The Canadian dream in my opinion is to have the opportunities to work hard and be rewarded by being able to afford a life, better than those of your predecessors. For myself, my parents immigrated to Canada to flee war. I've been lucky in my lifetime to not have experienced war within our borders, so there's that. However, I'm afraid to see Canada no longer be the best place for those fleeing and seeking a better life. Especially, when those within our borders are struggling for their basic needs.

Everybody has problems and I'm not here to lecture anyone on what problems are more devastating than others. What I do care about, is seeing my friends and neighbours in Canada having a life they can afford, so they can raise the children they want, have the job they desire and create value for the country that keeps them and their neighbours safe. So, it severely disappoints me every time I hear that someone is looking to permanently rescind their residency in Canada. It's happening more often than we'd like and to the most valuable people with high economic potential.

Lucy Hargreaves

@lucyhargreaves4

the people leaving Canada are young and educated

in 2021, the majority were 20-44 years old, and ~70% were university educated

curious what the latest StatsCan figures show for 2024/25

87

3:29 PM • Jun 29, 2026

I'm glad to see that parts of the government recognize this and there are ways to fix our declining standard of living in Canada, but we need to treat it like the emergency that it is. We should be united and it should be non-partisan to want a better living than our predecessors, but there are still Canadians that need to understand the importance of how systems operate, before passing judgement without the data and subject matter experts weighing in on the discussion. It's important sometimes to set aside our beliefs, values while critically analyzing data to ensure we do not fall into the trap of letting virtues cloud our ability to make good decisions. The best example of this is how we've severely complicated our Express Entry immigration pathways to benefit short-term political gains, rather than selecting high economic potential migrants.

It's very important to remember to set aside our biases and note that good intentions, do not always lead to good outcomes.

Steven J. Paolasini

@StevePaolasini

Any serious reform needs to answer three questions clearly:

- Who are we trying to attract?
- Why are they valuable to Canada?
- How do we measure that consistently?

Read the full piece:

macdonaldlaurier.ca/how-canadas-sk…

Would appreciate thoughts from others in the space!

macdonaldlaurier.ca

How Canada’s skilled immigration system went off the rails – and how to fix it: Nino Melikidze and...

Canada needs a system that clearly answers three basic questions: who are we trying to attract, why are they valuable to Canada, and how do we measure that consistently?

16

9:28 PM • Jun 24, 2026

Happy Canada Day. I still think Canada can win. I love this country and I want to see it work for Canadians, but we have to clearly admit that there are structural failures that require some serious reform. The first step to fixing it, is recognizing it. This post pretty much summarizes it well:

James E. Thorne

@DrJStrategy

Canada: Crying Over Spilt Milk in a Self‑Inflicted Stagnation

Canada’s elite have spent a quarter‑century turning a rich, opportunity‑dense economy into a slow‑growth, over‑levered cul‑de‑sac, and they still insist nothing is structurally wrong. There is no sense crying over

BBC News (World)

@BBCWorld

Just how much trouble is Canada's economy in? bbc.in/3StE8RD

3,016

1:16 PM • Jun 30, 2026

Canada’s elite have spent a quarter‑century turning a rich, opportunity‑dense economy into a slow‑growth, over‑levered cul‑de‑sac, and they still insist nothing is structurally wrong. There is no sense crying over spilt milk about past mistakes when the architects of this stagnation are still in charge and still in denial.

Canada did not just drift into secular stagnation; it embraced a kind of virtue socialism and an industrial policy anchored on climate change targets rather than productive capacity, competitiveness, or growth. An economy built on world‑class natural resources, strategic geography, and human capital has been deliberately downgraded into a housing‑addicted, low‑productivity balance sheet recession risk, and the people who did it still show up on panels calling this “resilience.”

For years, Canada’s comparative advantages in energy, resources, and industrial capacity were something to apologize for, regulate to death, or tax into oblivion, while policy and capital chased the illusion that you could mortgage and virtue‑signal your way to prosperity. The result is a country flirting with a liquidity trap, where even lower rates may barely move a real economy suffocated by over‑priced assets, under‑built productive capital, and households too damaged to borrow again.

The real scandal is not that Canada faces secular stagnation; it is that the elite engineered it, denied it, wrapped it in climate rhetoric, and now blame external shocks while the data scream that this is a made‑in‑Canada crisis.

To be clear, Canada’s problems are not the result of President Trump!

If Canada’s elite will not finally admit that decades of attacking its own strengths, worshipping its own bubbles, and treating industrial policy as a morality play have left the country one downturn away from a full balance sheet recession, then they are not guardians of the national interest, they are custodians of decline, and at this point, there really is no sense crying over spilt milk, only over the refusal to fix the mess they made.

Privacy is a fundamental right as an ordinary citizen. The most atrocious dismissals of the need for basic fundamental privacy is along the lines of “if you don’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”

JOEY

@JoeyTweeets

Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown, defending Canada's new mass surveillance bill at committee this week:

"For those with privacy concerns, my message would be: don't commit a crime."

That's Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act. Royal Assent expected before summer.

What it actually does

53

10:51 AM • May 27, 2026

There are many analogies that put this line of thinking into question. For example, why have curtains in your home if you’re not committing any crimes? It’s because you don’t want strangers like the government peering into your life at home. The “nothing to hide” argument confuses privacy with secrecy. Privacy isn’t about hiding wrongdoing—it’s about basic human dignity and vulnerability in private moments. This is why we don’t have cameras in public bathroom stalls even though you should only be urinating or defecating in them. So why should this be any different with a public platform like the Internet?

Encryption keeps us safe, as long as nobody can decrypt it.

This is why we have basic electronic tooling such as end-to-end encryption and why everything is now HTTPS by default. Governments like the one in Canada trying to demand “lawful access” by retaining metadata and backdoor channels are nothing more than creating an infrastructure to go on phishing expeditions for whoever they deem as potential criminals, whilst having the ability to to surveil any lawful citizen who hasn’t been suspected of committing any crimes at all. The mere idea of having metadata retention creates vulnerabilities that go beyond any lawful access. Having that infrastructure available means it’s accessible to not just the “good guys” but also the bad ones who don't care about lawful access. Have we not learned anything from the Clipper chip fiasco or the Snowden disclosures which has basically led to the current state of end-to-end encryption today? There is no such thing as a “safe backdoor” for only law enforcement and if you are forced to keep data, it becomes a honeypot of information for exploitation. It’s a basic concept that has somehow not reached the brains of lawmakers in Canada.

