These are not coordinated and yet somehow they’re the best free marketing campaign for the Austrian School of Economics, a way of thinking about money and markets that starts from a very unfashionable idea: people don’t and can’t know everything.

You are actually a proponent of the Austrian School and you just don’t know it yet. Let me explain in these simple steps:

(all views and opinions are my own)

Step One: Question the Spending

(You are here)

Flood control that doesn’t control floods has a way of clarifying the mind.

You don’t need a spreadsheet to see something’s wrong when your street turns into an ocean and the budget reports read like a fantasy novel. People start asking dangerous questions:

• Why is government spending always “record-breaking” but results are always the same?
• Why do we keep spending despite the never-ending national debt?
• Why do taxes keep rising while services get worse?
• Why does inflation feel like a silent tax no one voted for?

At this stage, most people still think the problem is execution. Bad officials. Wrong people. Poor oversight.

This is the status quo. We’re all used to it.

Step Two: You Stumble Onto the Root Cause

(Nobody warned you about this part)

Here’s the part they never teach, not in schools, not in economics classes, not even in polite intellectual circles:

The problem isn’t just corruption. The problem is the money. Fiat money.

Money that can be printed, expanded, “stimulated,” and quietly diluted without your consent. Money that turns governments into drunk sailors with an unlimited credit card.

Welcome to the Austrian School of Economics, a body of thought so radioactive it’s carefully kept out of the academe and politely ignored by credentialed bureaucrats and the “serious” intellectual class.

Not because it’s wrong but bcause it’s inconvenient.

This is the moment when people realize corruption isn’t a moral failure but a feature of a broken system.

Step Three: Gold Starts Screaming

(Gold isn’t just rising. It’s testifying.)

People ask the wrong question at first:
“Why is gold rising?”

They’re told:

• geopolitics
• interest rates
• global uncertainty

But some unlucky souls keep digging. And somewhere between a flooded barangay and a grocery receipt, they stumble into a book by Friedrich Hayek or Ludwig von Mises.

That’s when the headache (and heartache) starts.

At any given moment in our lifetime, there are always wars, uncertainties, and crazy geopolitics. Gold isn’t rising because it’s special. It’s rising because fiat money is failing.

Step Four: Sound Money Is the Exit

(Bitcoin fixes this.)

If you hate corruption, you want limits. If you want world peace, you want constraints on spending. If you want politicians to think twice, you don’t give them a printer.

Sound money does that.

Gold does it by being heavy, scarce, and politically inconvenient. Bitcoin does it digitally, by being finite, permissionless, and allergic to bullshit.

Different forms. Same principle.

When money can’t be debased, corruption gets expensive. When corruption gets expensive, war becomes unaffordable. When war becomes unaffordable, politicians have to relearn humility. They will have no choice.

Step Five: Welcome to the Austrian School

(You didn’t choose this.)

You didn’t wake up wanting to overthrow mainstream monetary theory. You just hated corruption. You just wanted your taxes to mean something. You just didn’t want your house flooded again.

And somehow, through floods, inflation, taxation, gold charts, and a world that feels increasingly unhinged, you arrived here.

You can start with books by F.A. Hayek or Ludwig Von Mises. There are lots of free copies online.

Welcome to the Austrian School.

Up nearly 70% this year, precious metals are sending a signal that refuses to fit neatly into anyone’s macro expectations.

The message is clear: the Emperor has no clothes.

Headlines and so called “economists” say it’s the rate cuts or perhaps a reaction to easing.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: gold has been rallying through tightening, easing, pausing, pivot rumors, and whatever policy the Fed blurts out.

The reality is simpler and perhaps too uncomfortable for them to admit. Gold has ignored their entire playbook.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

These rallies are exposing something deeper: the cracks in Keynesian economics, the religion of econometric forecasting, and central-bank-centric thinking.

The world is in trillions of debt and yet we don’t even know who these debts are owed to exactly. And even the intellectual class and the most credentialed don’t question why central banks can print new money from thin air.

