Joe Bryan’s Journey: From Wall Street to Bitcoin Education

• Spent a decade in derivatives trading at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and UBS before leaving finance to become an entrepreneur.

• The 2008 crisis and later the COVID response (money printing causing markets to soar) pushed him to re-examine first principles.

• Like many, his path ran from protecting wealth with gold to realizing Bitcoin’s superior qualities as hard money.

• By 2024, he left business entirely to focus on Bitcoin full time, creating What’s the Problem to explain inflation and monetary distortion in plain language.

• Today he views Bitcoin as the only issue worth working on outside of family, since everything else is downstream from fixing money.

Inflation Explained: The Big Red Button and Hidden Costs

• Inflation is not natural, it comes from governments pressing the “big red button” of money printing.

• New money first flows to government-connected entities, distorting price signals and pulling capital toward unproductive areas.

• Small businesses like family-run restaurants are crushed as input costs rise faster than revenues, forcing owners into price hikes, shrinkflation, or lower-quality goods.

• Inflation shows up in three layers: visible (prices rising), semi-visible (shrinkflation), and hidden (declining quality and health outcomes).

• The end result: a cycle of erosion where entrepreneurs, families, and consumers all lose while government power expands.

Money, Families, and the Breakdown of Society

• Broken money doesn’t just erode savings, it undermines family stability and long-term planning.

• As living costs outpace wages, homeownership slips further out of reach, often requiring two incomes and heavy debt just to buy a house.

• With both parents working and childcare costs high, families have fewer children and less time together.

• Declining marriage and birth rates in developed countries are directly tied to inflationary pressure and rising asset prices.

• Debt-based living creates constant financial stress, pushing people toward short-term thinking rather than building for the future.

The Investment Landscape: Bonds, Equities, and Why Bitcoin Is Missing

• Vanguard recently suggested a tactical allocation of 70% bonds and 30% equities for the next decade.

• Joe calls this advice “almost criminal,” since bonds guarantee negative real returns in a system where money printing never stops.

• Equity markets may rise in nominal terms, but when measured against sound money like Bitcoin, their returns collapse.

• Assets like housing, equities, and bonds are all vulnerable to confiscation or heavy taxation, leaving savers with little control.

• Bitcoin is the only savings technology that cannot be diluted or seized, offering true property rights in a world of political and monetary risk.

Gold, Ethereum, and Why Only Bitcoin Qualifies as Money

• For thousands of years, governments debased gold and silver through coin clipping and paper substitutes, history shows all fiat regimes end the same way.

• Gold is scarce and hard to produce, but it’s imperfect money: difficult to verify, costly to transport, and easily centralized in vaults.

• Bitcoin takes gold’s monetary properties and perfects them: absolute scarcity, easy verification, instant settlement, and portability anywhere in the world.

• Ethereum and other tokens are just fiat in disguise — each with their own “big red button” for dilution and control.

• Sound money means owning a fixed share of global wealth that cannot be altered by politicians or stakers.

• With Bitcoin, humanity has its first chance to separate money and state, a monetary revolution that cannot be stopped.

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