Protecting yourself from your own government

Regardless of the C-22 outcome, there is always a way to fight back against government overreach and their ignorance of technology. The poorly designed laws just makes it more difficult for the average person who may not be technologically sophisticated to protect themselves. For example, due to Bill C-18 (Online News Act), Canadians are no longer allowed to post direct links to news on platforms such as Instagram.

It is as simple as posting a short link URL to bypass the stupidity of the restriction due to the bill. Likewise, if a poorly designed and restrictive law infringes our basic right to privacy, there are ways to protect yourself by end-to-end encrypting and encrypting at rest before it even reaches external servers.

Encrypt your emails end-to-end and at rest

The easiest way to do this for email is using a service like ProtonMail which by default encrypts your email with PGP cryptography without any added complexity.

Disclaimer: I did not receive anything of monetary value to advertise ProtonMail on their behalf. I am an avid user of ProtonMail and highly recommend it based on my own research and usage. The link above is a referral link that provides credits to me for your referral if you decide to sign up.

If you know how to use an email service like Gmail, ProtonMail will take care of the technical aspects for you. If hackers or law enforcement doesn’t have your private key to decrypt your email, there’s nothing for them to read. They won’t even be able to coerce ProtonMail because there’s nothing they can technically do to decrypt your email. It is safest when the recipient and sender both use ProtonMail, but if you were to receive email from a non-ProtonMail user, their server will encrypt the message with your public key (your unique cryptographic identifier which only you can decrypt with your private key) and discard the unencrypted email afterwards. ProtonMail also will not be able to comply with C-22 as a Swiss company and it would be illegal for them to comply without Swiss authority.

For the more technical: use an encrypted email forwarder like easyDNS

If you manage your own custom domain/email address, you can also encrypt your email forwarding path so every piece of mail you receive is forwarded as encrypted with your public GPG keys. This is not an end-to-end solution, but will encrypt every piece of mail coming into your address so it remains encrypted for you. If C-22 does pass as-is, you could have an independent encryptor not located in Canada do this for you (likely for a fee via micropayments) instead of using a Canadian DNS.

You can't legislate, what you can't control

It's another bypass around poor legislation in an inherently global network where Canada can't enforce how the world operates, but rather, their ignorance would just cost Canada as a country through losing valuable tech businesses paying taxes in Canada. Likewise, with the Online News Act example, there will always be a way to circumvent intrusive government overreach and for Canadians to continue using internet services like ProtonMail and easyDNS. The only losers here are the Canadian government, the Canadian taxpayer, economy and the typical non-tech savvy computer user in Canada.

Instant messaging end-to-end encryption

For instant messaging applications, there’s a reason why Signal stands out from many other instant chat applications. Even {insert any 3 letter U.S. law enforcement agency) has not been able to breach the end-to-end encryption or able to access messages remotely. The only way to potentially expose content is through the physical possession of the device and using device forensic tools like Cellebrite. Do keep in mind that both the sender and the recipient have access to decrypt the messages so all hackers would need is possession of either of the end devices.

Although in 2026, there was a case where the FBI was able to obtain messages through Apple's iOS operating system on the device because Apple's push notification system would store message metadata (sound familiar? C-22?) to display to the user on push notifications (this has now been fixed by Apple, but if you're paranoid, Signal itself has a setting where you can disable previews of messages until you unlock your phone and open your Signal app). Even though your application security is robust, there are other system artifacts that could pose potential risks and shows how vulnerable a device can be once it's been physically possessed.

Don't let Canada make the mistake of killing our technology companies in the name of "lawful access"

After reading this, you might think I'm anti-law enforcement or trying to protect criminals and their digital devices. That would be far from the truth and as a former member of the Canadian military, I know how frustrating it can be to not have all the tools you need to do your job. Fundamentally, as described above, there is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is a fundamental right and not to be construed as an intent to commit a crime. Go after the criminals through legal means such as obtaining warrants and not after ordinary Canadians, our technology companies and global black hat hackers who would seek to benefit from the mistakes that Canada is making with Bill C-22. Email your MP and make sure to have your voice heard on this issue.

Likewise, you've probably heard of the term "brain drain", where we lose a good proportion of Canadians with high economic potential to the United States. We have demonstrated the superior education students get in our post-secondary institutions, only to see them take their skills, companies and talent elsewhere. In fact, immigrants come to Canada to study, only to emigrate to the United States for career opportunities.

Liam Gill

@realLiamGill

Canada continues to lose its most talented people to the United States.

The Bank of Canada estimates 75% of the GDP per capita gap and 66% of the productivity gap between the two countries is attributable to emigration from Canada to the US.

We need to stop the brain drain.

10

11:09 AM • Apr 7, 2026

Even the Bank of Canada published a staff working paper in December 2024 about the problem, while reinforcing the superior quality of education received in Canada:

• It finds that the top 10% of the income distribution accounts for three-quarters of the Canada-U.S. GDP-per-adult gap and up to two-thirds of the measured labour productivity gap.

• Larger income gaps exist for high earners, business owners, and university-educated workers.

• The paper explicitly states that “selective emigration of high-ability workers—commonly referred to as brain drain—to the United States may play a significant role” in these gaps.

• Canadian-born individuals in the U.S. are more educated than native-born Americans, earn substantially more, and cluster in top income brackets.

The case for Building Canada First

Canadians love to reiterate the safety and security of its people, especially our care for the least privileged. We love to showcase our ability to care for others with empathy and perpetuate a friendly demeanour to those who are struggling, such as the unhoused and the drug addicted. These are great values we share as Canadians, but we must come to the realization that resources are finite. It is especially hard to care for others when the basic necessities at home for your own family are barely attainable. This is the origin of the case for Building Canada First. It means being able to provide abundance at home so that we may share it with others.

