Bitcoin Has Already Won: The Math is Done

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Good day everyone. Welcome to another episode of On Time with Adam Livingston.

[00:00:04]Memorial Day weekend edition. I have a fun orange pill for you today. I absolutely love Bitcoin. I'm actually totally addicted to Bitcoin. I literally don't think about anything else. So, I was thinking, what should I bring to the masses on Memorial Day weekend to ease people's frustrations with the Bitcoin price? Because if you guys didn't see, we just wicked down to 75,000 and people are freaking out online. Bitcoiners are freaking out because gold just had that crazy runup last year in the midst of all of this geopolitical instability. We are seeing the S&P 500. The total stock market index hit all-time highs and Bitcoin is just wallowing in the mid70s right now. But as always, I encourage you to zoom out. This is a fun little video animation I made of the Bitcoin 2-year moving average. I want you guys to pay attention to that number on the bottom right of this video render here.

[00:00:59]You see the Bitcoin 2-year moving average only going up and to the right.

[00:01:04]So, stop getting obsessed about the spot price of Bitcoin. You can see that Bitcoin acts as a step function. It goes up and to the right if you simply zoom out over time. It's quite amazing to see. Two years ago, you saw the 2-year moving average in the 30,000s. And now look at it today, 77,515.

[00:01:26]And even better is the 4-year moving average because this is just smoothing out the volatility of Bitcoin's price action over a longer time frame. And as you can see, Bitcoin only goes up and to the right. It is truly a marvel of technology. It is a marvel of a product market fit. In this world where the M2 money supply continues to increase, in this world of quantitative easing, the money printer, governments devaluing their debt, Bitcoin is the way out of this fiscal crisis. So that's what we're going to be talking to today. Bitcoin only goes up and to the right. So it is Memorial Day weekend. Happy Memorial Day weekend, America. The grills are out.

[00:02:10]The flags are up. The lawn chairs are deployed. And somewhere a dad in cargo shorts is squinting at his package of ground beef like it owes him child support. We're talking $6.90 per pound for the saddest cut of beef ever conceived by man. The one that's literally named after the floor of the cow. In January of 2020, I'm sure you guys remember that. The month before CO hit, that same pound of ground beef was $3.89. 89. 6 years later today, it is $6.90.

[00:02:47]So, if you do the math, that's a 77.5% increase since January of 2020. And annualized, that means that ground beef is compounding at 9.6% per year, which, fun fact, beats the long-term return of the S&P 500. So, think about that right now. The most attractive asset class in America is the bottom half of a cow.

[00:03:12]That is incredible. That is glorious.

[00:03:14]That is a damning indictment on the fiat monetary system. So Americans this weekend on Memorial Day weekend, they're walking into Costco. They're looking at hamburger meat and they're doing the math like they're negotiating a leveraged buyout. They're checking their phones. They're calling their wives.

[00:03:31]They're whispering the words, "Maybe we just do hot dogs." So, the grill in today's day and age has become a luxury item. Cookouts have moved up a tax bracket. And right now, we're just one rate hike away from grandpa serving the family a single hot dog cut into seven pieces and calling it a shuderie board.

[00:03:51]So, this is where it gets fun because we know that everything gets cheaper when Bitcoin is your money. It's simple. You went from 53,974 sats for one pound of ground beef all the way down to 10,131 sats. And what do you see? You see ground beef declining in price by 81.2% since January of 2020. Just proving the fact that Bitcoin is the deflationary asset. It's the deflationary money.

[00:04:20]Everything gets cheaper when Bitcoin is your money. And it's not just beef, but it's gas, it's houses, it's college, it's health care, it is the down payment on a life. So this Memorial Day, while the average American, they're firing up their Webbers, wondering why a brisket now requires either a heliloc or a blood oath, the Bitcoiners amongst us were at the same store, you know, with the same shopping cart looking at the exact same beef doing the same math and we are quietly smiling because the Bitcoiner already knows that the dollar is the problem and we have the receipts. It's just math. So let's go back to the year 2000. America was peaking around that time. Tony Hawk just landed the 900. The Backstreet Boys were larger than life.

