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naddr1qq…qv8gWhat an eventful year 2026 has turned out to be so far in the Bitcoin space! In just a few short months, we have experienced everything from hardware wallets exploits, the fork wars 2.0, the quantum FUD, the seemingly about turn by Strategy in their Bitcoin acquisition strategy (no pun intended) and the somewhat depressed Bitcoin price just to name a few. In other words, a lot of drama has been mostly centred around Bitcoin’s market dynamics and other macroeconomic factors influencing its price. In the midst of all this the most important question of all seems to be all but forgotten, which is, why are we here?
Why does this space even exist in the first place? Why is Bitcoin the most consequential invention or rather, most important discovery of the 21st century? Why are you a Bitcoiner? For some it’s for the tech, for other it’s to get their bags pumped and for others like me it’s for taking the state out of our money. Money is not an invention of the state, but the central banking cancer that is pervasive throughout the world is designed to distort that fundamental truth and instil the idea that the state alone is to be trusted with the issuance of money. This is despite centuries of detailed evidence of the state’s gross mismanagement of the monetary system. Isn’t doing the same thing and expecting different results the classical definition of insanity? If the state has proven itself to be untrustworthy time and time again, why on earth do people still trust the state with the one thing that affects every area of their lives? Maybe the world is just one big collective insane asylum.
In the Bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi made this abundantly clear that trusted third parties have proven to be untrustworthy even though they have inserted themselves into the middle of every transaction, in addition to being the money issuers themselves. Bitcoin was designed to be a tool to escape that scam by creating a neutral proof of work based monetary system that is not subject to the political whims of the day and central bank alchemy. During the Covid plandemic for example, the US government printed 40% of all the dollars that ever existed in less than two years! Just let that sink in for a moment. Your purchasing power was destroyed by people sitting in rooms most folks will unlikely be invited into, by people you will never meet and all without consulting you. While to most of you, especially if you have been around this space for a while, none of this is news to you, but there is another overlooked aspect of Bitcoin which builds on top of this “separation of money and state” thesis. Something I like to call Bitcoin powered aid.
Before proceeding further, let me start by giving you telling of a real life scenario, a true event that happened recently. I, recent weeks, I have had the honour and privilege of speaking to people inside Iran and got to hear first-hand their stories of how life is for them. Some these stories I will share and some I will not, for obvious reasons. Ismail (not his real name) is a young man currently living in Iran, who had big dreams and goals for his life, like all young men do.
Those dreams were shattered, when earlier this year in March, his apartment building was blown up by missiles in the ongoing Iranian conflict. Fortunately, for Ismail he wasn’t home when the attack happened, but other families were not so fortunate and hundreds of people lost their lives as a result. Surviving the attack did not mean that Ismail had escaped its consequences. He had lost his home and years of sky-high inflation had already destroyed much of his purchasing power, he had little financial reserve with which to rebuild his life. So he did what a human being does when disaster strikes.
He looked outward for help and attempted to start a GoFundME crowdfunding campaign for rebuilding his home and regain some semblance of normality; but alas, he encountered another wall. A financial wall.
As you maybe aware dear reader, Iran is subject to sweeping international sanctions and restrictions on financial transactions. It has been cut off from SWIFT, thus major payment networks and crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe; operate within a system of banks, payment processors, compliance departments and jurisdictional restrictions that make serving people in sanctioned countries extraordinarily difficult. Ismail therefore encountered the great paradox of modern humanitarianism; which is that while there are who people willing to help him and with the resources to do so; the fiat financial system can still stand between the donor and the victim and say NO!
This is why Bitcoin matters, not because it’s a cool digital asset that is increasing in price. Bitcoin matters because there are people in this world who desperately need to receive value from other human beings and who cannot reliably do so through the financial system they were born into.
Ismail is one of them and he is not alone.