Gold is quietly voting no.

Every new high is a reminder that faith in fiat is weakening, not because people suddenly love shiny rocks but because they’re starting to doubt the stories backing modern money.

Money That Doesn’t Need Faith

Here’s where it gets interesting.
Bitcoin takes everything gold does well and removes the physical limitations.

Absolute scarcity, enforced by code, regardless if you believe in it or not.
No surprise supply discoveries.
No reliance on geology or mining breakthroughs. Verifiable, auditable, global, portable.

The only reason markets don’t recognize this yet is because gold has had a 5,000-year head start. Bitcoin has barely existed for over a decade.

You can deny it, model it, or explain it away but the market has already noticed the emperor has no clothes.

I’ve Seen This Movie Before

I was already around during the Blocksize Wars (2016 to 2017), and I still remember how terrifying that was. Back then, Bitcoiners like me suddenly had to face the possibility that the thing we believed in, invested in, and have been fighting for might not survive (this civil war is what caused the hard fork that gave birth to $BCH or Bitcoin Cash).

It was a very complex and divisive time. Even I became a believer of Roger Ver’s vision for a while since peer-to-peer payments was one of the main reasons that got me interested in Bitcoin. For a while, I actually advocated for BCash ($BCH) due to my limited understanding of why there were people who didn’t want to increase the block size.

Should Bitcoin just be about money?

I’ve always leaned libertarian, and my heart beats to the Austrian School of Economics — Mises, Hayek, Rothbard. To me, Bitcoin’s purpose is clear: hard money for a hard world. It’s not supposed to be a playground for JPEGs or a permanent storage for random memes.

And yet, as someone who believes in a freemarket of ideas, I also get why some people say Bitcoin should stay neutral. If you pay the fee, you play the game. That’s the ethos of permissionless systems. Who am I to say what’s “valid” or “invalid” use of Bitcoin if the protocol rules are followed?

That’s where I’m stuck: my heart says Bitcoin should remain laser-focused on money, but my principles tell me censorship, even “soft censorship”, is a dangerous slope.

Ordinals and Inscriptions

A big driver of this “Spam War”, as you may have heard of, is the rise of Ordinals and Inscriptions or ways to embed digital art, text, and arbitrary data directly into Bitcoin transactions. Think NFTs on Bitcoin, except instead of being a pointer to some image hosted elsewhere, the actual data can live on-chain.

To be honest, I don’t really see anything inherently bad about it. If someone wants to pay the transaction fee to immortalize a piece of art or a meme on Bitcoin, that’s their choice. It’s kind of beautiful in a way. It’s proof that Bitcoin is not just money, but also a cultural canvas.

But here’s the catch: when thousands of people start doing this at scale, the network risks getting clogged. Block space is finite, and inscriptions compete with regular monetary transactions. Fees can spike, the mempool can fill up, and suddenly the whole thing starts to look less like a global payments network and more like a battleground for who gets to write what into Bitcoin’s permanent history.

That’s where the fear of “spam” comes from. Not necessarily that inscriptions are evil, but that their volume could slow down, bloat, or even destabilize the network in ways Satoshi may never have imagined.

Is this a Bug or a Feature?

This leaves me wondering: is this exactly what Satoshi intended? That the protocol is strong enough to host these massive debates without breaking? That the community would constantly wrestle with the edges of freedom, neutrality, and utility? Maybe this is a feature, “iron sharpening iron” as they say, an immune system stress test for Bitcoin’s resilience.

Or maybe it’s a bug. Maybe this loophole of embedding arbitrary data into Bitcoin is the crack in the armor that could one day split the chain, bloat the ledger, and slowly kill the very thing we believe will change the future of humanity.

That’s the haunting part. We don’t know.

The Existential Question

The Spam Wars may not sound dramatic to outsiders, but to those of us who’ve lived through Bitcoin’s civil wars before, it feels like a deja vu. Another existential question, another test of whether the network can survive not just code-level attacks but also social, political, and cultural ones.

