It’s a warm afternoon here in Sardinia.
From the terrace of our bedroom overlooking a turquoise blue bay, I can see olive groves that have stood for centuries and the stone walls of a farmhouse that was here long before the Italian Lira, let alone the Euro. There’s a sense of permanence here, a weight of history that puts the frantic noise of modern markets into perspective.
It reminds me that empires, and their currencies, are not eternal.
As most of you know, I didn't start my career as a Bitcoin believer. Far from it. My journey began on the trading floors of Wall Street, in the heart of the traditional financial system. I was an investment banker, fluent in the language of leverage, debt covenants, and EBITDA. We built complex models that projected futures based on the assumption that the system itself was sound. We were priests of a faith I now recognize as a cult: the cult of the ever-expanding debt supercycle.
My path took a turn.
I grew tired of shuffling paper and engineering financial outcomes that felt increasingly detached from reality.
I wanted to build, to understand the fundamental architecture of the new world being forged by technology.
I taught myself to code, dove headfirst into data engineering, and eventually found my calling in machine learning and venture capital, funding the protocols and platforms that will define the next century.
This dual-lensed experience, seeing the world through the eyes of both a Wall Street banker and a Silicon Valley technologist, has led me to one unshakable conclusion.
We are at the end of a monetary era.
The global fiat system, underpinned by the U.S. dollar, is not just flawed… it is INTENTIONALLY destined to fail.
And its replacement, the only logical and technologically sound alternative, is Bitcoin. This isn't a speculative gamble. It is the most calculated, asymmetric bet of my lifetime, a thesis I am staking my family’s generational wealth on.
Here is the data.
What I Learned from the Debt Supercycle
On Wall Street, debt is everything. It's the grease that turns the gears of capitalism. We used it to fund mergers, finance buyouts, and allow companies to expand faster than their cash flow would permit. We called it 'financial engineering,' and we believed we were masters of the universe, allocating capital with precision. In hindsight, we were just accelerating a process that had been running for decades: pulling future growth into the present, leaving an ever-larger bill for tomorrow. We were arranging deck chairs on a mathematically sinking ship.
The scale of this bill is now so colossal that it defies rational comprehension. Across the global financial system, there exists over 100 trillion in U.S. dollar-denominated debt. Think about that number. It’s the sum of countless promises made by governments, corporations, and individuals. Sure, a lot of them are promises we made to ourselves… but the money is due. And it doesn’t exist.
Now, here’s the ghost in the machine: the actual amount of U.S. dollars in existence (the M2 money supply) to service that debt is only around $6 to 7 trillion.
This is the most terrifying asymmetry in modern finance, and no one talks about it.
It's a global game of musical chairs where, for every seven chairs, a hundred players are circling. When the music stops, the overwhelming majority will be left with nothing. For years, the music has been kept playing by the constant issuance of new debt to pay off the old. But the system is now groaning under its own weight. The U.S. Treasury itself is scheduled to issue another $1.6 trillion in new debt in the coming months, not for new investments or bold projects, but simply to roll over maturing bonds and fund a spiraling deficit.
Debt to pay debt. Backed by debt. In other words: a ponzi scheme.
This creates a fatal dilemma for the Federal Reserve. Either they stand aside and let the market absorb this tsunami of new bonds, which would require interest rates to spike to levels that would instantly bankrupt huge swathes of the economy, or they step in and monetize it.
That’s a polite term for turning on the printing press, creating digital dollars from thin air to buy the government debt no one else can afford. We love to monetize anything that moves.
Politicians stand at podiums and proclaim we will "grow our way out of it." As someone who has built hundreds of financial models, let me be clear: that is a lie. It is a political soundbite designed to placate the masses, not a viable economic strategy. For the past thirty years, the growth of total system debt has systematically outpaced the growth of GDP. That’s 30 years of internet, office suites, algorithms and machine intelligence…. and it didn’t keep pace with the bill we owe.
The formula is simple and damning: Debt Growth > GDP Growth.
We have reached a point of leverage saturation where any attempt to slow the creation of new credit triggers a recession. The system must expand, or it dies.
This isn't a policy choice anymore. It is a trap. The system's own internal logic is forcing the hand of every central banker. They will print. They must. And in doing so, they will systematically destroy the value of their own currency.
Why Bitcoin's Volatility Is a Feature, Not a Bug
When I left banking, I was drawn to the elegant certainty of code. I immersed myself in data, systems, and algorithms. These are worlds governed by logic, not by the whims of a committee. When I first looked at Bitcoin, my old banking brain recoiled. The price chart was a mess of volatility, the signature of a speculative penny stock. It looked like pure noise.
But my data scientist brain, trained to find patterns in chaos, saw something entirely different. It saw a signal. It was the unmistakable, exponential signature of a network effect in its earliest and most explosive stage of adoption.
Traditional analysts completely misinterpret Bitcoin's volatility. They compare it to the stock of a mature company like Coca-Cola and call it unstable. This is a category error of epic proportions. Bitcoin is not a company. Bitcoin is a new monetary protocol being monetized in real-time. Its volatility is the byproduct of price discovery on a global scale, happening at a speed we've never witnessed before.
Think of the adoption of any revolutionary technology, the telephone, the internet, as an S-curve. The initial phase is slow, then comes a period of chaotic, exponential growth, and finally, it plateaus as it reaches saturation. Bitcoin is in that vertical part of the curve. With a perfectly fixed supply of 21 million coins, its price is the only variable that can absorb the tidal wave of new demand. With only 1-2% of the world's population currently onboarded, the volatility we see is the friction of the next 98% trying to find a seat in a lifeboat that is already built to its final capacity.
