I have a question for you.

When did you last eat an avocado? Maybe you had avocado on toast, or sliced in a burger? 

What can this humble fruit teach us about failing national currencies and the importance of Bitcoin?

Avocados originally from the Americas, are a high-value export crop grown for a discerning global market. Unlike most fruits, avocados can be stored “on the tree,” ripening only after being picked. This allows growers to time their harvest based on market demand or labor availability. There is no rush, no special storage is needed for avocados, you can always wait until tomorrow to harvest your fruit.

The Value Tree

Now I am running with some analogies that I hope will give a fresh way of thinking about Bitcoin.

We can look at our working lives as a tree of value. Our tree requires care: water and nutrients, a bit of sunlight.

 But this tree isn’t purely wild nature; it needs planning and effort to produce fruit. You have to pollinate the flowers and ensure the tree and the fruit are healthy. But despite our efforts, something’s been going wrong for a long time. The fruit that our value tree produces is becoming less tasty and more prone to just rotting away.

For some people, the fruit may look big and tasty but it's mostly just filled with water. For others, it drops prematurely to decay on the ground. Some trees flower but may never bear fruit. 

We’ve learned to optimise our harvesting processes but the results are worse than ever.

But instead of addressing the real problem, the tree's health or the soil’s quality, we focus solely on getting the compromised fruit to market as soon as possible. This endless rush masks the deeper issue.

So back to Money

Of course the fruit of our value tree represents money, the "fruits of our labor." Today, our money begins to rot the moment it’s picked. This is inflation: the constant erosion of our saved value. Instead of growing meaningful wealth, we’re forced to scramble, collecting what’s left before it loses even more value.

No one can save anymore. You have to put your money into housing or stocks or something else otherwise of course it is going to lose value to inflation. Everyone knows that. 

This has far-reaching consequences: inflated asset prices, unaffordable homes, student debt, and widespread economic and social unease. 

When we use money that is printed by governments I think of it kind of like dumping a whole bunch of worthless sand around the base of our value tree, suffocating and poisoning the roots and causing the tree to become weak and to produce this bad fruit. The fruit doesn’t hold value, it drops to the ground too soon, and forces us into a cycle of immediate consumption, which in its own way weakens the tree even more

Payment Systems: The Rush to Move Rotting Fruit

I think the rise of digital payment systems and neo-banks such as Wise, PayPal, Venmo, Alipay, and others reflects this problem. They excel at moving money quickly, but really they’re just the “last mile” of a broken national currency system. These platforms don’t store value; they only move it to its next destination.

Fiat money cannot innovate on storing value. The focus is on speed and convenience, hiding the decay that is happening beneath. The entire fintech and banking industry optimizes the fruit supply chain without questioning the tree's health or the reason the fruit is rotting in the first place.

Now, the actual actual final settlement of the value is hidden away beneath layers of abstraction. It doesn't really fit with our fruit tree analogy anymore, but you don’t really see what happens behind the scenes, the fruit is wrapped in plastic and just appears in the supermarket, but as soon as you open the package you can see that it is beginning to go off.

Something’s wrong here. 

‍Bitcoin produces better fruit.

Now imagine a different tree at the back of our orchard. This tree has been overlooked by the government and has been left to grow strongly on its own. There is no poison suffocating its roots and its leaves.

Like avocados this tree grows fruit that stays on the branch until they are ready to be picked. The fruit doesn’t fall to the ground straight away and it doesn’t rot on the tree, it grows in value over time. It’s resilient, thick-skinned, and can withstand the journey to market.

This tree is Bitcoin. Its fruit are satoshis: the unit of Bitcoin. There are one-hundred million satoshis per Bitcoin, and there are 21 million bitcoins. Our tree stores value securely on the world’s most robust monetary network. 

With Bitcoin, you can choose when to harvest your wealth, rather than being forced to pick it prematurely.

Bitcoin as Money

Now almost every national currency has a trading pair relationship with Bitcoin. The tides come in and out and there can be short-term volatility but from the frame of reference of Bitcoin, all of these national currencies are simply payment mechanisms for sending the value that we store in Bitcoin.