Maybe that’s the destiny of Bitcoin: to always be in conflict, always under pressure, always facing the threat of self-destruction. Or maybe it’s just growing pains, a necessary struggle that keeps the immune system strong.

All I know is that I’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t get any easier to watch the second time.

These two kids, Blake Anderson and Zach Yadegari, built three apps that have accumulated $15M USD in Annual Recurring Revenue:

• Umax — an app that rates your face using AI (very reminscient of Zuckerberg’s Facemash, something I was just literally referring to in my previous blog post, Shut Up and Build)
• RizzGPT — an AI-powered app that tells you what to reply to girls or boys you like
• Cal AI — a simple calorie counting app that uses AI to asses the number of calories in what you eat based on a photo. This one easily outranked some of the bigger players within its first year.

None of them are insanely complicated. None of them require years of R&D or the backing of Y Combinator. They’re simple. Almost deceptively so. And most importantly, they’re all within the capabilities of vibe coding.

Their Gen Z GTM Playbook

Their go-to-market playbook is straight out of their own experience and media consumption habits. They utilize short form videos and partner with the right content creator and have come up with very interesting metrics:

• CPM (Cost Per Mille) — something we’re all familiar with, classic cost per 1,000 impressions or views
• RPM (Revenue Per Mille) — these kids measure revenue generated per 1,000 views of their short form content both owned and earned/paid with partner content creators.

Also, for these kids, as with most Gen Z kids, growth hacking is instinctive. Marketing is deeply ingrained within the product experience itself. They put strong emphasis on onboarding, UX, and conversion optimization (eg. split testing paywall locations and triggers, etc.).

Rocket-Internet-esque Model but Gen Z

On twitter, Zach literally encourages people to copy their products or copy the incumbents but integrate well with AI then create “viral” loops with short form content. It reminds me of a Gen-Z-fied Rocket Internet model that we can all do (yes, even those with no coding experience!). That’s basically what they did with Cal AI and right now it feels like a land grab for most other niches or app categories/verticals.

I’m not Gen Z though… am I too old?

In Blake Anderson’s podcast , he interviewed another infamous Gen Z kid, Roy Lee of Cluely who actually mentioned somewhere that vibe coding or AI itself is just so new that even expertise in this space is a land grab, too. It’s not like biology that you have to study for decades, he says, and something anyone can be an expert at in a shorter time frame.

And for me, it’s not theoretical cos I’ve built a a few things myself as I’ve talked about in this blog a few times. In fact, I estimate that I can replicate a very similar MVP to our old product in my failed startup in one week (something that took us one year and about $100k USD to do previously, which was probably a mistake in and of itself).

So you can imagine how crazy this all feels for me.

So yeah, I’m 37, probably (and statistically) beyond half of my life already. I’m obsessed with vibe coding, and dreaming of becoming a vibe coding rockstar. Hopefully it’s not too late!

This is also where he unveiled my favorite “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” spot, the bold and courageous branding video that did not feature even one single product shot.

Both the speech and the ad lit a fire in me. It was the reason I fell in love with the idea of storytelling and creative work. It’s what pushed me to join the ad agency and marketing world. I was chasing that same magic of crafting campaigns that stood for something bigger than the product itself.

But this worldview has already been shifting for years. These days, I find myself asking a question I never thought I’d entertain back when I was deep in the agency world: what if it’s not content that’s king, but product?

It’s driven partly by the way our media consumption has evolved: attention is now divided across scattered platforms, and creatives are often forced to cram an entire narrative into 6-seconders, praying people won’t click “skip” or scroll away. We are now in a world where “effective” is preferred over “creative”.

In this new reality, the most resilient products aren’t the ones with the most beautiful campaigns. Slack, Notion, Figma, etc.—these didn’t grow because of emotional TV spots or glossy campaigns. They grew because the product experience itself became the marketing.