[00:05:05]And the M2 money supply, which is the total amount of dollars sloshing around in the American economy, it actually sat at only a modest $4.67 trillion. And by March of this year, 2026, that number is $22.69 trillion. Yes, there has been a 386% expansion in the money supply in the last quarter century. That is the money printer with the substance abuse problem. And when we look at consumer prices, you know, the polite, softer, familyfriendly version of inflation, the fake government statistics, they're telling you that consumer prices have doubled over that period. So the best case scenario, the lying fake number is telling us that consumer prices have only doubled when we've seen the money supply go up at that rate. So according to the fake math, your dollar from the year 2000 is now buying you 51 cents of whatever you want to buy in 2026. That's literally the math using the fake numbers that have cherrypicked data. And that is your paycheck. That's your savings, your mortgage, your kids' college fund, and your retirement. Your net worth on your personal capital, your I will be fine if I just hit a million by 65. You know, this whole Dave Ramseyesque Dave Ramsey adjacent normie traditional finance influencers who say, "Buy the S&P 500, you'll be a millionaire in 40 years." Uh, sorry, that's not good enough. You have to buy Bitcoin. Why would you want to be a millionaire in 40 years when the price of ground beef is going to be $100 a pound? So, you guys saw those two video renders of the Bitcoin 2-year moving average, the 4-year moving average. All you got to do is stack sats, zoom out, sit in your cold storage Bitcoin, and stop worrying about life because Bitcoin is the perfect product market fit for the money printer, for asset inflation, for everything getting out of reach. It makes sense to store your wealth in Bitcoin. And yes, people will tell you that wages went up, so it's not a big deal. The government will remind you of this every single chance that it gets.

[00:07:17]They love this stat. They'll put it in every single press release. They love it the way that your most insecure friend posts about his job promotion on LinkedIn. Using the official statistics, median weekly earnings, they rose from $568 in 2000 to $1,233.

[00:07:36]Yippi, how exciting. That is a 117% increase. Pretty good, right? More than doubled. No, because in the exact same window, the median US home went from 165,000 to 43,000. So yeah, in 2000, the median house cost 291 weeks of median earnings, but in 2026, that is 327 weeks. So the treadmill is just getting faster for you. every time they brag about the rising wages, just know that it can't outrun the money printer. And then on top of that, the mortgage rates are worse. What are they 6 12% right now? So congratulations, your wages are higher, but the asset that you need them to buy is more expensive, and the money you have to borrow to bridge the gap costs more, too. So you won three races, but somehow you finished last. That is the hat trick of being destroyed. And then the system has the audacity to call this generation entitled. You know, I'm right on the cusp of millennial and Gen Z, depending on what definition you are.

[00:08:39]I'm entitled in both generations. We're the lazy. We're the avocado toast generation. You know, the quiet quitters, failure to launch. You know, all of these boomers who bought a 4-year colonial in 1987 for the price of a used Hyundai. They're now writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal asking why millennials don't want to work hard and sacrifice. They're just ignoring that the treadmill is getting faster, the wall is getting taller, and the system handed every young person in America a LinkedIn post about mindset. This is why Bitcoin is no longer optional. You need to stop worrying about the spot price and store your savings in the thing that is impossible to dilute. And what's funny is that even using the official government statistics from just the numbers last month, we're getting 3.8% year-over-year CPI inflation, which is nearly double what their target is, nearly double what they call healthy, but their healthy number still destroys half of your purchasing power in 20 years. And then on top of that, energy is up 17.9%.

[00:09:43]So, you know, this core basket that they're talking about, it's excluding the two things that we actually need every single week. And that is the real game. Yes, we have a new Fed chairman.

[00:09:54]Yes, we have the prediction markets pricing in rate hikes this year. So, who knows what's going to happen exactly.

[00:10:00]But at the end of the day, the inflation isn't the groceries, kids. Inflation should be defined as the rising cost of escaping the dollar itself. Because when our currency continues to leak, every scarce thing on earth just becomes the lifeboat. And that is how other assets get something called monetary premium.

[00:10:22]That's why the housing prices are inflated. Stocks are obviously lifeboats right now. The equity market is just going through the roof. Gold became the lifeboat last year. You've seen land do it, fine art do it, whiskey, Pokemon cards, whatever you want. some idiot's collection of vintage typewriters becomes a hedge against monetary policy.

[00:10:43]And this is the cantalone effect.

[00:10:44]Unfortunately, the people who are closest to the money printer, they're going to get the new dollars first. And unfortunately, you guys are orange pill.

[00:10:52]You understand what Bitcoin is, how it is the perfect thing to be holding right now with this era of fiscal debasement.