If I have a bill denominated in New Zealand Dollars or US Dollars, I can easily convert Bitcoin into these fiat currencies and pay that bill via Wise or PayPal or gift cards.

If I want a 1000 yen bowl of ramen at some restaurant in the Japanese countryside, I can easily withdraw cash from any convenience store via Bitcoin converted through Revolut.

These payment systems focus on moving money fast and in a way are symptoms of a broken system that has nowhere left to innovate, but they are not the cause of the problem. The thing is we can’t keep our value in fiat form for very long. The moment our value is traded into national currencies it begins to decay and is only good for making a payment right now. It doesn’t hold its value. It’s just the same as our fruit example. Once it is picked or falls from the tree it needs to move or else it will rot.  

But I think with our new Bitcoin fruit, we can still use these fiat payment systems, we can still use national currencies if we want, they just become layer 2 networks on top of Bitcoin: that is to say the fiat payment systems unintentionally serve Bitcoin by facilitating transactions while Bitcoin remains the store of value beneath.

When I use Wise or Paypal to send money I’m really just transferring my Bitcoin’s stored value into fiat form temporarily.Now critics may argue that Bitcoin isn’t “working as money” if it’s used primarily in this way via counter-trade, where it is exchanged for another currency in order to make a payment. But I think this has the wrong frame of reference.

The focus on consumer payments is understandable because that is what we see everyday. The reality is that in most parts of the world you cannot directly buy your groceries with Bitcoin, yet. 

Though that said, there are more and more places where you can. Most places still use legacy payment rails.

But these existing fiat payment rails are again just about moving value around as quickly as possible before it rots. What is missing from the critics is the idea of a store of value. 

Bitcoin over the long term is far superior to all government money because Bitcoin preserves value in a way that printed national currencies cannot.

Just like the avocado, you can store your Bitcoin on the value tree without having to spend it straight away because it holds its value.

Perhaps the thought experiment is what if all of the fintech startups building fiat payment rails, all of open banking stuff, all of the neo-banks, all of the apparent innovation happening with fiat money, is actually building infrastructure that serves Bitcoin. 

In the short to medium term being able to send your value stored in Bitcoin using national currencies is a bit like the way the internet rolled out: At first the internet ran over phone lines, now the phone calls themselves run over the internet.

I think something similar might happen with Bitcoin. Currently we may still send our Bitcoin value via nation state currencies, we price our stack in USDs and we might celebrate the number go up, but in the end, government denominated money, if it still exists, might end up travelling via Bitcoin.

Now of course this has implications when it comes to censorship and privacy and getting rugged. It is important to always keep the security and decentralisation of the bitcoin network in mind. 

But ultimately how do things play out? I think for a while it is likely to be a spectrum from people using the most KYCd of legacy banks aping into the Bitcoin revolution without even realising they have Bitcoin, through to people running their own nodes and lightning channels and everything in between, there will be optionality but ultimately Bitcoin will be at the root and will become the denominator for value.

In Conclusion

Metaphors have limits. Bitcoin isn’t really an energy battery, or property on Manhattan island, or an avocado, or any of that stuff. It's just better money. As we rethink money and value, these analogies are useful for helping us grasp the fundamental shifts that are happening. 

Money is interesting in that it is both an abstraction and a real thing and I think these kinds of thought experiments are useful lenses for looking at Bitcoin.

Bitcoin allows us to reclaim the fruits of our labor, free from the decay of inflation caused by government intervention in money. And while fiat systems still dominate today, maybe the entire world is working for Bitcoin when it makes it easy to send our Bitcoin value around on fiat rails.

If you have held your value in Bitcoin over the last few years you have done materially better than if you had held value in any fiat money or fiat-denominated asset. 

As more people realise this the facade of government money will crumble away and people will just save and spend in Bitcoin.

But what do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree. Have I taken the analogies too far?

Send me your thoughts or comments here.