Two books have challenged and reshaped my thinking:

Ryan Holiday’s Growth Hacker Marketing was the first wake-up call. It made me realize that the old playbook of massive PR launches and cinematic storytelling, the very stuff that inspired me to become a marketer, just doesn’t work anymore. I learned this the hard way.

Wes Bush’s Product-Led Growth takes this shift even further. In the PLG model, the product isn’t just what you sell — it’s your most powerful acquisition, activation, and retention channel. You design experiences so good they trigger word-of-mouth, build virality loops into the product itself, and deliver undeniable value even before considering asking for a fee.

The way we build, market, and grow products has changed forever.

And maybe that’s the hardest part to admit — that Think Different was a product of its time. A time when a single, beautifully crafted campaign could ripple through culture, when ads could live in our heads for years, and when attention wasn’t yet shattered into a thousand tiny screens.

And so here I am, the same person who once got into this business because of a 60-second brand film that never showed a product, learning to live in a world where the product is the ad.

Maybe that’s where the magic is now.

You prove you know something,
Without revealing that something.

It’s mind-bending because it works against instinct. How can you confirm someone’s identity without storing their private data? How can you verify a transaction without showing the details? It feels impossible — which is exactly why it’s both revolutionary and controversial. Even some of the smartest people I know are stuck in cognitive dissonance over it, torn between excitement and distrust.

In a way, it’s like finally solving the mystery of Schrödinger’s Cat — being able to prove whether the cat is dead or alive without ever opening the box. The truth is verified, yet the secret remains intact.

(all views and opinions are my own)

Or maybe think of a magic trick where the magician claims there’s a rabbit in the hat. Normally, he’d pull it out to prove it.

In ZK, the rabbit stays in the hat.

The magician instead shows you a series of airtight steps and verifications that convince you beyond doubt the rabbit is there without ever revealing the rabbit. You leave satisfied, the rabbit enjoys its privacy, and the magician keeps the secret safe.

This is also why ZK tech feels so alien — it allows you to know without seeing, to verify without revealing. It turns our understanding of proof and trust upside down.

Real-World Use Cases

This “trust without exposure” property has powerful real-world applications:

• Privacy coins can confirm transactions without revealing the sender, receiver, or amount.
• Identity systems can verify you meet certain criteria (age, citizenship, membership) without storing or sharing your personal data.
• Voting platforms can prove your ballot was counted without revealing your vote.

The controversy comes from trust or rather, who we trust to implement ZK proof correctly. In practice, ZK proofs are only as trustworthy as the system around them. If the magic trick is flawless but the magician is working for the wrong circus, the audience could still lose.

So while the math is bulletproof, the politics, incentives, and governance around these systems are not. This is where people’s excitement meets their unease. It creates a tension between wanting privacy and fearing how that privacy might be handled.

As for me, I’m just happy that, after decades of debate, we finally have a way to determine whether Schrödinger’s cat is alive or dead without ever risking harm to it. No unnecessary box-opening and no chance of accidentally killing a perfectly cute cat in the name of science. With Zero-Knowledge Proofs, the mystery is solved, the truth is known, and the cat gets to live (or not?) entirely on its own terms.

A few weeks ago, I had no idea what the hell a GitHub or a Java Script is for. Today, I’ve got two app prototypes out despite not knowing what the hell I’m doing. They’re live. People are actually using them.

Ideas no longer have to collect cobwebs in your notes app. It’s time to build them and here’s my guide on how to do it.

1. First, shut the hell up.

Di ako marunong mag code e.
I need to find the right co-founder.
Baka pag di na ako busy.
Wala pa akong pera eh.

Seriously. Close your mouth because these excuses are now obsolete. Every single word that comes out of your mouth is just another second spent not building. Open ChatGPT and get started. Shut up and build.

2. You’re in your Facemash era — own it.

You remember Facemash, the mean app that Mark Zuckerberg built in The Social Network? In a recent Acquired podcast episode I listened to, they said that wasn’t the only thing he built. He built dozens of other random, chaotic, sometimes pointless apps. Because he had an itch.

