An exploration into Bitcoin's function and role in restoring human relationships, culture, and nature in an era of energy descent.
The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries of near-continuous money creation have left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, and the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, of images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. (Charles Eisenstein, 2011, pp. 93-94)
For too long we have been conflating money and wealth. Forever we have been energy-brind (Hagens, 2021) for it is not money that runs our society. It is energy, our capacity to do work, as it is defined in physics, that sustains our lives. For hundreds of thousands of years our capacity to do work was bound to the sun’s energy flow. It was during this period that the Chinese began defining agriculture as “the art of storing sunlight. Throughout all those years, hunters and gatherers, farmers, ranchers and pastoralists, all knew that our lives depended on our ability to capture, and whenever possible, maximise the sun’s energy flow.
During this era in which we had to live within the sun’s energy flow most of our relationships and lives were maintained through the gift economy, some of our relationships and needs were sustained through tributes and barter, and we only used money to transact with strangers. Anthropologists describe this phenomenon as ‘the pyramid of human relationship’ (Orlov, 2013, Graber, 2012). Eisenstein’s analysis of where the current financial crisis arises from, as well as the accurate description of the maladies caused by the printing of money, especially FIAT currencies in the opening citation, also draws from his historic understanding of the pyramid of human relationship (2011). Orlov, known for his prediction of the American demise in The 5 Stages of Collapse (2013), has been arguing that modern western society and its FIAT economy turned the pyramid upside down. In a tiny vertex at the bottom, we have the gift economy, practice almost exclusively within nuclear families. Immediately above we have tribute and barter, experienced in our society mostly through governments’ taxes and thite given to churches and congregations. And finally, on the very top we have the upside down pyramid base where the great majority of our needs, goods and services are paid for with FIAT money.
Such inversion and erosion of our values and social fabric, in such a scale and velocity, was only possible once we found a stock of energy; first as coal, the oil and natural gas. Coupled with machines and technology, one teaspoon of oil has the embodied energy of a full day of human labor. One barrel of oil may equal anything between 4,5 to 11 years of a human’s labor or about 6,000 workers per day (Hagens, 2021). And yet, because governments can print money at will, a barrel of oil is traded at about $80 dollars. The use of FIAT money during an era in which we have access to cheap energy is making us lose our grasp of reality.
We use money as an energy token. Energy, as defined in physics, is the capacity to do work. Money, then, is a claim on future energy and resources, and debt a claim on future money (Hagens, 2021). Our growth economy’s global GDP in 2025 was $115 trillion dollars (Rao, in Visual Capitalist, 2025), but our global debt reached $338 trillion dollars (Global Debt Monitor, 2025). It is obvious for anyone who has been following the oil corporations’ return on investment in their exploration endeavours that we have already entered an era of energy decline. In other words, we don’t have the stock of energy necessary to transform this $338 trillion dollars in work and that millions, perhaps billions of people will not be able to pay their debt.
This energy predicament has a direct impact on Bitcoins value and function. Today, most people use Bitcoin as a store of value, and measure such value against the dollar (1BTC ≅ $100,000); a FIAT currency decoupled from the energy reality. In the same way we do not have a stock of energy left to claim the $338 trillion dollar debt (or to transform it work - goods and services), we do not have enough energy to underpin the projections of constant (if not exponential) increase in value for BTC.
I am a farmer in a “developing country”, a classification that implies that my country’s economy should be “developed” as the American or Western European were. Farmers and rural folk in general are the only cohort of people both urban leftists and liberals agree to look down on, as pointed out by the agrarian writer Wendell Berry. I am also an educator and a consultant for rural community development and farm planning. I dedicate my life to find agro-eco-system’s design and economic solutions capable of nurturing and securing a worthy, just and comfortable life for those willing and striving to produce nutrient dense and chemical free food whilst improving the health of the territory they live in.
Because I live and work amongst small ecological farmers in Brazil, I can still value, trade and create the social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital mentioned by Eisenstein in the opening citation. It is in this context too that believe most western people have been looking at Bitcoin as a solution for a society that is already upside down, as pointed by Orlov. Shouldn’t most people involved and invested in Bitcoin be using it to restore a healthy pyramid of human relationship and economics? Shouldn’t we be securing Bitcoin as mainly a currency that brings freedom and privacy back to our transactions?
The average age of farmers around the world today is 60 years old. Most are sunken in debt, and therefore cannot retire. On the other hand, we have a whole generation of young people refusing to participate in the corporate world, thirty for a meaningful and healthy life in harmony with nature without capital to secure a land base to do so. Land, because it is been used as a store of value, instead of for producing healthy food and nurturing strong local economies, is being transferred to the super rich.
The same thing is happening to Bitcoin. Instead of being used to facilitate private transactions, nurture worthier lives, and restore healthy human relationships in decentralized and energy efficient communities, Bitcoin is (mainly) being used by rich people to secure their lives within an upside down western society.
If we are to restore healthy human relationships that can honor our social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital and bring about a currency that is in tune with the sun’s energy flow, then Bitcoin need to be used to restore the gift economy, the commons, our ecosystems, farming communities and our foodsystems. Perhaps then Bitcoin can foster a culture in which the rich are the most generous ones, instead of those who have managed to accumulate the most. Perhaps then Bitcoin can actually work as a valued currency, instead of value stored.
References:
Charles Eisenstein (2011). Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition. Ed. North Atlantic Books.
David Graeber (2012). Debt: the first 5,000 years. Melville House.
Dmitri Orlov (2013). The 5 Stages of Collapse: survivors’ toolkit. New Society Publishers.
Global Debt Monitor. Global Debt Monitor: Seismic Shifts in Global Debt Markets – Demographics, Deglobalization, Decarbonization and Digitalization, accessed on Novemver, 2025. https://www.iif.com/Publications/Members-Only-Content-Sign-in?returnurl=/publications/id/6301
Nate Hagens e D.J. White (2021). Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures. Published by the author.
Pallavi Rao on Visual Capitalist. The $115 Trillion World Economy in One Chart, accessed on Novemver, 2025.