldwide continue to engage in rampant currency debasement and are rolling out central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)?
Nick Giambruno: First, I am all for free-market competition in money. I say let the best money win. Having a handle on the basics is crucial to understand what is happening here. Money is a good, just like any other in an economy. And it isn’t a complex notion to grasp.
It doesn’t require you to understand convoluted math formulas and complicated theories—as the gatekeepers in academia, media, and government mislead many folks into believing. Understanding money is intuitive and straightforward.
Money is simply something useful for storing and exchanging value. That’s it. The way I see it, three primary monetary goods are competing against each other today: Bitcoin, gold, and fiat currency.
Fiat currency is currently the dominant form of money in the world. But that status is fleeting as central banks are debasing their currencies at breathtaking speed. CBDCs are a desperate, last-ditch effort to keep the fiat currency scam going—a Hail Mary.
To escape the collapsing fiat system and CBDC enslavement, many millions—soon billions—of people are turning to monetary alternatives like gold and Bitcoin. Fiat currency is a fraud of historic proportions that causes incomprehensible damage. So I am rooting for both gold and Bitcoin in this three-way war for monetary supremacy.
International Man: Can you explain Bitcoin’s monetary qualities?
Nick Giambruno: Bitcoin shares many of gold’s monetary characteristics. They’re both durable, divisible, consistent, convenient, scarce, and most importantly, “hard assets.”
“Hardness” does not mean something that is necessarily tangible or physically hard, like metal. It means “hard to produce.” By contrast, “easy money” is easy to produce.
The best way to think of hardness is “resistance to debasement,” which helps make it a good store of value—an essential function of money. The most important characteristic of a good money is that it is credibly “hard to produce.” All other monetary characteristics are meaningless if the money is easy for someone to produce. Like gold, Bitcoin does not have counterparty risk.
In other words, Bitcoin and gold are the only primarily monetary assets that aren’t simultaneously someone else’s liabilities. Gold has established itself as money over thousands of years. Bitcoin is a new and emerging money. Bitcoin is like hard money with a call option based on its further monetization, which is an excellent bet. A lot more can be said on this topic, but this sums up the essential points.
International Man: What about CBDCs?
Nick Giambruno: Despite all the hype, CBDCs are nothing but the same fiat currency swindle on steroids. It’s doubtful CBDCs can save otherwise fundamentally unsound currencies—as I believe all fiat currencies are.
If the current fiat system is not viable, then CBDCs are even less viable as they enable the government to engage in even more currency debasement. Would a CBDC have saved the Zimbabwe dollar, the Venezuelan bolivar, the Argentine peso, the Lebanese lira, or the Nigerian naira?
I don’t think so. And a CBDC won’t save the US dollar or the euro from their fates either. There are a lot of bad things that come with CBDCs. But there’s a silver lining… CBDCs are going to introduce and familiarize people with using digital currencies. It’s then only then a matter of time before they discover Bitcoin.
CBDCs and Bitcoin share some characteristics. For example, they are both digital and facilitate fast payments from a mobile phone. But that is where the similarities end. The reality is that CBDCs and Bitcoin are entirely different in the most fundamental ways. You need the government’s permission and blessing to use a CBDC, whereas Bitcoin is permissionless.
Governments can (and will) create as many CBDC currency units as they want. With Bitcoin, there can never be more than 21 million, and there is nothing anyone can do to inflate the supply more than the predetermined amount in the protocol.
CBDCs are centralized. Bitcoin is decentralized. Governments can censor transactions and freeze, sanction, and confiscate CBDC units whenever they want. Bitcoin is censorship-resistant. No country’s sanctions or laws can affect the protocol.
There is no privacy with CBDCs. However, with Bitcoin, if you take specific steps, it is possible to maintain reasonable privacy. CBDCs are government money that are easy to produce and give politicians a terrifying amount of control over people’s lives. On the other hand, Bitcoin is non-state hard money that helps liberate individuals from government control.
In short, CBDCs are a pathetic attempt to compete with Bitcoin. CBDCs make an inferior form of money even worse, but at the same time, they are an excellent Trojan Horse for Bitcoin. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that once governments inevitably inflate their CBDC units, censor transactions, freeze people’s accounts, and confiscate funds, it will push people to look for better digital alternatives, first and foremost Bitcoin. That’s how, contrary to conventional wisdom, CBDCs could be an enormous catalyst for Bitcoin adoption.
International Man: Couldn’t governments simply ban Bitcoin?
Nick Giambruno: Bitcoin threatens a major source of the government’s power—the power to create fake money out of thin air and force everyone to use it. There’s no question they’ll try to protect this racket from Bitcoin. The question is whether they’ll be successful.
Remember, the powerful Chinese government has banned Bitcoin numerous times with little to no long-term effects as adoption grows. That’s because it’s entirely impractical for governments to ban Bitcoin. They’re no match for the economic incentives that attract millions—soon billions—of people, and increasingly, corporations, and even nation states to a harder and superior form of money.
Further, all aspects of Bitcoin are genuinely decentralized and robust. The best that governments can do is play an endless game of global whack-a-mole.
Governments in Argentina and Venezuela have laws restricting their citizens from accessing US dollars. However, these laws have little effect on their citizens’ desire and ability to use them. These actions just create a thriving black market, or, more accurately termed, a free market.
Similarly, governments have tried to ban cannabis for decades, which hasn’t worked out very well for them. Bitcoin would be infinitely more challenging for governments to ban than US dollars or a plant. I would like to see governments try to ban Bitcoin because they’ll fall flat on their faces. It’s doubtful any government will be more successful in banning it than the Chinese government was. A failed attempt to ban Bitcoin will reinforce its value proposition as a superior form of money nobody controls.
International Man: Where do you see the Bitcoin price going?
Nick Giambruno: What we have with Bitcoin is an entirely new asset that millions worldwide are adopting as money because of its superior monetary properties, namely its total resistance to debasement. The monetization of the new monetary good is genuinely unlike anything anyone alive has ever seen. It took gold centuries to achieve monetization. Bitcoin has a good chance of undergoing monetization in a much shorter period.
The market cap for Bitcoin today is around $600 billion. The market cap for all the mined gold in the world, which took thousands of years to accumulate, is about $12.7 trillion. That means Bitcoin has a market cap roughly equal to 5% of gold’s and is already well on its way to monetization.
Assuming gold stays flat and Bitcoin goes up 20x, it would have a market cap roughly equal to gold. At that point, a single Bitcoin would be worth over $620,000. I think that’s a real possibility in the next ten years, though it could happen much sooner. If that sounds outrageous, consider this… Ten years ago, the Bitcoin price was around $100. Today, it’s roughly 310x that.
Bitcoin has made numerous breathtaking moves to the upside in the past. I think it can do it again, especially as corporations, institutional investors, and even nation states start buying Bitcoin for the first time. Of course, it’s important to remember that past performance does not indicate future results for any investment.
Here’s the bottom line. Few people are aware of what is really happening with Bitcoin. And even fewer know how to prepare. That’s why I’ve just released an urgent PDF report revealing three ways you can do that. Check it out as soon as possible because it could soon be too late to take action. Click here to get it now.
Article cross-posted from International Man.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
