If Bitcoin Won: A Thought Experiment About Money, Collapse, and Human Flourishing

“We are still early” is more than a meme; given today’s numbers, it is mathematically true and morally weighty. As fewer than 2% of humans are estimated to own any Bitcoin, the thought experiment of Bitcoin as a future global money helps expose how fragile today’s monetary order already is. Here are some numbers to put this into perspective:

• As of 2025, the world’s population is about 8.2 billion people.

• Recent estimates suggest roughly 1.3% of the world’s population, around 106 million people, own Bitcoin in any amount.

• Hundreds of millions more have heard of Bitcoin, but polls and media coverage still show large groups dismissing it as a scam or purely speculative, even as regulatory agencies warn about crypto scams and fraud.

So when someone says “we are still early,” they are pointing to a world where a tiny minority actively hold Bitcoin, a much larger group vaguely understands it, and a sizable fraction associates it primarily with bubbles, fraud, or criminal activity.

Imagine that, over time, Bitcoin moves from being one asset among many to becoming:

• A store of value: the thing people save in order to preserve purchasing power

• A medium of exchange: the common rail for payments, especially across borders

• A unit of account: the yardstick in which prices, wages, and contracts are denominated

For that to happen peacefully, several conditions would likely need to develop first: robust, user-friendly infrastructure for saving and transacting; widespread education about key management and monetary history; and legal frameworks that recognize Bitcoin-based contracts and settlements. In this gradual scenario, people would not wake up one morning to find everything repriced in satoshis; instead, parallel pricing in local currency and Bitcoin would coexist for years, with the balance slowly shifting as trust in legacy currencies erodes.

Even so, there may be a more turbulent path that starts at the edges of the global system. Historically, when weak currencies suffer high inflation or capital controls, people flee into stronger foreign currencies such as the U.S. dollar or the euro. In recent years, multiple emerging-market currencies have experienced rapid devaluations or a loss of public trust, pushing citizens toward hard assets, foreign cash, or digital alternatives.

In a speculative future crisis, several things might happen:

• Weaker currencies (with chronic deficits, political instability, or heavy money-printing) would be hit first by inflation and capital flight.

• People in those countries would increasingly adopt a “dollarized” pattern, using the dollar or another strong currency for savings and larger transactions while still receiving income in the local unit.

• As debt levels climb and confidence in even strong fiat currencies erodes, some portion of global savers might start treating Bitcoin as a hedge against both local and reserve-currency failure, much as gold once did.

If this process continued, it is possible to imagine a world in which local currencies fail, the dollar system strains under the weight of global demand and debt, and Bitcoin gradually steps in as a neutral, non-state monetary base.

Alternatively, in a world where Bitcoin anchors the monetary system, work and jobs would still exist, but some of their incentives would change. Instead of wages constantly chasing rising prices under inflationary currencies, real wages would tend to be shaped more by productivity than by monetary expansion. Long-term planning could become more credible: saving for education, retirement, or multi-decade projects would hinge less on predicting central bank policy or asset bubbles.

On the other hand, the transition itself could be disruptive:

• Industries built on currency arbitrage, excessive leverage, or opaque financial engineering might shrink dramatically.

• Governments and institutions that relied on steady inflation to ease their debt burdens would be forced to confront fiscal imbalances more directly, likely leading to spending cuts, tax reforms, or political upheaval.

• People whose livelihoods depend on proximity to the current financial center, like those in certain banking and speculative trading roles, face painful adjustment, even as new roles in security, infrastructure, education, and real-economy production grow.

Jobs would not disappear, but what counts as “valuable work” would tilt more toward producing real goods and useful services than toward navigating ever-more-complex monetary distortions.

Yet, money is not only a tool of trade but also a tool of power. Today, reserve currencies and international banking networks allow certain states to wield sanctions, subsidize deficits, and project influence without direct military confrontation. A Bitcoin-based system would weaken this lever, because no state could unilaterally print or block the base money, and final settlement would not depend on a central intermediary.

This shift could cut both ways:

• Reduced ability to weaponize currencies might lower the effectiveness of some forms of economic warfare, making overt sanctions harder to enforce.

• However, states losing monetary privilege might react defensively, using trade barriers, surveillance, or even force to slow capital flight or retain control over tax bases.

• Resource-rich regions could find it easier to sell directly in global, neutral currencies, changing who benefits from oil, minerals, and other critical commodities and perhaps intensifying local or regional struggles over those assets.

Over the long run, if states learn to fund themselves more transparently, through consent-based taxation rather than hidden inflation, trust between citizens and governments could improve in some places, even as others face deep institutional crises.

Even so, there remains a fear that a wave of currency collapses would throw the world back into a kind of dark age: cities hollowed out, grids failing, people scattering to rural areas to grow their own food and revert to barter. Episodes of severe monetary breakdown in history have indeed produced periods of barter and subsistence living, especially where institutions were weak and alternative coordination tools were absent. In a modern setting, if financial rails failed suddenly and people lacked both savings and skills, some regions could see real hardship of this kind.

Yet Bitcoin’s design pushes in a different direction: it is digital, global, and permissionless, built precisely to coordinate across distance without a central authority. If adoption grows before a full-blown crisis, giving people time to learn, build tools, and accumulate some savings, Bitcoin could help:

• Preserve capital during currency failures, reducing the need to physically flee with gold or cash.

• Enable cross-border mutual aid and remittances directly between families and communities, even when local banks fail.

• Support specialized, high-skill work coordinated over the internet, so that not everyone has to retreat into subsistence farming to survive.

In that scenario, some people might choose rural, lower-time-preference lives because they can, not because they must, and they could still trade seamlessly with cities using the same global money. Far from enforcing a universal return to barter, a widely understood and fairly distributed Bitcoin standard could allow human flourishing to continue, and even deepen, as value storage and exchange become more honest, transparent, and resistant to manipulation.

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About the Author

Deanna Heikkinen is an author, historian, and educator with over 15 years of experience in teaching. Holding a Doctorate in Education and Master’s degrees in both History and Anthropology, she brings deep academic insight and a love of storytelling to her exploration of world history, Western civilization, and the evolution of money. She co-authored, with her husband Joel, the 2004 book Shells to Satoshi: The Story of Money & The Rise of Bitcoin, which follows the development of money from ancient exchange systems to digital currency. Her 2025 book Ownschooling: Bitcoin, Sovereignty, and Educationencourages families to reimagine education, sovereignty, and financial literacy in an increasingly decentralized world. She is also developing a multi-level children’s book series that introduces the story of money, from cowrie shells to Bitcoin, to young readers.

As the founder of The Money Wisdom Project, a new nonprofit educational initiative, Deanna seeks to educate children and communities about the history of money and Bitcoin. The organization is working to create comprehensive curriculum packets on the history of money and Bitcoin to distribute free of charge to teachers, schools, communities, and Bitcoin circular economies. The project’s mission is to deepen financial and historical literacy while donating books on the history of money and Bitcoin to schools and public libraries worldwide, empowering learners of all ages to connect the lessons of history to today’s monetary systems.