It breaks my heart to continue hearing from students — but especially University of Waterloo engineering students in general — continue perpetuating the motto "SF or bust" which indicates that San Francisco is the ultimate and only end-goal for success in their careers. Statistics Canada in July 2025 found these highly skilled temporary workers and labor-certified applicants remain concentrated in STEM fields (computer, mathematical, architecture, engineering) with high median wage offers (~$137,000 USD in 2024). It highlights ongoing retention challenges for skilled talent. These are the types of Canadians we must retain in Canada to benefit the Canadian economy, creating the abundance at home that we need.

Hard conversations and decisions must be made

There are many reforms that can be done to reverse this trend, but it requires the political will to do so. Canadians must understand that not all of these changes are win-win scenarios, but systemic changes short term need to be embraced to create long term prosperity in the future. "Short term pain for long term gain" is a popular phrase used in many contexts. Canada needs to secure its abundant future tomorrow by making drastic changes today. With an abundant future, everyone wins because we can grow the pie for everyone versus arguing about how to distribute a limited or shrinking pie for the most unfortunate.

The Reforms

Make building companies in Canada great again

Where have all the Canadian startups gone? - Leaders Fund

The country has been good to us providing a high quality of life and opportunities to build.

https://leaders.vc

It needs to be viable to build startups in Canada again and we should incentivize this with some ideas for reform:

• Tax reforms (not cuts) to incentivize growth behaviours:

  • Eliminate capital gains on startups. Create a more aggressive, Canadian version of the US Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) exemption to incentivize company formation in Canada.

    

    • Corporate tax reforms by rewarding reinvestment and disincentivizing extraction. Estonia's distributed profits model is an example. Companies pay zero corporate tax on earnings they reinvest in the business – in hiring, equipment, R&D, and expansion. Tax applies only when profits are distributed directly or indirectly – through dividends, share buybacks, bonuses, or any other means of economic extraction from the corporation.

• "Buy Canadian" mentality and make it tax deductible. There are many great technology companies in Canada and we should incentivize every Canadian to utilize it. It helps to find homegrown initial customers at home to get the first few million of annual recurring revenue (ARR) and can raise further capital afterwards. We can incentivize this by having tax deductions for buying Canadian.

• Canada needs a startup boom with clear objectives. Similar to China's 5 year plans, Canada needs to massively incentivize startup formation by identifying and dominating key industries with clear objectives for global market share and self-sustainability. Then, let the market decide which companies have the right to survive by ensuring competition and innovation with supportive policies.

• Engage founders and successful external policies in shaping government programs. Programs like SR&ED cost billions but often bog down startups in process. Founders should contribute to help redesign them so they actually work for entrepreneurs, alongside replicating policies which have worked in other nations such as Singapore's Startup Tax Exemptions (SUTE), Intellectual Property Development Incentive (IPDI) and Enterprise Innovation Scheme (EIS).

• Change the risk-adverse culture in Canada for competition. We should not be demonizing entrepreneurs for their success — we should be elevating them. We need to champion and encourage more companies to locate, build and stay in Canada such as Shopify, Stackadapt, Cohere and create the next wave of Silicon Valley companies in tech hubs such as the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and Montreal. Canada's 20 largest public companies on average was founded 110 years ago — companies older than many of us have been alive.
  

  

• Repeal policies that disincentivize technology companies from building and/or remaining in Canada (e.g. C-22 An Act respecting lawful access). Policies that put technologies at risk for privacy and cyberattacks does not incentivize technology companies from building and contributing to the Canadian economy.

  

  Windscribe

  @windscribecom

  We won't be far behind if C-22 passes. In its current state, VPNs would almost certainly require us to log identifying user data.
  Signal isn't headquartered in Canada so they can just shut off Canadian servers, but our HQ is. We pay an ungodly amount of taxes to this corrupt

  

  Globe Politics

  @globepolitics

  Signal warns it would pull out of Canada if made to comply with lawful access bill theglobeandmail.com/politics/artic…

  8,934

  9:54 PM • May 14, 2026

Bringing the entrepreneurial spirit to government

We need political leaders who are inspired to create the change that we need for this country to succeed. We need to seriously look at grassroots candidates with a driven attitude, take positions of high power to start being the change we want to see. We can all win if we start getting seriously involved civically rather than just shrugging, or picking up and leaving the country. It's easy to say "it's too late" for us or passively follow the status quo of 10+ year old career politicians who continue to perpetuate the norm of complacency.

It's time to secure our children's future and see some drastic change for the better.

Examples of failed prohibitions

Alcohol prohibition

As with many things in the past, including the famous prohibitions on alcohol in the 19th century by both Canada and the United States, both countries eventually repealed those policies. In Canada, partially because it was too hard to enforce with decentralized inconsistencies between provinces and loopholes such as medicinal or sacramental exemptions. Does that sound familiar?

Cannabis prohibition

For a long time, cannabis was also prohibited except for certain purposes. Its recreational usage was legalized in October of 2018. The hope was to combat the black market of recreational marijuana which existed because people wanted to use it, regardless of its legality. The whole reason why black markets exist is because it's the natural consequence of prohibiting activities where there is demand for it. It often creates a premium incentive because of the difficult legal access to it. Before cannabis legalization, it was estimated that 4.9 million Canadians aged 15 to 64 spent an estimated $5.7 billion on cannabis for medical and non-medical purposes. The government and its policies doesn't influence the market demand for a banned substance, it only limits legitimate, safe access. At the same time, it misses out on potential taxable revenues. It's a lose-lose for the government. Ask any police officer pre-2018 about doing administrative paperwork for simple possession of cannabis. It's a waste of time and resources.

Firearm prohibition

A more recent example of prohibition failures include the prohibition of "assault-style firearms" (a term which has no logical, technical definition to it — only an arbitrary cosmetic definition) in 2020, has not had the outcome of reducing crime and enhancing public safety. This is because most gun crimes are committed with illegal firearms possessed by criminals. Upwards of 88% of crime guns used in Toronto were traced from the United States, none of which Bill C-21 (handgun freeze/ban) nor the "assault-style rifles" Order In Council (OIC) gun bans would have made a difference. To further demonstrate its failure, we now have six years of real-world data to demonstrate whether or not there is any causal relationship to the policy and the outcome. In StatsCan's Firearms and Violent Crime report published in 2024, we have four years to analyze. It concludes:

• Data shows no clear causal reduction attributable to these bans.

