Did Rome Really Fall Because of Money Problems?

Rome fell due to currency debasement and a variety of other things, but currency debasement was a major part of it. If you look at the Roman currency and the percent that it was backed by an actual scarce metal, I think it was either gold or silver, I think it was silver, you can see from the beginning of the Roman Empire where it went from either 100% or very close to 100% you I think it was silver. Uh anyway, the main the main metal the base metal and then the currency was debased over time. Debbased means the base metal was removed. Therefore, the word debased because the base metal is being removed. So, it's being debased, which is where we get the term currency debasement. So in that process, the percentage of precious metal in the coins that were circulated and used to pay taxes and everything went down and down and down as the government kept melting down the coins, putting less base metal in them and then reminting them. And if you obviously if you take, you know, 100 gold coins, remove 1% of the base metal, then you can print 101 coins because you can use a little bit of the base metal from the other 100 coins to make a new coin. And they did that over and over and over until the percentage of the precious metal was so small that ultimately the Roman soldiers were unwilling to take Roman currency as payment. And if you have a huge empire, uh you can you can defend any size empire, if your money's good, because if your money's good, uh your soldiers will take it. And if your soldiers will accept it, you can build an army big enough to defend virtually any empire. But if you debase your own currency, at some point the soldiers are not willing to take the debase currency and it gets it gets harder and harder and ultimately you cannot defend your uh empire from foreign invaders. Now the US has the same problem as Rome and almost every major empire that has fallen over the years. You can track currency debasement as a major cause that effectively undermined the core of the uh uh of the of the empire. And so you can just see the decline that basically tracks right with the currency debasement. And then you know the government gets more and more in debt. They print more and more money. They debase the currency which back then was by removing base metal. Right now, they don't even have to go through the charade of removing base metal. They uh they just uh print more money out of thin air by adding zeros in a spreadsheet or, you know, printing paper money out of thin air and claiming it has value. Um but anyway, uh so we are, you know, quickly going the same direction in the United States where we are $37 trillion in debt. We are constantly debasing our currency. Now people will still today take our currency to fight in our armies and uh you know defend our nation but as the country becomes less as we print more and more money that we we get more and more tenuous as to people's willingness to finance us uh to lend the government more money when the government's already in so much debt already and to um you know to accept the government's currency. So, if we want America to stay great, um, we need to stop doing that. And because humans never stop doing bad things because we are sinful beings. And if you give humans a magic money printer, they never stop abusing it. That means the future of America is really you can only go two directions. You can go back to gold or you can go forward to Bitcoin. We're not going back to gold for all the reasons I've talked about on numerous videos that gold does not work as a store of value in a modern economy. It's too hard to custody. It's too hard to authenticate. It's too hard to transact. It's not divisible. It's hard to move large amounts over uh space and time. I mean, it just doesn't work. Um so the clear answer is Bitcoin. And if if the US economy redenominates on Bitcoin before uh we sort of run out of gas and people stop accepting our currency to defend our nation then which is you know that's decades away but uh as long as we can make that transition to a sound money so that our nation is back on a firm footing before it becomes a real big problem we'll be fine. If we don't, then the United States likely will go at some point the way of Rome, drowning in debt with a debased currency that nobody wants. And at some point it gets hard to defend your nation. It gets hard to hold it all together. Uh it gets hard to do much of anything as a government if you have a currency that nobody wants anymore. So um we are slowly currently heading that way. We are picking up speed, but we are slowly heading toward that reality. And had had Rome not, you know, gotten in financial trouble and debased their currency and all of that, um, you know, the empire would not have fallen the same way. Now, there there were other factors at play, but that one was a really big one. And as I've studied, I've spent thousands of hours studying politics and public policy and the rise and fall of empires and history and all that. Um, I never really could find a satisfactory answer to why Rome fell. You know, every time you read a history book, they give you the the, you know, the set of reasons that Rome fell. And each one um I mean, some of them sound plausible, but typically when I would read about why Rome fell, my takeaway would be, I'm not sure that sounds right. Like it seems like a something is missing. When I found Bitcoin and heard the explanation of, oh yeah, at the core of it, they were debasing the currency. And then you can just literally look up a chart that shows the percentage of base metal in the Roman currency over time. It's just very clear that that was a major driver of it. And that uh strikes me as a much more satisfactory answer than other answers like well the empire just got too big to defend. It's like what do you mean too big to defend? Like nothing's too big to defend if you have, you know, a sound currency and enough of it. Uh you know there's you can build a massive army. you can defend a pretty large empire, but not if you're debasing your currency. So, I think that's a better explanation for a larger percent of the reason Rome fell as compared to numerous other reasons that are put forward by people who don't want to acknowledge that currency debasement played a major role in it. Because if you acknowledge that, you have to acknowledge that modern empires have the same problem. And since nobody wants to uh you know, nobody wants to acknowledge that, they keep coming up with excuses for why Rome fell. Uh, and they always leave out currency debasement because if you if you insert that, you got to answer other questions and everybody doesn't want to answer other questions. So, they usually they usually start there. So, um, anyway, let me answer uh happy to answer any questions about that or anything else related to Bitcoin. Message me if there's anything you want me to do videos about. Otherwise, I'll just keep doing whatever crosses my mind. Have a good one, everyone.