Bitcoin stands at a crossroads. It is no longer just a rebellion, but the first real attempt to build order on something other than trust in authorities. It can become the anchor of civilization in an era that has realized that instead of blind faith, it needs proof, and instead of human promises, truth measured in energy.
The first generation proved it works.
The next has a far harder task: to prove why it matters.
The cypherpunks lit the fuse and are now passing the torch. The second generation will decide what we let burn. Bitcoin was born from their code, yes, but its meaning now reaches far beyond their ethos—it no longer belongs to them. It belongs to everyone who understands that in a time when institutions are failing, betting on a decentralized world makes profound sense: a world built on energy, mathematics, and incorruptible consensus. A new triangle of power that cannot be corrupted.
From Anarchy to Architecture
The first generation saw Bitcoin as an anarcho-capitalist escape—cypherpunk ideals, libertarianism, steaks, memes, and number go up.
The second generation must anchor its principles into the very foundations of civilization: energy, law, and ethics. Instead of slogans, it must speak of the essence of sovereignty, of technologies grounded in physics rather than faith, and of energy as the incorruptible foundation of both value and civilizational order. Because energy is the only true currency in this bankrupt world.
This is not an escape from civilization. It is an attempt to rebuild its foundations on firmer ground.
When the Signal Becomes Noise
Hayek and Mises gave us the map. We turned it into a poster on the wall.
Memetics replaced thinking. “Money printer go brrr” and laser eyes—symbols of a time when survival was at stake. They worked brilliantly as signals. Today, they’re just noise. They sound like a parody of what Bitcoin was meant to be: the most serious civilizational experiment since the invention of the internet.
Civilizations do not advance through memes and t-shirts. They advance through ideas that outlive generations.
As long as Bitcoin’s language remains trapped in forums and echo chambers, it will never enter the tables where energy, law, and the future are decided.
Death of an Idea in Derivatives
If we do not give Bitcoin a new frame, Wall Street will translate it into its own: yield, exposure, diversification, risk weight. They already speak a different dialect: the language of indices, derivatives, ESG, and “responsible investing.”
Wall Street is a machine that grinds every idea, crushes it into derivatives, performs a prefrontal lobotomy, and sells it back to you with fanfare. It keeps the form and kills the soul.
Bitcoin could end the same way: victory in price, defeat in meaning. It will survive as an asset, but die as an idea - no ban, no revolution - just quiet oblivion in the columns of quarterly reports.
Bitcoin has no shareholders, no board, no voting rights. It lives only on hashrate and consensus, pure energy and incentives. That is its genius. And its fragility. What cannot be seized directly can be tamed by narrative.
Capital cannot change the network’s rules. But it can change the language used to talk about it. The day “hold your keys” becomes a marginal fetish and “having exposure” the norm, financial sovereignty will die quietly in regulated funds and mandatory hosted wallets.
The second generation must therefore protect Bitcoin not only from the state, but from ourselves: from our comfort, our fear of risk, our willingness to compromise.
Otherwise, we will win the war and lose the peace.
The Century-Long Search for Real Value
The touching faith of fiat-bros that their money marks the end of monetary evolution is the greatest blindness of our age. It is as endearing as their grandfathers’ belief that the horse was the pinnacle of transportation — only with the added arrogance of an elite that has lived outside physical reality for half a century and believes it can stay there forever.
But history hates “forever.” Something always comes that looks impossible—until it becomes real. Bitcoin is the completion of a century-long quest for the one thing humanity has never been able to measure objectively and immutably: economic value.
We measure time with atomic clocks. Distance in light-years. Temperature in kelvins, but economic value is still measured by trust and printer speed. The most precious information remains in the hands of politicians and central banks.
Bitcoin is not a revolution. It is the last missing unit of the global measurement system. The first true standard of economic value that cannot be counterfeited, diluted, or bent. The first one grounded in thermodynamics and mathematics, not promises and armies. The first that belongs to everyone and no one.
It is the metrology of civilization, the culmination of a path that took more than a hundred years:
Henry Ford (1921–1930s) proposed an energy-backed currency, supported by Thomas Edison.
Frederick Soddy (1920s–1930s) defined wealth as energy organized by intelligence.
Buckminster Fuller (1960s–1970s) envisioned a global energy-accounting system for all humanity.
Satoshi Nakamoto (2008 → ) solved the century-old money puzzle. He anchored value in physical reality:
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Scarcity forged in mathematics,
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Trust replaced by decentralization,
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Promises replaced by energy - through Proof-of-Work, where computation becomes proof and energy the measure of truth.
What Ford and Fuller only sensed, the cypherpunks turned into reality. The first ones infused money with energy and meaning. The second added code and scarcity. Together they closed the arc: the completed alchemy—from energy → to code → to scarcity → to trust.
From “Fuck the Banks” to Civilization
The memes got us here. Now we need a language to go further. “Fuck the banks” ends conversations. We need to open one: “How do we secure a reliable, incorruptible unit of economic value in an age when every institution is failing?” From the ashes of memes rises a language that offers meaning instead of shouting.
Bitcoin must be re-anchored - philosophically, culturally, ethically - into soil that understands its significance: no longer as a tool of revolution or speculation, but as the architecture of trust in an age of distrust.
This is not about “ending the state.” It is about how to keep power in check when it flows from politics into code and the world’s complexity exceeds the capacity of all central authorities. Decentralization is not ideology. It is the only known architecture that can handle higher-order complexity.
It is not even about “separation of money and state”, that is an old libertarian refrain. It is about a far more radical and civilizational necessity: the separation of people from power over other people’s money. The state is not the only entity that can debase money. Bitcoin simply does not allow anyone to change the rules of the game. No one can devalue, censor, or confiscate your wealth.
That is why this is not about “individual freedom” in the romantic sense. It is about resetting humanity’s fundamental relationship to economic reality, where energy replaces promises, consensus replaces authority, and decentralized networks replace centralized power.
Bitcoin separates economic value from human arbitrariness. It is a trust protocol: decentralized, energy-backed, mathematically verifiable.
Why Is This Story So Hard to Grasp?
Most people see no problem. Their world still works. They live in the comfort of delegated power and are willing to trade freedom for the promise of convenience and safety. Bitcoin demands they take responsibility... sovereignty. That is a difficult choice for many. And when they walk into a room where people talk about “fiat slavery,” “sovereign individuals,” and “sun on your balls,” they see rebellion and risk, not the future.
As long as Bitcoin is framed as an escape from order rather than its higher form, it will remain misunderstood.
The Challenge
Bitcoin can be the answer—but not until we start talking about it differently. It deserves more than inflation memes and laser eyes. It deserves philosophy. It deserves culture. It deserves a new language.
Let us speak like people who are building civilization, not like those betting on its collapse. That means stepping out of the echo chamber and planting the language that will write the next hundred years of economic reality.
The question is not whether Bitcoin will survive, but whether it will survive in us.
Whether we let it be consumed by TradFi and decomposed in its Teflon digestive tract, or plant it as the foundation of the civilization yet to come.
The second generation was not handed the torch to lock it in a vault.
It was handed the torch to set the world on fire.
This essay was originally written in Czech. The original version is available on the Substack www.alexpilar.com