• Firearm-related violent crime and shooting homicides continued rising after the 2020 assault-style ban (peaking in 2022) before modest declines in 2023–2024.

• The sharper drop in rifle/shotgun crimes in 2024 aligns with the ban’s focus, but handguns (unaffected until the 2022 freeze) remain the dominant weapon and followed a similar post-2022 decline. It is important to note that crime handguns are not the ones legally acquired and possessed by licensed owners.

• Official reports note the primary drivers of gun crime are illegal possession, smuggling (especially U.S. handguns), organized crime/gangs, and repeat offenders — factors not directly addressed by bans on legal civilian ownership of certain long guns.

• Border seizures and ghost-gun detections have risen, suggesting ongoing supply from illegal channels.

It should be pretty easy to understand that criminals, by definition, do not abide by the law. Therefore, a prohibition on arbitrary firearms is a poor solution looking for a problem. There are many other ways to address/reform firearms legislation than outright bans (out of scope for this article).

"Never let a good crisis go to waste."

The only individuals affected by the bans are licensed and vetted legal firearms owners. It is also important to note that tragedies (regardless of the facts) are politically used to emotionally push policies through, even without the data to statistically justify its existence. Policy dominated by emotions rather than logic (supplemented with good data) is a road that helps no one. It is entirely understandable that after a tragedy, the public pressure for immediate solutions are very high. It is very important for any government not to react in the heat of the moment with reactive policy, but rather take the time to create appropriate, critically thought out policy that addresses the root cause of the tragedies using the facts (which takes time).

The 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting by Gabriel Wortman was used as a tragedy to justify the OIC bans of an arbitrary list of firearms. All five of the firearms used were illegally possessed (three smuggled through the United States, one stolen in Canada and one stolen from a police officer) and Wortman was not licensed to possess or acquire them. Therefore, the ban instated never targeted the source (or root cause) of the problem. It was lazy policymaking which had consequences to legal firearms owners (collateral damage to a group of responsible individuals which had no bearing on the tragedy itself) and also collateral damage to creating a more lucrative black market for both legal and illegal firearms. In fact, criminals can now 3D print ghost guns which this poorly crafted policy has no effect on.

Why banning cigarettes will fail just as hard

Politicians aren't always good at thought exercises and utilizing game theory to craft better policy. Part of what makes a good policymaker is thinking how an adversary would take advantage, circumvent, manipulate and avoid policy altogether. For cigarettes, there currently is a black market and it will only become more lucrative to smuggle cigarettes if they are no longer legally accessible. Remember, banning things do not curb demand - it curbs access as a supply hurdle.

Let's game theory how a void will be fulfilled if we legally banned access to cigarettes:

• Native reservations which will not need to follow the federal regulations, will have a monopoly on selling legal cigarettes.

• It will be politically unpopular to ban cigarette possession and criminally charge smokers for having cigarettes for personal use.

• The introduction of a ban will introduce a demand shock by hoarding cigarettes while the legal supply decreases over time to nil.

• The government will lose a lot of revenue from banning legal sales of cigarettes, which funds a lot of health care resources.

• The flows of black market sales will reinforce organized crime and the underground economy.

• It becomes more lucrative to smuggle contraband into Canada. Risk and reward dynamics shift to making this a very profitable risk.

• Illicit or home grown tobacco/cigarettes which have no quality standards will become more prevalent.

Key Insights

Market size for illegal cigarettes will explode in demand. Most, if not all of the profits will end up in organized crime, where you'll have unintended consequences of additional violence and corruption. Health outcomes may worsen, undermining the entire purpose of the ban because unregulated cigarettes do not follow any standards in a black market. Depending on how the policy is crafted, some may switch to vapes/nicotine alternatives. which doesn't really address the root problem of poor health outcomes.

This is like the 1990s tax-smuggling crisis on steroids. Bans don't kill demand for addictive goods—they create profitable crime. Suppliers and consumers will coordinate efficiently around enforcement gaps. Canada’s existing networks (reserves, borders, farms) will make adaptation trivial.

Recently, it came to light that Doug Ford had regularly worked from home, while mandating public servants back to the office. It should not be partisan to feel disrespected when a superior tells you to do something they don't do themselves. It's important to understand the distinction between the position versus the person. The position of Premier of Ontario deserves respect as the elected leader of our province. However, the person in that position must earn the respect bestowed upon that position by its citizenry. This isn't the case in politics very often and citizens should demand better from their political leaders. After all, these are the individuals and institutions we've delegated in society to be entrusted with our policy formation, our public tax dollars and enforcement of these policies.

The military is a great experience for people to learn how to be a good leader and also how to distinguish them from the bad ones. The reason for this is that the military is not a democracy and ranks (akin to positions such as Chief of Staff) are generally the first thing you learn about someone before you ever learn about their leadership traits (or lack thereof). There aren't many other workplaces where you can get reprimanded for not saluting a superior officer, even if they encompass the traits of a terrible leader. From my experience in the Canadian Armed Forces, the good leaders are the ones subordinates will undoubtably follow into battle. They trust you with their life, your decisions and the consequences that come with it, including unlimited liability (death). This is the ultimate test of whether or not your leadership is adequate.

Integrity and trust is the ultimate backbone of a healthy leader and subordinate relationship. When our public servants, especially those in positions of high power (e.g. cabinet ministers, premier/prime minister) erode this integrity and breaches our trust, it's not surprising that confidence in Parliament continues to decline. We cannot build a strong, united country if we continue electing poor leaders to our most important public institutions. We must take decisive action to ensure our elected officials are actually good leaders by encompassing the traits above. For our democracy depends on it...

