All You Have Is Monopoly Money

And you’ll own nothing.

Embracing Discomfort.
2 min readMar 1, 2024
Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash

Our financial system is a grand illusion, a magic trick played with monopoly money we’ve all agreed to chase. It’s a cycle of selling our most precious asset – time – for tokens printed on a whim. And it’s fundamentally flawed.

Let’s talk shelter – a basic human need. Here’s how it plays out: You approach your bank, hoping to secure a loan five times your income for a house. After some routine checks, the bank hits a few keys, and voilà, money appears out of thin air, earmarked for you. But it’s hardly a gift. In reality, they’re offering you a house today, on the condition you give back two and a half houses over thirty years.

Sounds like a deal of a lifetime, right?

Wrong. You walk away thinking you’ve secured shelter, but in truth, you own a mere fraction of your home. The real cost, inflated by fees, solicitors, and stamp duty, means you’re getting even less house for your hard-earned cash.

Fast forward through three decades of mortgage payments, property taxes bleeding you dry, and you’re left questioning: Do you truly own your home, or is it just a prolonged rental from the bank?

Decide to sell, and the financial funhouse mirrors multiply. Exit fees, agent commissions, and yet another round of stamp duty carve up what’s left of your “investment.” And through it all, those paper tokens – our so-called money – have been hemorrhaging value, leaving you with a pile of depreciating currency and no roof over your head.

This is the reality of a broken monetary system. It’s a game rigged against you, a perpetual motion machine of wealth transfer from the many to the few.

Thank the lord for Bitcoin, indeed.

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