Same with me.

I’ve always had that itch. The only difference is I can now scratch that itch violently because of AI.

A decentralized paluwagan?
An AI cancer companion?
A Tinder for restaurants?
How about a Tinder for my cat?!

Whatever. I declare this as my Facemash era. Make it yours too.

3. Scope like you’re managing developers

Back when I ran a tech startup, I learned one hard truth: developers can’t read your mind. You have to tell them what to build, feature by feature, flow by flow.

Same with AI.

You can’t just prompt “Build me the Uber for Dogs” and expect a fully functioning platform with login, dashboards, push notifications, and everyone’s beloved dark mode.

You have to scope.

List features. Prioritize. Decide what’s essential, what can wait.

With my Cancer companion app Caya, for example, ChatGPT told me that features like OCR (allowing cameras to read words in documents) and integration of GPT-4 would burn through my cash like a bonfire — so I deferred some features, and listed what I can settle for in an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

This is called a roadmap. And ChatGPT will have no choice but to help you with this if you ask it.

4. Design it like a coloring book

This one’s a fun part for me and something I also have little to no skill at. Design.

You can now literally draw how you want your app to look like on a tissue paper and ask ChatGPT to turn it into actual app wireframes.

Don’t know how to design like me? Doesn’t matter. Ask ChatGPT:

“Give me sample UX flows for a journaling app.”
“What screens should a decentralized paluwagan have?”
“What UI components would you expect in an app like this?”

Look for pegs and inspirations. Screenshot other apps and websites. Feed it into ChatGPT and ask what you need to do to make it happen.

After you get ChatGPT’s recommendations, you can now intervene with your intentions and goals. Color them in.

Pick fonts, shapes, colors. Draw a maze of how you want users to go through your app. It’s all a lot like a coloring book, really.

5. Code like you’re possessed by someone who knows how

I used this app called Replit. It’s an AI agent that will code for you. And I asked it to build for me. Button by button. Line by line. Flow by flow.

First, a login page. Then an onboarding flow. Then a dashboard. I’d say:

I want users to sign up with their Google Account
I want this button to be round and pink, put it on a bar at the bottom part
I want users to have a dashboard with X, Y, Z.

Just think of it as if you’re leading a team of manic, infinitely knowledgeable, hallucinating interns. You just need to be precise with what you want.

6. Ship it like it’s hot

Once the basics were working, I asked for a step by step guide on how to go live. Step by step, from domain purchase to hosting to a bunch of other tools I’ve never heard of like Vercel or Sendgrid.

Why isn’t the button working?
Why didn’t this page load?
Why is the whole site on fire?

Don’t panic. Ask AI. Fix. Repeat. Debug like you’ve never done before (cos literally, this will be your first time!).

7. Flex it. You earned it.

Post it and let people break it. Get feedback.

Watch the magic that happens when you go from “I have an idea” to “here’s the damn link!”

There’s a spiritual difference between thinking and shipping. One stays in your head. The other lives in the world. And it’s such a profound experience to witness your product out in the wild.

So I leave with my final words of wisdom and motivation, given that I feel so entitled and deserving to give advice after shipping two useless products no one cares about.

Shut up and build. Build something half-broken yet wholly alive. Build with whatever tools you’ve got. Build no matter how absurd or ugly the output seems at first. Build until you bleed and burn.

So take that draft of a business plan you haven’t touched in a long while. It’s finally time to set it on fire.

It was a humble little experiment born out of curiosity and a desire to outsmart the algorithms. I learned how to rank, how to game the system to drive traffic, and how to monetize that traffic through Google AdSense. That blog — and the SEO strategies I applied to a couple of other blogs — paid for more than a few bills.

But something started to change. Slowly at first. Then all at once.

I still remember when the first cracks appeared. It was around the time of the infamous Google Panda update. That was the first real wake-up call.