[00:10:59]And it's just frustrating right now because the world is treating it like it's the risk on asset when we know that it is the inverse. Though right now, as a Bitcoiner, you know, it's just the waiting game. So, right now, the Congressional Budget Office is actually projecting a $1.9 trillion federal deficit for the fiscal year of 2026. 1.9 trillion. Okay, that's the deficit for this year. 10 years from now in 2036, that is projected to hit $3.1 trillion from 1.9 to 3.1. That's not quite a doubling in one decade, but we have to start to talk about what are their ways out of this mess. We're seeing federal debt projected to climb to 120% of the gross domestic product. So, the net interest cost, just the interest, yes, just the interest and not the principal, they are rising from 3.3% of the GDP to 4.6%. The federal government is now spending more on interest payments than on national defense. The biggest line item in the budget of the most powerful nation in human history is a visa minimum payment. So, we're seeing debt compounding faster than the productive economy. And when that happens, the menu of political options collapses to four ugly entre. You can either cut spending hard, like that's ever going to happen.

[00:12:20]You can raise taxes hard as if you could get elected with that position or you could explicitly default on your debt which will never happen. And then of course that leaves option four which is to debase the currency. You need to melt the dollar measuring stick to deal with this problem. You have to deflate the value of the currency by inflating the number of units that are slloshing around in the supply. They're not going to say folks we're not going to pay our creditors back. You can't. So unfortunately, they're just going to inflate the debt away. They are going to cook the books in slow motion. They are going to boil the citizens of this country in a 3 to 7% official inflation cauldron for 40 years. And they're going to call it macroeconomic stability. And it's not surprising every other fiat regime in human history finds itself in this position. The Romans did it, the Argentines did it, the Germans did it, the French did it, the Spanish did it, the Chinese did it. every single empire ever that issued a currency at some point debaseed the currency into oblivion to pay for the promises that it can't keep. The only exceptional thing about the United States is the size of the printer. So the Fed is this committee of the credentialed adults.

[00:13:36]You have the PhDs from Princeton, Harvard, Yale, MIT, whatever. They're all trapped inside of this machine that requires intervention every single time.

[00:13:46]The leverage in the system gets too big and asset prices start to wobble, banks get scared, or perhaps the Treasury yields rise too fast, which we're also witnessing. So, every single decade, they just light the house on fire. Every decade, they show up dressed as firemen while they are the arsonists. The modern financial system is the arsonist with a fire hose. And the funny part is that these people genuinely believe that they're saving the world. They have their meetings about it. They have their minutes. They publish their papers.

[00:14:17]There's a whole annual symposium in Jackson Hole where they fly in on their private jets to discuss the unfortunate inequality created by the policies that they implemented at last year's Jackson Hole Symposium. Bitcoin reintroduces us to this idea that money should be this natural thing, okay? a system that exists outside of the control of humanity. And we know that is the superior form of money, one that's not by committee or human policy, humanmandated decided policy. And it's not difficult because the Fed balance sheet, it is a fossil record. You can look back on it and just see what they do. Ignore what they say. Look at what they do. Every single layer of the fossil record of the Fed balance sheet is financial collapse. Okay? Every layer is a crisis. 2008 financial collapse, what did you get? You got a round of quantitative easing. 2010, 2012, you had more quantitative easing because the first one didn't take. 2020 in CO, you know what happened there? The printer went burr at speeds previously thought to violate the laws of physics. 2023 was the bank term funding program after the regional banking crisis. And right now the Fed is in a position where they have to struggle to come up with another name to call it. And this is sad because when the money supply is distorted like this, you guys need to understand that markets, they're not even pricing the companies anymore. The capital markets, they're pricing the Fed's reaction function. Earning season is a footnote to everything. The real Super Bowl is now the Fed meeting day. That's literally what it is. The traders, they're sitting at their desks. They're gonna be parsing Kevin Worsha's sentence structure like they're decoding the Dead Sea Scrolls. Did he say data dependent or data dependent? Sell everything. So fiat right now is managed by people who continually promise restraint. But of course restraint is mathematically impossible for them. And Bitcoin is managed by the math that doesn't know that you exist, which is a beautiful thing. That is the difference. So that's my entire speech today. That is my Memorial Day weekend orange pill for you with a nice side of 77% inflation on ground beef. So this weekend, light your grill, you know, drink your beer, hug your family, salute the flag, and then of course, quietly, calmly with the patience of someone who has done the math. Keep stacking sats because the dollar is the problem, and the receipts quite literally are everywhere. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of On Time. I hope you enjoyed the orange gospel today. If you want to be in your Bitcoin position safely and securely before the next great shift happens, Swanprivate is for you. If you are interested in being paired up with a Bitcoin wealth professional, whether you're an individual, family, office, company, whoever, whatever you are, go to swan.com/noscondb.

[00:17:10]Find out how we can help you today because we want to be your partner for generational wealth because we run the numbers. We know what's happening with Bitcoin. It's going up forever, Laura.

[00:17:20]And we want to be alongside you with every single step of your Bitcoin journey. Have a terrific day, everybody.

[00:17:25]Do not party too hard.