Solutions / Tradeoffs / Proposals

• Stop voting in individual representatives of poor virtues into politics

• Introduce recall policy for elected officials during their term

• Hold your leaders of any organization accountable for their actions by demanding accountability, transparency and integrity

• Be the change you want to see in the world

• Ensure you are not the problem by looking within

• Periodically seek feedback outside of your echo chamber

Part I — What money actually is

Is money a credit system or a commodity system? Some economists insist money is fundamentally credit: a social memory of who owes what. Others insist it's fundamentally a scarce thing: a commodity with desirable physical properties. Both are right, because both describe the same underlying object from different angles.

Money is a ledger. It can be nature-based. It can be fiat-based. It can be tech-based. It's a way to have a divisible, portable, scarce, easy-to-move-and-verify unit of account on one side of most transactions.

— Lyn Alden

The ledger framing does useful work. It dissolves the apparent mystery of how multi-coloured pieces of paper with some significant individual's face on them become valuable: they're entries in a shared record that millions of people have agreed to treat as authoritative. It also explains why some ledgers survive and others don't.

The "shared illusion" is real — but some monies are harder to break than others

People sometimes describe money as a shared illusion. This is partially correct. Yes, a currency requires enough people to agree on its value as a medium of exchange. But some monies have physical or mathematical properties that make the illusion vastly harder to exploit. If your society uses seashells as money and then meets a civilization with industrial dredging equipment, your savings evaporate. If you use grain, industrial agriculture does the same thing. Gold, by contrast, has survived every technological shock humans have thrown at it for thousands of years — which is precisely why, across independent civilizations, gold kept winning.

Moneyness is geographic

If you live or have experienced traveling outside of North America, you can understand this perspective from your own life. When you go on vacation or visit family abroad (in my case Vietnam), you can end up with Vietnamese Dong in your wallet when you return. Over there, those Dongs — a legal tender used by over 102 million people — become almost impossible to spend or convert for anything close to their nominal value. Casino chips and Bitcoin are easier to offload.

Takeaway. The "moneyness" of a currency evaporates the moment you step outside the jurisdiction that enforces it. Only a handful of currencies in the world retain most of their value across borders. This asymmetry is not decorative — it is the reason reserve currencies exist in the first place.

Part II — The dollar's four thrones

When people say "the dollar is the world's reserve currency," they're usually compressing four distinct functions into one phrase. We must analyze each of these carefully as the costs and benefits of each are different.

Figure 1 — The four functions of reserve currency status (in this case, United States Dollars)

The Triffin dilemma, restated

Each of those four functions requires enormous quantities of dollars to exist outside the United States. A Brazilian company that owes $100 million has, by definition, demand for $100 million. A South Korean bank that routes its Korean Won trades through the dollar needs a dollar book. Multiply that across every country and every contract, and the world needs trillions of U.S. dollars sloshing around beyond U.S. borders.

How did they get there? The honest answer is that the United States has run a structural trade deficit for roughly fifty years. The outbound dollars that bought foreign goods are the same dollars that now sit in foreign reserves. This is not a sidecar of reserve status; it is the mechanism. Reserve currency issuers export currency in exchange for real goods. That's the deal.

Winners and losers on the same passport

Does the United States benefit from reserve currency status? It's not a yes or no question. Different Americans are on opposite sides of the trade.

Winners. The federal government (deep demand for Treasuries, projection of sanctions and surveillance power). Wall Street (selling securities to the world). Silicon Valley (selling equity and software to the world). Consumers of imported goods (the overvalued dollar makes imports cheap).

Losers. Domestic manufacturing, particularly low-margin industrial production in the Midwest. An overvalued dollar makes U.S. exports uncompetitive and is one of the quieter drivers of the long Rust Belt decline. Compound that across decades and the political consequences are visible in both political parties' current coalitions.

In the early decades of dollar hegemony, there were probably more winners than losers. That ratio has shifted. A lot of the populism that now defines Western politics, on both left and right, can be traced back — not in its symbolic content but in its economic grievance — to who is on which side of a fifty-year capital account.

Part III — Why gold kept winning

Before fiat currency, across every civilization that developed enough to have a ledger at all, gold and silver rose to the top of the monetary stack. This is not an accident of culture but a consequence of physics and network effects.

Gold is effectively eternal. It does not rust, rot, or degrade. It is extraordinarily dense per unit weight. It is almost never consumed — the vast majority of the gold ever mined is still in circulation, which gives it a stock that vastly exceeds its annual flow. That stock-to-flow property is what makes it difficult to debase. Stock-to-flow depicts the relationship between the present supply of a raw material and the extraction of new material. Therefore, no single actor, including industrial miners, can meaningfully dilute the standing supply in a short period.

Why is this important? A property of sound money requires a property called scarcity in order to not meaningfully dilute the value of the money over a short period of time with little to no costs.

If you were to hold one material for twenty years and pass it on to your kids, gold is really, really high on the list — if not number one.

— Lyn Alden

Gold's flaw: it can't move at the speed of information

Gold's weakness, has always been granularity and speed. You can't pay an unskilled labourer a fair daily wage in gold — the necessary fraction is microscopic. This is why bi-metallic and tri-metallic systems (gold, silver, copper) were historically popular: they introduced finer denominations. The deeper weakness, though, was revealed only once humans invented the telegraph. Gold is slow. Information, once wired, is not. That mismatch, is the hinge on which modern monetary history turns — and we'll come back to it.

Part IV — Why we have banks (and what they quietly do)

Banks, are best understood as friction-reduction technology, built in layers on top of base money. Coinage reduced the friction of weighing metal at every transaction. Paper notes reduced the friction of carrying metal across long distances. Ledgers reduced the friction of moving notes. Each layer was itself a technological leap in its time; we only call them "traditional" in retrospect.

The mechanics of fractional reserve banking

A fractional reserve bank accepts deposits that are redeemable on demand — your checking account — and lends most of those deposits into illiquid assets like thirty-year mortgages and multi-year business loans. The bank's assets exceed its liabilities (that's what "solvent" means), but only a small fraction of those assets are in base money available for immediate withdrawal. Hence the name.

Figure 2 — The duration mismatch on a simplified bank balance sheet

The gap between "payable now" on the liability side and "recoverable over years" on the asset side is the structural feature that makes bank runs possible. It is not a malfunction — it is the business model.

