Sunday Summary, OCT12
A week in review from the Editor
My father had a mug on his dresser
…filled to the brim with coins. I can recall the end of some days, him pulling an overstuffed wallet out of his back pocket, placing it on the top of the dresser, then reaching into the front pocket and wrestling a small handful of coins to inevitably be deposited with a set of tiny clinks into the already overflowing vessel.
At the time, I thought nothing of Austrian economists, Fiat currencies, or hard money. It was simply a daily ritual; a set of actions that signified the end of a day’s transacting—a sort of balancing of accounts.
Money isn’t just a tool; it’s a set of cultural rituals.
It’s how we learn to relate to value, to the future, to trust. Some families kept gold coins in the freezer. Others balanced checkbooks every Sunday. Some never spoke about money at all. The culture of money, like any culture, encodes beliefs through thousands of tiny actions about what is safe, what is fair, and what endures.
Now that culture is shifting.
Fewer people handle cash. Fewer still save in anything physical. Even the act of “going to the bank” has become almost obsolete. The practices and institutions that once defined our financial lives have sublimated into apps, interfaces, and invisible ledgers. And somewhere between Apple Pay and auto-deposit, money lost its ritual gravity. It became pure abstraction.
Bitcoin enters this cultural void not merely as “new money,” but as the reintroduction of ritual in an era that has forgotten it.
To hold Bitcoin—to truly hold it…
is to engage in practices that are strangely personal, almost sacred. You learn to protect your keys, to write down a seed phrase on paper or steel, to verify rather than trust.
It’s not frictionless, but that friction teaches. It forces engagement where blind clicking existed before.
In this way, Bitcoin reawakens a lost cultural practice of money.
It demands habits, literacy, and care. Teaching a child to use Bitcoin is not like handing them a debit card. It’s more akin to teaching them to read—because in understanding Bitcoin, one learns not only how to store value, but why that value exists outside of institutions at all.
Running a node, checking the mempool, backing up a wallet; these are the new piggy banks of the digital age. They are ways of participating in a culture that prizes sovereignty over convenience. And like all cultures, these practices are best transmitted through stories, repetition, and example.
Imagine a future where a parent doesn’t just say “save for something special,” but explains how to generate a wallet, why self-custody matters, and what happens when code, not politicians, defines the rules of money.
Of course, culture isn’t static. Bitcoin’s own rituals evolve. In the early days, the phrase “not your keys, not your coins” was almost a commandment. Today, tools like collaborative custody or inheritance planning are expanding what it means to “hold your own money.” These aren’t purely technical innovations; they’re also cultural: redefining trust and responsibility within a shared ethos.
The future question isn’t simply how Bitcoin changes culture, but how it creates it. What stories will we tell our children about this strange tool? Will they remember sitting with us, learning to secure a wallet the way we once learned to count coins?
Our generation is the first to inherit a money that exists beyond borders, beyond institutions, and beyond digital permission. The culture we build around it—the rituals we teach, the values we encode—will determine whether Bitcoin remains just a technology, or becomes the foundation of a truly new social fabric.
Maybe someday, my children will recall the first time they helped back up a seed phrase, the way I remember that mug on the dresser. That memory, too, will be money culture—and it will tell them something important about the kind of world we chose to build.