Physical or resource constraints tend to accelerate rather than stop the fiscal 'train' because the train is nominal: an economy that hits serious resource constraints typically sees its deficit blow out and its currency devalue sharply initially, rather than its deficit shrinking.

Even if Bitcoin rises to a million dollars per coin, the resulting wealth inequality concern must be weighed against magnitude: at a million dollars Bitcoin is only ~2% of global capital (roughly a quadrillion dollars across all assets), comparable to gold's current ~2% share, with Bitcoin currently around 0.2%—so a 10x gets it to gold's size, achievable either by Bitcoin rising or everything else crashing.

Bitcoin is not a credit instrument but final value delivered, combining portability and scarcity to make it easier to transfer than gold, yet it remains ultimately just portable capital—a way to store semi-liquid value within a network effect that one eventually intends to spend on goods and services or pass on.

China's Belt and Road and Japan's private sector both reflect a strategic shift away from accumulating US Treasuries toward acquiring real assets abroad—loans, infrastructure projects, commodity and energy deposits, and part-ownership stakes—using their engineering and industrial bases to build the projects, though such holdings can be challenged during heightened nationalism and resource competition.

US structural fiscal deficits are driven by two entrenched forces: accumulating interest-bearing debt on the public ledger, and baby-boomer demographics—the same generation whose home-buying years drove peak bank lending in the 1970s-80s is now drawing down Social Security and Medicare, turning a prior Social Security surplus into a deficit that flows back into the economy as claims on labor, technology, and energy.

In fiscal dominance the public sector now creates roughly as much or more net new credit per year than the entire private sector (net new bank loans plus corporate bond issuance plus private credit), reversing the prior 70-year norm where private sector credit creation dominated outside brief recessions.

Total US debt relative to base dollars was around 50-to-1 or 60-to-1 going into the Global Financial Crisis, but because the Fed expanded the monetary base so much afterward, that leverage has shrunk to roughly 20-to-1 today, counting any contractual IOU for a dollar (bank deposits, bonds) against direct central bank liabilities (physical currency and bank reserves).

The Great Depression and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis are parallel events because both marked the peak of a private-sector debt bubble after which interest rates were cut to zero and even that proved insufficient to reinflate the next cycle, triggering a multi-decade rotation of debt from the private sector to the public sector—with World War I/the GFC and World War II/the 2020s pandemic playing analogous roles.

The US financial system is no longer officially tethered to gold, but in a de facto way it still is, because the decoupling of bank lending and dollar redemption from gold was gradual and pre-dated 1971; even after 1971 higher-level systems still operate on the premise of dollar scarcity, which (with division of powers and central bank independence) keeps the system more constrained than pure fiat would otherwise be.

Once a country exceeds roughly 100-120% public debt to GDP (especially combined with structural deficits from demographics), central bank rate hikes blow out the fiscal deficit via interest expense more than they reduce private bank lending, so the central bank loses its braking power over total credit and can even accelerate total credit while trying to slow it.

Egypt is a useful semi-extreme (but functioning, not Venezuela-level) case study of energy-constrained debasement: over a decade its per-capita energy consumption topped out and declined—at roughly one-eighth the US level rather than after meeting needs—while money supply grew 15-20% per year, producing summer rolling blackouts, lackluster telecom, more work-hours required to buy a car or laptop, and mal-investment in pre-built ghost-city real estate as people seek a store of value beyond the depreciating local currency.

AI is a moderately useful tool that automates some white-collar work the way the tractor and factory automation displaced blue-collar work, but it will eventually hit a ceiling because AI models are inherently probability engines that 'say what is likely to come next'—a fundamentally different and error-prone way of thinking than humans, as illustrated by repeatedly confident-but-wrong book summaries.

MMT is essentially post-Keynesian: it observes that although the current system still legally operates as though on gold (the government must borrow to spend), under fiat the government could simply spend or print, and inflation is avoided not by the gold-era constraint but by directing printed money toward productive capacity (nuclear plants, semiconductor factories) so increased goods-and-services supply offsets the money-supply increase.

Properly-constructed stablecoins are quite stable because, unlike Bitcoin (which has no redemption and a freely-fluctuating price), they have an arbitrage mechanism that restores the peg when they temporarily disconnect, and the largest ones are arguably more backed than a typical bank account via short-term T-bills and reverse repos.

The only realistic way out of fiscal dominance is to let the economy run hot and grow nominal GDP faster than the interest rate paid on debt (e.g., ~7% real GDP versus 3-4% funding rates), which could theoretically bring debt-to-GDP down to 70-80%; but even in this 'run it hot' scenario you generally want to own almost anything other than bonds because money supply growth flows into scarce assets and rapidly devalues bonds and cash relative to what is truly scarce, including energy over the long run.

The US escaped its comparable 1940s public-debt-to-GDP peak through a combination of strong growth and inflation alongside explicit yield curve control: the Fed grew its bond holdings roughly tenfold from 1942-1945 and pegged the yield curve (e.g., ~1/3 of 1% at the front, 2.5% at the long end) with an open bid, holding yields at 2.5% even when inflation peaked at 19%.

Keynesians argue government can provide a countercyclical force to smooth credit cycles, while Austrians counter that the whole project of central banking and rate manipulation amplifies the private-sector credit waves in the first place, so trying to put out one fire often starts the next; and although Keynes prescribed deficits in recessions and surpluses in good times, in practice governments always run deficits of merely different sizes.

The current system is structurally biased toward the old and wealthy and against the young and especially the working/middle class who are too well-off to receive support but work all the time, because those not on the receiving side of deficit spending are impaired—so even as the aggregate train keeps powering on, the train stops for many individuals.

Money is fundamentally a ledger used to price things and store liquid value; when that ledger is broken it makes the economy less efficient and pushes people toward mal-investment as they try to arbitrarily store value with varying levels of sophistication to protect themselves.

US fiscal deficits constitute a 'train' that cannot be stopped within any realistic investing time horizon (5-10 years); fiscal dominance is continuing and there are very few narrow ways out of it, so we are essentially stuck in it.