The system works as long as most depositors don't try to withdraw at the same time. When they do — as Jimmy Stewart learned in It's a Wonderful Life, and as Silicon Valley Bank depositors learned in 2023 — the bank either fails or is rescued. The point is that this is not a bug introduced by greed; it is a structural feature of lending long against short. The alternative is "full reserve banking," which is essentially what private credit funds look like today: depositors are told up front that their money is illiquid for a period of years.

The short-lived free banking era

Before central banks consolidated note issuance, the United States ran what historians call the free banking era — a patchwork of state-chartered banks, each issuing their own notes, holding their own reserves, and accepting each other's paper at varying discounts depending on reputation and distance. A J.P. Morgan note in New York was gold-good across the country; a note from the Bank of Rural Louisiana might not be recognized at all in Boston. Some historians blame the instability on lack of regulation. Others blame it on too much regulation — specifically, state laws that prevented banks from branching across state lines, which meant they couldn't diversify their deposit bases. This free banking era is an analog precursor to today's cryptocurrency and DeFi (decentralized finance) experiments: messy, uneven, and genuinely innovative in places.

Part V — War, fiat, and the most consequential financial lie of the 20th century

In the summer of 1914, with the Austro-Hungarian archduke freshly assassinated and Europe sliding into war, the British government faced a problem. The United Kingdom had no treaty obligation to enter the conflict, but its government wanted to. So it decided to raise war bonds at a premium to its normal sovereign yield and let British capital vote on the endeavor.

British capital voted no. The bond drive was "paltry." A respectable amount trickled in from London investors, but nothing close to what the war required. And announcing the failure was unthinkable — Germany would have made propaganda hay from the fact that British citizens would not fund the war their own government was about to prosecute.

So the Bank of England lied

The Treasury quietly had the Bank of England create new base money, lend it to a handful of senior bank officials, and use those funds to buy the unsold bonds. The Financial Times duly reported that the issue had been "oversubscribed." Britain went to war on monetized debt. The pound was dramatically devalued over the following years. And the episode stayed buried — until 2017, when the Bank of England's own blog, more than a century later, cheerfully revealed what had actually happened. The Financial Times then issued its retraction, a hundred and three years late.

It's not an accident that the era of total war — World War I, World War II — coincided with the arrival of a purely fiat ledger that could be expanded with the stroke of a pen.

— Lyn Alden

Fiat currency and the scale of war

This is not to claim fiat causes war — war predates both fiat and civilization itself. The claim is narrower and, I think, harder to dispute: fiat currency raises the ceiling on war. A commodity-backed currency imposes a hard budget constraint on belligerents, visible to their citizens in real time through either taxation or formal default. A fiat currency lets a government pay its soldiers and suppliers in money that will be quietly debased six months later, spreading the cost across the entire population without anyone voting on it. It's likely that World War I would have been dramatically smaller without it, and World War II is essentially a second act of the same unresolved financial wreckage.

There is a viral dynamic here, too. If one country adopts fiat and its neighbours don't, the fiat country can outspend them in a crisis. That asymmetry tends to spread.

Bretton Woods: the last gold peg

After 1945, representatives from forty-four countries met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to rebuild the shattered international monetary order. Two proposals were on the table. John Maynard Keynes, representing a depleted United Kingdom, proposed the "Bancor" — an artificial international unit of account backed by a basket of major currencies, a direct ancestor of the IMF's Special Drawing Rights. The United States, arriving as the undisputed industrial and financial winner of the war, proposed the opposite: the dollar would be pegged to gold, every other major currency would be pegged to the dollar, and foreign central banks — but emphatically not American citizens — could redeem dollars for gold at a fixed rate.

The US proposal won. And for roughly twenty-six years, until Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, that was how the world worked. After 1971, the last tether was cut. What remained was a pure ledger.

Part VI — The core thesis: transactions outran settlements

This is the argument at the heart of Alden's book Broken Money, and it's worth pausing on because everything else in Alden's framework follows from it.

Before the telegraph, information and physical matter moved at roughly the same speed — the speed of a horse, a ship, or a runner. A transaction and its settlement were therefore roughly simultaneous. Gold changed hands, and the news that gold had changed hands traveled with the gold itself.

The telegraph broke that symmetry. Starting in the 1830s and deployed widely from the 1860s on, it meant information could now cross an ocean in minutes while the physical gold backing those messages still had to be loaded onto a ship and sailed across it. Transactions accelerated to near-light-speed. Settlements did not.

Figure 3 — The transaction / settlement gap, 1800 → present

The gap between instant transactions and slow settlement is the space in which modern banks and central banks accumulated power. Bitcoin's claim, is that this gap is no longer a physical necessity — it is now a political choice.

This gap, is where modern banking and central banking grew up. If transactions can move at the speed of light but settlement cannot, someone has to sit in the middle, netting balances, issuing claims, and absorbing the timing risk. That someone is a bank. Banks then needed central banks to coordinate among themselves, and central banks eventually needed a global reserve central bank — the Federal Reserve — to coordinate among each other.

Eventually the layers piled so high that the base-money settlement layer became vestigial. The ledger was the money. Gold, for most practical purposes, ceased to be what dollars were claims on and became just another asset that dollars could be used to buy.

This is the sense in which Alden calls our money "broken." It is not broken because it is fiat. It is broken because the architecture was built around a physical limitation — slow settlement — that no longer has to be accepted as given.

Part VII — Bitcoin as fast settlement

Once you've accepted the transaction/settlement framing, what Bitcoin is becomes much easier to describe than it usually is in the hype-driven discourse. Bitcoin is the first credible technology for performing irreversible, decentralized settlement at telecom speeds.

Sending a telegraph message requires almost no bandwidth — Morse code is enough. Sending a transaction was therefore never the hard problem. Sending final settlement at the same speed — without a trusted intermediary — is the hard problem. It requires a distributed ledger, meaningful bandwidth, cryptographic signatures, and a mechanism (in Bitcoin's case, proof of work) to make the ledger expensive to rewrite. All of those components existed in academic form for decades before 2009. What Satoshi Nakamoto did, is assemble them into the first working system.