Collateral Damage Is Not a Metaphor, It’s a Line Item
Every sanctions regime is sold to the public with the same promise, that it will punish the regime, not the ordinary people. Ismail’s predicament proves that this promise isn’t worth anything at all. Bear in mind that he isn’t a political actor, combatant or even a civil servant. He is just an ordinary young man who just wanted to make something of himself and one day build a family. Regardless he became a victim of a conflict he didn’t instigate and cut off from the global financial system through no fault of his own. This is the part that so much sanctions coverage refuses to say plainly, which is that financial exclusion is not a side effect of these policies but the enforcement weapon.
A sanctions regime does not drop leaflets into a specific bank account belonging to a specific general. It severs an entire nation's population, ninety million people, the overwhelming majority of whom had no seat at any table where the confrontation was decided; from SWIFT, from correspondent banking, from the payment processors that the rest of the world treats as invisible infrastructure. The generals have accountants and shell companies for exactly this contingency. Ismail had a GoFundMe page and a suspended banner. The tool was aimed at power and it landed, as it always lands, on the powerless. To many of you reading this, you can’t begin to imagine what this is like but for people like Ismail, inflation, war, sanctions and persistent terror are their daily experience. High inflation alone is unpleasant but when paired together with war and sanctions, even running a business becomes extremely difficult. What’s the way out for them? Well, Bitcoin is definitely a huge part of the solution.
If GoFundMe had a Bitcoin payout option, who knows how far Ismail would have been now with the rebuilding efforts. This is not a criticism of GoFundMe per se, but it’s just a candid analysis of the paradigm in which they operate where critical humanitarian aid cannot go to regions that have been designated persona non grata by the guardians of the liberal world order, not as a result of any internal policy on their part but it’s a constraint they inherit from relying on trusted third parties like payment processors and banks. It’s these institutions which are the enforcement arm of the fiat overlords and by a single stroke are able to financially censor 90 million civilians; who for the most part are also victims of their government’s economic and foreign policies.
Then There Is Azad
Azad's story (also not his real name) begins somewhere entirely different. He is a family man in Shiraz who has worked at a distribution company for over five years. No missile destroyed his apartment and no explosion turned his possessions into rubble, but his catastrophe is quieter. That makes it no less real. Six months ago, his salary was worth roughly $330, but today, that same salary is now worth approximately $130. The number on his payslip may not have collapsed by 60 percent, but his purchasing power did. Azad's problem is not merely that he is earning too little but that the economic value of the hours he has already worked is being systematically destroyed.
Azad is not a speculator, nor is he is trying to outperform an index. The only thing that matters to him at this point is the preservation of the value of his labour. That is the humanitarian case for sound money and that is why Bitcoin matters.
Iran's own Central Bank and its Statistical Centre; two state institutions with every incentive to understate the damage, using different consumption-basket methodologies that routinely diverge by several points, have managed to come to the same conclusion. Year-on-year inflation stood at roughly 52.6% in December 2025. and by February 2026 it had climbed to approximately 68%. By the period ending June 21, 2026, the Central Bank of Iran was reporting year-on-year inflation of 83.1%, while the Statistical Centre put the same figure at 88.6%, a spread of five and a half points that exists only because the two agencies disagree on exactly how bad it is, not whether. The IMF's independent forecast for full-year 2026 lands at an average of roughly 69%, among the highest inflation rates of any economy on the planet, alongside a projected contraction in real GDP of over 6%.
These numbers require translation. An annual inflation rate of 88.6%. means that the same representative basket of goods and services that cost 10 000 tomans in the comparison period would cost approximately 18 860 tomans a year later! That said, even this example understates the humanitarian impact because the basket does not contain equal quantities of everything people buy. Food inflation reached roughly 128% year-on-year in July. Major food categories were even worse, oils and fats were reported at 261% year-on-year, while milk, cheese and eggs rose 147% and meat and poultry 145%. This is precisely why Azad's story matters, because his salary is not merely being eroded against some theoretical consumer-price index; but against the things his family actually needs.
This Is What Monetary Collapse Looks Like From the Kitchen Table
Fiat keynesian economists talk about inflation as though the central problem is choosing the correct number, while families experience it as a sequence of humiliations.
