Bitcoin and Inflation: Protecting the Value of Your Work

Gram’s kitchen smelled like butter and sugar and something you could never quite name, but you would recognize anywhere. She was always in motion. Pulling a cake from the oven, leveling it with a knife while it was still too hot, already mixing frosting in the next bowl. Or she was sitting in her chair in the living room, crochet hook moving so fast it looked like a magic trick. Loop, pull, loop, pull. She did not sit still. She converted. She took her hours and her hands and turned them into things she could give away.

Cakes for birthdays. Cupcakes for all the neighborhood kids. Blankets for every grandchild and great-grandchild she loved.

My children came after she died.

But she still made something for them.

Soft green and white. She crocheted it in the years before she passed, knowing she would never be the one to place it in their hands. She sat in that chair and looped and pulled and looped and pulled, pouring her time into yarn for a child she would never meet. That blanket is not just fabric. It is her energy, stored in something that outlasted her. Something that could still hold long after she no longer could.

I think about that a lot. I think about what it means to pour yourself into something. Your hours. Your hands. Your years. And whether the thing you pour into actually holds.

Because most people are pouring into something that leaks.

I’ve done it too, and I know the exhaustion by heart. Go to work. Do the job. Collect the paycheck. Watch it disappear into bills, groceries, and the basic cost of staying afloat. Sleep. Wake up. Do it again. The hamster wheel does not care about your dreams or your plans or the life you meant to build. It only asks that you keep running.

And the dollars you earn on that wheel shrink while you sleep. Every year, the money you traded your precious, limited hours for buys a little less. That is inflation. Not an abstraction. A quiet theft. A slow siphoning of your effort. You run harder, and somehow fall further behind. That is not bad luck. That is the system doing exactly what it was built to do.

I did not fully understand it until 2020. When schools and businesses shut down, everything I had been too busy to notice suddenly had nowhere to hide. The loss of control. The pressure coming from every direction. The fear. But for some of us, the chaos of 2020 was not new. It was only the first time the rest of the world had language for it. I had been living in uncertainty for years. The world had simply caught up.

But something else happened when everything stopped.

I got curious.

For the first time in a long time, the wheel slowed down just enough for me to look up and ask a different question: What if I have been storing my life in the wrong container?

That is when I found Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not a stock. It is not a gamble. It is not a tech fantasy for people with too much time and too little sense.

Bitcoin is a container that holds, and protects the value of your work.

There will only ever be 21 million. No one can print more. No one can dilute it. No one can decide yours should be worth less because they need to rescue a bank, patch a broken system, or fund a war you never chose.

For the first time in human history, ordinary people have access to money that cannot be quietly weakened by someone far away making decisions on their behalf.

That is why it matters.

You work. You pour your time into something. And the question is whether the container holds.

Gram understood that, even if she never used those words. She did not pour herself into things that disappeared. She poured her love into cake recipes passed down for generations, and blankets, and a home that still stands. A home I live in now. A home that is still useful, still full of life.

She chose containers that lasted.

And now I am a mother, trying to build a life that looks different from working until age seventy-five, just to keep up with a system that never keeps what you give it. I am rewriting my life in real time. Part of that rewriting is choosing, deliberately and stubbornly, to stop pouring my energy into a container with a hole in the bottom.

I am choosing the container that holds.

Right now, in my living room, folded carefully inside a cedar chest, there is a blanket. Soft green and white. Made by hands that are no longer here. Made by a woman who understood that the truest gift you can give someone is your time, stored in something that lasts.

She did not know she was teaching me about Bitcoin.

But she was.