Jack Mallers’ thunderclap keynote at BTC Prague 2025 distilled monetary morality into six immortal commands. Greater than Fiction exists to push that creed forward in time, sketching vivid, plausible lives under sound money.
The embers breathed orange beneath the crystal sky-dome, each spark mirrored a thousand times in the curvature overhead. Elder Vero—one-hundred-and-eighteen winters, bone thin yet bright-eyed—lay on a reed mat woven before the Republic itself existed.
Around him squatted his three great-great-grandchildren—Aya, Kito, and Nolan—red valley dust caking their bare heels. The youngest tugged Vero’s sleeve.
“Elder, were you truly alive when America’s currency collapsed?”
Vero’s laugh rasped like sand on steel. “Collapsed? Little one, we molted it—slipped the husk of empire the way a cicada slips old shell.”
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“There was an era,” he began, voice low, “when a single flag printed paper nobody dared refuse. The cost of truth was silent—paid in a eight-per-cent annual inflation few could see, yet everyone felt. Forty trillion fell in a few years, while forty men minted themselves gods.”
Nolan frowned. “The dollar?”
“Aye. Its demise was not the miracle—our replacement was. We moved towards principle values and physics forged by the creed of Bitcoin captured by the legendary Jack Mallers: You shall not steal, You shall not inflate, Your shall not censor, You shall not confiscate, You shall not counterfeit. Words sharper than bayonets because mathematics held the hilt.”
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A breeze dampened the embers of the fire. Vero prodded them with a carbon-fibre stick. “I was sixteen when the great firewall ring-fenced the banking system. Father’s petrol station died overnight—he would not scan his iris for the government FedDollar. They froze every account, seized the deed. We walked into the desert with nothing but a solar rig and a Raspberry Pi.”
“You were frightened?” Kito asked.
“Utterly. Yet I carried a Lightning node in my rucksack—thirty-one sat channels open to the world. I bartered router repairs for bread, then wrote manuals—blueprints for leaving Babylon without firing a shot.”
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Aya traced the holographic plaque beside the hearth.
“These were not laws,” Vero said. “They were coordinates to the future. Follow them and you discovered the exit-vector.”
“What came next?” Nolan whispered.
“The dollar withered—died with a whimper, not a bang. The Fed tried to nationalise hash-rate; hash-rate laughed. Cities emptied. Mesh valleys bloomed. Children learned to push a PSBT before learning cursive. We built canvas academies and taught that energy became money, and money—truth.”
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“And today?” Aya asked. “What is New America?”
“No empire. No central bank. Merely federations of sovereign network states trading in unverifiable honesty. Things started to change, people got married again, could afford to have many children, own a home within a few years of work and work only a couple of hours a week with their AI agents. In other words, Inequality has shrunk to a level unseen in human history.”
“No billionaires?” Nolan’s eyes widened.
“None required,” Vero replied. “When currency cannot be conjured, only earned, wealth circulates like blood, not pools like toxin.”
Aya rested her head on his shoulder. “Do folks still remember what you did?”
“What matters is the ledger remembers,” Vero murmured.
The fire sighed lower. Vero unfurled a linen-bound journal, edges sun-scorched, ink faded to sepia.
“Tomorrow you’ll read the first block of the new-year ledger,” he said, placing the volume in Aya’s hands. She nodded, eyes wide with the weight of ritual.
“Remember,” Vero whispered, tapping the cover, “Bitcoin was never a get-rich-quick scheme. It was the slow, patient art of getting free—together, or not at all.”
The dome lights dimmed, and, somewhere beyond, the sovereign mesh sang soft pings across the valley night—heartbeat of a world that finally, irrevocably, belonged to itself.
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