The shopping list gets shorter, the food portions get smaller, the cheaper meat replaces the premium meat until the meat disappears altogether, healthcare becomes a luxury and something to postpone, children's needs compete with parents' needs. Then people start selling possessions, including priceless heirlooms and finally the borrowing starts.
Instalment plans become the dominant way of purchasing things they previously bought outright. That last development is particularly revealing. By August 2026, Iranian businesses were increasingly offering "buy now, pay later" schemes for everything from clothing and electronics to gold and travel as consumers struggled with collapsing purchasing power.
A society does not turn everyday necessities into instalment purchases because everything is going well but it does so because the monetary unit has stopped performing one of its most basic functions, which is preservation of purchasing power through time.
Azad Is Paying for Time He Already Gave
Azad cannot get his time back. If he worked eight hours yesterday, those eight hours are gone. He cannot work nine hours today to recover them. When people lose confidence that money will preserve value, their behaviour changes. They consume faster, they save less (if they save at all), and their planning horizons become shorter. A society trapped in persistent monetary instability becomes increasingly present-oriented because the future is difficult to price. The tragedy is that this behaviour can then make the economy even less capable of long-term capital formation, and this is how monetary instability becomes social instability.
Bitcoin Does Not Solve Poverty. It Solves Exclusion
While Bitcoin cannot lift sanctions, end the war or fix the economy, it does something far less narrower and more real. For Both Ismail and Azad, Bitcoin removes the specific chokepoint that turned a war and an inflation crisis into a financial exclusion crisis on top of everything else. For Ismail, the exclusion was the whole injury on top of the injury. His home was destroyed by violence he had no part in causing; that’s a catastrophe no monetary technology is able to fix. The inability to receive help after the catastrophe was a second, entirely separate wound, and that second wound was purely a function of routing; his rebuilding fund had to pass through a permissioned and blacklist driven correspondent-banking system.
For Azad, the exclusion runs the other direction: outward, not inward. A worker whose wage is being erased by a currency he has no ability to opt out of is functionally locked inside a monetary system with no exit and every option for holding value that doesn't dissolve requires either connections, capital, or risk that a five-year distribution-company employee does not have. Sanctions cut off Iran's formal access to dollars, gold custody abroad, and most international financial instruments, leaving Bitcoin as one of the only stores of value that a person with a phone and no banking relationship abroad can actually reach without an intermediary's approval.
The Bitcoin community has spent years asking whether institutions will adopt Bitcoin, and in my view, that is not the most important question. Rather we should have focused more on the following; can a person who has been excluded from the financial system still receive help? Can a person whose currency is collapsing preserve some of their labour? Can an ordinary human being maintain an economic relationship with another human being even when their respect governments disagree? These are the tests that matter. Failing them means Bitcoin has become just another custodial financial product, and thus we would have misunderstood the invention.
Which brings us back to the central question of, why are we here? Why are you here? Well in my opinion, we are here because Ismail's house was destroyed and the international financial system could not easily deliver help to him, because Azad works for his family while the currency in which he is paid continues to lose purchasing power, because ordinary people routinely become collateral damage in conflicts between governments and finally we are here because money can be weaponized.
Bitcoin is much bigger than just number go up (NgU) technology and while it’s not the answer to all of humanity’s problems; it is indeed the starting point of solving state sanctioned theft whether by inflation, taxation or violence. Bitcoin's most important feature is not that it is difficult to create but that it’s difficult for an external authority to prevent two people from using it. That distinction matters enormously to people who live inside functioning financial systems. It matters infinitely more to those who do not.
Kudzai Kutukwa on Nostr: The #Bitcoin community has spent years asking whether institutions will adopt ...
The #Bitcoin community has spent years asking whether institutions will adopt Bitcoin, and in my view, that is not the most important question. Rather we should have focused more on the following; can a person who has been excluded from the financial system still receive help? Can a person whose currency is collapsing preserve some of their labour? Can an ordinary human being maintain an economic relationship with another human being even when their respect governments disagree? These are the tests that matter. Failing them means Bitcoin has become just another custodial financial product, and thus we would have misunderstood the invention.