Overnight, pages that used to dominate the SERPs vanished. SEO forums turned into digital support groups. Panda didn’t just penalize bad content — it shifted the goalposts for everyone. It became less about “beating the algorithm” and more about playing nice with it.

Since then, I’ve watched the slow but inevitable decline of the SEO manager — a role once vital to every digital team.

Just glorified content writers who know a bit of code?

Look, devs don’t want to write marketing copy, and marketers don’t want to touch code — so the SEO manager fills that awkward middle space.

So basically, in many agencies today, SEO managers have been reduced to glorified content writers who aren’t afraid of a bit of code. They churn out keyword-stuffed blog posts and bloated pillar pages in the hopes of hitting Google’s ever-shifting targets. Metadata here, schema markup there, some internal linking for good measure. It’s still a job. For now.

But let’s be honest. That in-between role? It’s dying.

AI Search Is Eating Traditional SEO

Enter the age of AI-powered search. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s own Gemini aren’t just changing how people find information — they’re replacing the need for traditional search behavior entirely. Why dig through ten blue links when you can ask AI for a direct answer, complete with citations, summaries, and follow-ups?

Even Google knows this. That’s why it’s experimenting with AI Overviews and AI-generated snippets. In doing so, it’s skipping your beautifully optimized blog post and giving users the answer without ever clicking your link.

And if the clicks go away, what’s left to optimize?

AI doesn’t care about your H1 tag hierarchy. It doesn’t need your canonical URL to make sense of your page. It doesn’t crawl like before — it consumes content like a machine and regurgitates it through predictive models. The game has changed. The algorithm isn’t something you beat anymore. It’s like how even the best chess grand masters can’t ever beat Stockfish.

So yes, the SEO manager is dead. Or at least, on life support.

And as someone whose life trajectory was changed by trying to beat the search engine… I’m oddly at peace with it.

Because the truth is, the internet is moving on. The next wave of search isn’t about rankings or backlinks or even content strategy. It’s about relevance and understanding users’ problems and solving them.

There was a time when success meant being one of the top blue links on the page but the future? The future doesn’t have blue links.

And no matter how well you optimize your title tag, you can’t outrank the machine.

All because nowadays, you can turn your drawings and scribbles on a tissue paper into mockups of UI/UX. With a bit of curiosity and a few well-placed prompts, you can deploy an actual website or app — with zero coding knowledge. It’s crazy.

And I’m not saying this in theory. I’ve been building three different products. Just me, my ideas, and ChatGPT.

Let me show you what my “weekend builds” look like so far:

1. Loogs.ph

A decentralized paluwagan built on the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

In the Philippines, paluwagan is a time-honored tradition — friends and family pooling money together in cycles, like a community savings plan. But what if we could modernize it, make it borderless, faster, not prone to inflation, and more secure?

Enter Loogs.ph.

This isn’t just digitizing a paluwagan — it’s decentralizing it. We’re using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to eliminate trust issues, delays, and geographical limitations. People can join and contribute from anywhere in the world, and because it’s Lightning-based, transactions are fast and cheap. And yes, all the branding, UI/UX, and even the marketing key visual with OFWs promoting the app that you see below were all generated by ChatGPT

With zero coding knowledge, I was able to ship a waitlist landing page all on my own (see https://loogs.ph/) — what a time to be alive!

2. Kahit Saan AI

The Tinder for restaurants.

We’ve all been there:
“Kahit saan.”
“Ikaw bahala.”
“Kahit ano, okay lang.”
“…”

Kahit Saan AI is my love letter to every couple or barkada who’s had this frustrating loop. Think Tinder, but for restaurants. You swipe through restaurant options until you match — decision made, argument avoided. We’ll use AI to pull up nearby restos based on preferences, budget, and cuisine, and create a user experience so Gen Z it hurts. Yup, it’s giving.

3. Caya

An AI-powered health companion for cancer warriors and their loved ones.