Why the volatility is a feature, not a bug

A common objection to Bitcoin as money is its volatility in dollar denomination. That is a true concern, but it's important to reframe the problem. Bitcoin began with a market capitalization of zero. For a network to bootstrap from zero to trillions in decentralized fashion, it must exhibit upward volatility — there is no other path. Upward volatility in turn attracts euphoria and leverage, which produce drawdowns. That cycle is not a malfunction; it is the only way a non-sovereign monetary network can achieve scale.

The implication is that Bitcoin is not yet useful as a day-to-day medium of exchange in most developed economies. Its present utility, is as a bootstrapping store of value — specifically, as portable self-custodial capital. If you were going to hold one thing for a decade and pass it to your child, gold has been the default for thousands of years. Bitcoin, is now competitive with gold on that axis and superior on one dimension gold can never match: you can carry it across a border in your head by memorizing twelve words.

A telling liquidity test. Alden's litmus: what can you actually convert to local value, outside of the top five currencies? Dollars, euros, yen, Swiss francs, sterling — easy. Gold — fairly easy within a few miles of almost anywhere. After that, things drop off quickly. She places Bitcoin inside the top ten for global spot liquidity — ahead of most of the world's 160-plus sovereign currencies.

Part VIII — Shadow banking, reframed

The phrase "shadow banking" has ominous connotations, and after the 2008 crisis it often carries an assumed verdict. Shadow banking refers to lending and credit activity performed by institutions that do not hold a banking license — private credit funds, insurance companies, asset managers, specialty lenders. After 2008, regulation tightened on chartered banks, and a great deal of lending migrated to these less-regulated but also less-subsidized firms.

The part that alarms observers is opacity: these entities are less transparent to central bank regulators than chartered banks. Private credit in particular is, in some ways, safer than traditional banking from a systemic-risk standpoint. A private credit fund takes capital from wealthy investors and institutions who are told explicitly that their money is illiquid for years. That's closer to full-reserve banking than anything a chartered bank does. The depositor — really an investor — is first in line for losses, but they know that going in.

The systemic risk, Alden argues, lives not primarily in private credit itself but in the linkages: banks lend to credit funds, credit funds lend to leveraged borrowers, and under stress the chains can tighten. As of her current assessment, she sees the size of the U.S. private credit and adjacent sectors as meaningful but not yet sufficient to constitute a first-order threat to the banking system. That could change if standards loosen and the sector grows further. For now, the people most exposed to a private credit blow-up are the people who can best absorb it.

The phrase she keeps returning to, borrowed from earlier crises, is socialized risk, privatized profit. If the sector gets large enough to threaten the system and then gets bailed out, the calculus flips. Until then, treat it as worth watching, not as imminent danger.

Part IX — "Nothing stops this train"

What stops this train? Alden's answer, which she has popularized as a phrase borrowed from Breaking Bad, is one word.

Nothing.

— Lyn Alden

Her meaning is specific and not fatalistic. The United States (and in my opinion places like Canada), she argues, has entered a regime of fiscal dominance — a macroeconomic state in which the size and trajectory of government deficits overwhelm the ability of monetary policy to control inflation or financial conditions in the traditional sense. When the federal government is borrowing trillions a year structurally, independent of the business cycle, that spending becomes the dominant variable. Interest rate hikes, which used to discipline the private sector, now mostly transfer interest income from taxpayers to bondholders. Rate cuts loosen a brake that was never effectively engaged.

The practical investment implication Alden has been giving for years: don't fight the fiscal. In an era of fiscal dominance, the assets that hold their real purchasing power are those on the receiving end of large deficits, not those denominated in the currency being expanded to service them. This does not tell you which month to buy or sell anything. It tells you which side of a fifty-year imbalance you want to stand on.

It also tells you why currencies and bonds have already underperformed most other assets — not as a future prediction but as a description of what has been happening. The sovereign debt crisis people keep asking her to date has, in her view, been unfolding in slow motion for years. It shows up not as a single headline but as quietly devalued reserves, restless electorates, and a long, grinding transfer of wealth from people who hold fixed claims to people who hold real things.

Where the book lands

Alden's thesis is more optimistic than "nothing stops this train" sounds. The broken money she describes is broken for a specific, identifiable reason — the transaction/settlement gap opened by the telegraph and never closed until 2009. We now have, for the first time in roughly 180 years, a credible technology for closing it. Whether the political and institutional structures built around the gap can absorb that technology gracefully, resist it, or be displaced by it is the open question of the next several decades.

These transitions will take time. Gold beat shells across centuries. Fiat displaced metal across decades. Whatever comes next will not resolve over a single news cycle — and the investment and policy consequences of the interim are exactly what a careful analyst can still map. There is no specific remedy to the problem, but understanding the problem will allow you to create better investment decisions alongside crafting better economic policies in government.

I highly recommend readers of this post who have an interest in this topic (anyone that values wealth) to go further in depth by reading Alden's book "Broken Money" to better understand how to piece together what is often a confusing set of terms and processes about how money works. It's probably going to be the best investment of your time in this increasingly complicated world.

From a social human perspective, we ask questions to get answers just as you would in a normal conversation. Not skirt around them like you're trying to avoid telling your spouse about your secret affair, whilst reiterating all the great things you've done for your family. That's an abusive relationship. It couldn't have been clearer in this conversation, simply asking to see an awarded contract worth $250M of public money without results:

Matt Strauss

@strauss_matt

What is even the point of Parliament?

At Health Committee, we asked to see the PrescribeIT contracts, in which the Liberals blew $250 million on NOTHING.  

But Mark Carney’s Chief Filibuster Officer spent 2 hours talking to prevent us from seeing it.

I asked why at Question

5,135

8:39 PM • Apr 14, 2026

People like to view Canadian politics solely as a game. Even voting is itself a game and there are strategies in place to maximize your chances of success (see issue on electorial reform, but specifically strategic voting as an example). Just like any game, there are incentives and disincentives in place to shape behaviours for an optimal outcome.