From a systems engineering perspective, Bitcoin is a marvel of simplicity and strength. In machine learning, we talk about the importance of 'constraints' in a model to prevent it from going haywire. Bitcoin has the most powerful and elegant constraint in financial history: absolute scarcity. When you feed an exponentially growing demand signal (global adoption) into a system with a fixed supply constraint, the price is the only possible release valve. It must move, and it will move violently upwards in logarithmic steps.
Contrast this with the fiat system.
The supply of dollars is determined by a small committee (the FOMC) meeting in a closed room, making decisions based on lagging, often manipulated data. Bitcoin’s monetary policy, on the other hand, is transparent and predictable. We know, with absolute certainty, when the next 'halving' will occur, cutting the new supply of coins in half. It is a system governed by mathematics, not politics. It’s code versus a committee.
As a technologist, I will bet on the code every single time.
The Ultimate Asymmetric Bet
In my current role as a venture capitalist and head of the McDonagh Family Office, my job is to identify and fund the foundational protocols of tomorrow. We look for technologies that have the potential to create entirely new markets, to re-architect industries from the ground up. We search for asymmetric bets: opportunities where the potential upside is 100x or 1000x, while the downside is, at most, a 1x loss.
After years of funding protocols for decentralized data, communication, and computing, I had a profound realization: Bitcoin is the protocol for the base layer of the entire financial system. It is the protocol for value itself. Comparing Bitcoin to a stock is like comparing the TCP/IP internet protocol to a single website. It’s a failure to see the bigger picture. You wouldn't have shorted TCP/IP in 1995 because GeoCities was a clunky website. You would have invested in the unstoppable growth of the network itself.
This is precisely why Bitcoin has become the cornerstone of our family office's strategy.
My primary duty is no longer chasing quarterly returns but ensuring the preservation and growth of wealth across generations. How can I possibly fulfill that duty by holding assets denominated in a currency that is programmed for self-destruction? I cannot. To do so would be a dereliction of my fiduciary responsibility.
I need an escape valve. I need a store of value that sits outside the political and monetary system. An asset whose properties are enforced by a global, decentralized network of computers, not by the promises of politicians. Bitcoin is that asset. It is a long-duration savings technology designed to absorb monetary energy and protect it from debasement over decades, even centuries. It is the ultimate tool for generational wealth preservation.
The Stablecoin Trap and the Bond Market's Demise
The incumbent system is not going down without a fight. It will create antibodies, tools designed to create the illusion of innovation while reinforcing centralized control. The two most prominent examples today are stablecoins and the flailing attempts by central banks to control the bond market.
From my investor perspective, I've seen countless pitches for new "payment rails." Stablecoins like USDC are exactly that: a FinTech user interface built on top of a crumbling operating system. They are being marketed, through legislation like the GENIUS Act, as a way to project U.S. dollar strength. This is a sophisticated misdirection.
When someone in a developing nation buys $100 of USDC, a complex chain of events occurs, but the net effect on U.S. debt is zero. Their local bank might sell a U.S. Treasury bond to get the dollars, and then the stablecoin issuer, Circle, takes those dollars and buys a U.S. Treasury bond to back the USDC. The owner of the debt simply changes from a foreign institution to a U.S. corporation. It's a shuffle, not new demand. What it does accomplish is herding users onto a centralized, fully surveilled, and controllable payment system. You are swapping the risk of a central bank debasing your money for the risk of a corporation or regulator freezing your assets with a keystroke.
It's a trap.
Even more damning is the ongoing mutiny in the bond market. For my entire career on Wall Street, government bonds were the bedrock. The "risk-free rate" on U.S. Treasuries was the gravitational center of the financial universe; it was the starting point for valuing every other asset on Earth.
That foundation cracked in 2022. The Federal Reserve, in its panic to fight the inflation it had created, aggressively hiked rates, inflicting the worst losses on bondholders in history. They sent a clear and terrifying message to the world: in a crisis, we will sacrifice the holders of our "risk-free" debt to save the currency.
The trust that held the system together for fifty years is gone. The bond vigilantes are back. Now, when the Treasury tries to issue new debt, the market demands a higher yield to compensate for this newly understood risk. But the government cannot afford higher rates; it would bankrupt them. This creates the final checkmate, the doom loop. When the free market refuses to fund the government at affordable rates, the central bank has no choice but to step in and print the difference.
The bond market is no longer a source of funding… it is the justification for monetization.
The Choice Is Clear
From my vantage point here in Italy, I am surrounded by the echoes of empires.
The Romans built roads and aqueducts that have endured for two millennia. They also built an empire on a silver coin, the Denarius, which they believed was eternal. They maintained that belief right up until they had debased it with so much copper that it became worthless, and their empire crumbled with it.
My journey has taken me from the heart of the old financial empire on Wall Street to the frontiers of the new digital one in Silicon Valley. Wall Street taught me how the current system is designed. Data science taught me how to see through its noise and identify the clear signal of its replacement. Venture capital taught me to recognize the profound, world-changing scale of this new protocol.
We are no longer talking about a niche internet curiosity or a speculative asset for a portfolio's fringe. We are witnessing a peaceful, technology-driven revolution. It is a choice between two fundamentally different systems. One is based on authority, debt, and inevitable debasement by decree. The other is based on mathematics, energy, and verifiable, absolute scarcity.
My decision is final.
My firm’s capital and my family's future are being allocated accordingly.
The fiat endgame is no longer a theory, it’s playing out in the bond markets and inflation figures every single day.
The only question left is whether you see it, too.
Friends: in addition to the 17% discount for becoming annual paid members, we are excited to announce an additional 10% discount when paying with Bitcoin. Reach out to me, these discounts stack on top of each other!
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I started Wealth Systems in 2023 to share the systems, technology, and mindsets that I encountered on Wall Street. I am a Wall St banker became ₿itcoin nerd, ML engineer & family office investor.
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