This one is personal. I’ve seen firsthand how chaotic the cancer journey can be — for patients, caregivers, and families. So I asked: what if we could build a simple AI-powered assistant to help organize, explain, and support?

Caya was born out of that need. Para Kaya ang Big C.

It’s a health companion that uses OCR to scan and store medical records, summarizes them in plain English, and will eventually become a collaborative support tool for patients and caregivers alike.

None of this progress would’ve been possible even a year ago — not without a full team, a ton of money, or months of R&D. But today? I can sketch something on paper, ask ChatGPT to turn it into UI, get backend logic explained, and even get marketing copy in the same thread. It’s like I have an infinite intern who never sleeps and knows almost everything.

So yeah — No-code? Low-code? AI-code? Doesn’t matter. If you’ve got the vision, you can ship. You don’t need to be a coder. You just need to be curious.

Like me, I’m not a developer. I’m just a random guy with a keyboard and a bunch of silly ideas.

What’s your excuse?

The message is clear: central bankers are only human and they can make costly mistakes.

(all views and opinions are mine and mine alone)

The Unelected Bureaucrats

Despite their impressive titles and credentials, central bankers are unelected bureaucrats. They operate behind closed doors, insulated from democratic accountability, yet hold immense power over our money, savings, and future. The BSP’s decision to sell our gold is a stark reminder that no one is immune to error, even those entrusted with managing a nation’s wealth.

The Austrian School of Economics

For decades, the Austrian School of Economics, thinkers like Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek have warned us against this very model: a centralized authority controlling money. According to Austrian theory, central planning inevitably fails because it lacks the information that only the market can provide. No single committee, no matter how educated, can predict and control the complex dynamics of value, supply, demand, and human action.

And again, I reiterate, that this was never and is still not taught in schools. Not to the appointed bureaucrats, not to the so-called intellectual class, and not even in any economics class. Although somehow gaining traction already, it’s just not mainstream yet, especially in the academe.

The Endless Printing

But the gold sale isn’t the only concern. It’s part of a broader pattern. Central banks, not just in the Philippines but worldwide, are actively devaluing our purchasing power. Through inflationary policies, they increase the money supply, eroding the value of our pesos, dollars, and euros.

They call it “stimulus” or “quantitative easing.” We call it what it really is: legalized theft of savings.

Gold, in contrast, cannot be printed. It cannot be inflated into oblivion. It is mined, stored, and preserved. And it has held its purchasing power across empires, wars, and fiat failures for thousands of years.

Many mainstream analysts tie gold’s rise to tensions in the Middle East, but that’s only part of the story. Geopolitical uncertainty is surely a catalyst but it’s not the cause. The deeper reason gold continues to surge is because people are losing faith in fiat currencies.

From the peso to the dollar, all are subject to manipulation, debasement, and poor policy decisions. Gold doesn’t need a war to go up, it just needs more central banking.

The Power to Opt Out Of This System

The good news? We’re not powerless. In an age where central banks devalue currency and sell off real assets like gold, technology has given us tools to opt out of this broken system.

Bitcoin offers a decentralized alternative to fiat money. It has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, immune to political manipulation and bureaucratic error. Unlike the peso or dollar, it cannot be inflated away, and no central banker can decide to print more of it on a whim. It represents the digital embodiment of the Austrian School’s ideals: sound money, rooted in rules, not rulers.

Meanwhile, for those who still value the timeless security of gold, there are now gold-backed cryptocurrencies like $PAXG (Pax Gold) or $XAUT (Tether Gold). Each token is backed by one ounce of real, physical gold held in custody. This allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to own and transfer gold instantly and securely, without the need to buy jewelry or store bars in a vault. Tokenization also allows it to be fractionalized, meaning you can buy a mere 100 pesos worth of gold if you wanted.

Together, Bitcoin and assets like $PAXG or $XAUT allow individuals to take back control and to store their value in assets that resist inflation, government overreach, and central bank blunders.

Sound money isn’t just a theory anymore. It’s a choice.