Filibustering is a strategy used to delay and disrupt the parliamentary process by filling up time to reiterate "approved talking points" and not actually answering the posed question. There are multiple issues with this strategy that every Canadian should be able to agree is unproductive, unethical and outright disrespectful to Canadians:

• Time is already limited in question periods. Wasting even more time to not actually get anything answered or done would get you fired in the private sector. Don't waste company time.

• Be honest about your mistakes and learn from them. The government is not perfect and will make mistakes. The goal is to minimize those mistakes. However, there are no incentives in place to admit mistakes nor disincentives in place to obfuscate them.

• This seemingly unharmful tactic contributes to deteriorating trust in our public institutions and our public servants. Really, what is the point of Parliament if people can't get answers to their questions? If you had a friend who never answers your questions to avoid telling you the truth, I'd bet you wouldn't be friends much longer.

Solutions / Tradeoffs / Proposals

• Hold your Member of Parliament accountable. E-mail, phone and ensuring you make your vote count during elections is important.

• We need recall policies to allow constituents to recall their Member of Parliament during a term as a disincentive for continuing filibuster behaviour.

• Mainstream media and those who have social capital to hold politician's "feet to the fire" need to start/continue calling out this type of behaviour.

• Every awarded contract worth over a certain amount ($10M+?) should be publicly accessible without a needing a request.

• More civic tools such as Canada Central's MP Scorecard which uses multiple artificial intelligence models to analyze the quality of Minister Q&As. Use the data to get rid of question dodging politicians.

• Play the Parliament Game to see how you rank against AI in rooting out non-answers to questions.

The Who

I'm Phil Ngo, a first-generation naturalized Canadian, born with an ambitious attitude of "getting $h!t done" through seeking truth in numbers and data. I've been surrounded by technology all my life and aim to use it productively to make our lives collectively better. My life is best defined as exploratory and adventurous with expertise in various fields you never would have guessed. I helped cast NBC shows during the 2012 television pilot season, worked on television production sets, but also spent years in military communications and experienced pilot training in the Royal Canadian Air Force, soloing my first plane at the ripe age of 22. My experiences led me to eventually spend a good decade of my life contributing to the development of blockchain technology, specifically Ethereum. Now, I take my experiences from my adventures and blockchain protocol development to ensure Canada leads itself down a path of prosperity for its people and retain the amazing homegrown talent we provide to the world.

The Why

I needed a place to easily write and convey my thoughts and understanding to two large communities I am highly active in (Ethereum/Blockchain/Tech and Canadian politics). Short form Instagram stories can only explain so much content, to only disappear in 24 hours. X/Twitter posts are highly curated to keep you enraged in your own echo chamber while demoting your own posts of "lower engagement." It's important to have a place to authentically showcase why I believe Canada can be better than it is today. This is my contribution to the conversation and to have Canadians start caring about being civically active to ensure we become the most prosperous country in the world. We may not agree wholeheartedly on how to solve all of our problems, but I will vigorously defend your right to think/say/debate it. It's super important to listen to everyone, but especially people you disagree with. What we fail to understand in decision making is that it's actually more important to execute any decisive action, even if it's wrong in hindsight. It's a trait that any military officer would tell you as they go through leadership training. More importantly, it's what Canada can really improve on. Not just talking about how to improve things, but actually doing things.

The What

I truly believe that a successful country requires an active group of non-partisan, well-informed citizens to ensure we can create the most effective governance for achieving prosperity. My experience in trying to create synergistic, win-win outcomes in my previous professional lives is the goal I seek for Canada. I seek to find truth in public data, from various experts in fields of relevance, and to ensure the following virtues are preserved for a well-functioning democracy:

Accountability

Without accountability, there is no incentive to succeed. As a previous employee of the federal government, there was a concept of "failing upwards" where you were promoted to higher positions of power without the merit to justify it. It became more of shifting problems to other departments until it's off your plate - not actually solving the problem. Like any private enterprise, if you do not have the motivation/desire, skills or experience to succeed, you either find it real quick or you're replaced. The government should not be a "safe job" if we want it to be an efficient and effective (more below) machine for coordination. Keeping people such as your Member of Parliament accountable for milestones to justify their positions and purpose is sorely needed.

Transparency

Without the transparency of our governments, there is no real democracy. We cannot act as effectively on missing or partial information if we want to make the best decisions at a given point in time. We must remember that the government works for the governed (its people), not for itself. You may frequently hear of quotes such as "rules for thee, but not for me" or similar descriptions of leadership integrity being questioned. It's unfortunately, all too common that it's accepted as a norm to be a corrupt politician. It should not be normal for leaders to lie, deceive and mislead while wielding the power we've delegated to these individuals and institutions. Alongside accountability, we must demand radical transparency from our public servants and institutions. Everything from honesty about issues/data, actually answering questions from the opposition and taking conflicts of interest seriously are just a few examples.

Efficiency

Taxpayers deserve to have their forced contributions to public coffers maximized to benefit society at the best value. We know all too well that the government is generally seen as a customer with a bottomless pit of money to be exploited by contractors, consultants and lobbyists. We must demand transparency in how the government procures, awards public tenders and make sure we're getting the best quality for value for the taxpayer. We must take a business approach to government execution, not accepting rewards for self-interest via backroom deals. As an example, there's no reason why we should be spending billions for a customized software pay solution, especially when the contract was awarded with obvious conflicts of interest. The government should create the environment for prosperity to flourish, but should not interfere with the market economics that create that progress.

There are many other ways we can make government more efficient, transparent and accountable so we can create an environment of economic prosperity for all Canadians. This blog will help to outline highlight how, alongside the technologies that can potentially help. Economic prosperity is the first step to solving many other important social and cultural issues we have in this country. But we must all agree, that making money as a country to help solve these problems is of foremost importance. The consensus we need as a country is to grow the pie for everyone, rather than arguing how to split the remaining scraps. Building Canada as the most prosperous country in the world, starts with showing the data. Build Canada has been a non-partisan force for good so we can achieve this goal. Many memos are filled with blueprints on how to get there. We just need to elect a government to get on board with the program. We can be the very best, if we choose to be.