Stop for a second and think about how you normally describe inflation. Probably something like: "meat is expensive," "rent is expensive," "everything is expensive." It's the natural way to put it — but it's also a way of thinking that puts the problem in the wrong place.
Today's meat isn't more nutritious, rarer, or harder to produce than it was ten years ago. Real estate hasn't become more useful. A gallon of gas hasn't changed composition. What changed was something else: the ruler you're using to measure the value of things got shorter.
"Things are getting more expensive."
"My money is buying less and less."
The shrinking ruler
Imagine you measure people's height with a tape measure. Except every year, someone shrinks that tape measure a little — without telling anyone. People stay the same size, but with a shorter tape, everyone "appears" to be growing. Every time you measure someone, the number goes up — not because the person grew, but because your measuring tool shrank.
The dollar, the euro, and any other fiat currency are that tape measure. When a government issues more currency than the economy produces in new goods and services, each unit of that currency comes to represent a smaller fraction of the world's real wealth. The price of goods, measured in that currency, goes up — not because the goods are worth more, but because the currency is worth less.
A concrete example: the price of bread
Think of a loaf of bread. In terms of flour, yeast, energy, and labor required to produce it, that loaf is, at its core, basically the same product it was decades ago. What changes is how many units of local currency you need to hand over to get it:
| What stays the same | What changes |
|---|---|
| The bread (flour, yeast, labor, energy) | The amount of currency needed to buy it |
| The real value of the producer's labor | The purchasing power of each unit of currency |
| The product's usefulness in your life | The number printed on the price tag |
The bread didn't "decide" to be worth more. The currency is what got diluted — and the more units of it exist in circulation, the less each unit represents of the real wealth available in the world.
Illustrative representation: the number "$1" never changes — but what it can buy shrinks over time.
Why this shift in perspective matters
This isn't just a philosophical question of semantics. Changing how you see it completely changes the decisions you make with your money:
If you believe "things are getting expensive," the natural reaction is to try to buy less, wait, cut spending, and keep the leftover cash sitting in a checking or savings account — hoping prices "come back down."
If you understand that "my money is losing value over time," the logic flips: holding cash idle in a currency that's being diluted is, in practice, losing purchasing power every single day — even if the number in your account never goes down. The question stops being "what's going to get expensive?" and becomes "which asset can I store value in that can't be diluted?"
Your account balance can stay exactly the same for years — and you can still end up poorer. Because what matters isn't the number, it's what that number can buy.
Where Bitcoin comes into this story
This is exactly where the comparison with Bitcoin becomes useful. Unlike the dollar, the euro, or any currency issued by a central bank, Bitcoin has a fixed maximum supply of 21 million units, defined in code since 2009 and impossible to change by political decision.
That means that while the "tape measure" of fiat currencies keeps shrinking year after year, Bitcoin's unit of measurement stays fixed. That's why, when you measure the price of goods, real estate, or even other currencies in Bitcoin over long cycles, the pattern that emerges is exactly the opposite of what we see with the dollar: the number tends to fall, because it's the unit of measurement that's staying scarce — while everything else is being measured in currencies that keep getting diluted.
That doesn't mean Bitcoin's dollar price doesn't swing in the short term — it does, quite a lot. But the underlying thesis is different from that of any fiat currency: on one side, a unit of account with growing, unlimited supply; on the other, one with fixed supply that anyone can audit.
Tracking this in practice
One way to visualize this phenomenon in your own financial life is to track, over time, how much of your wealth sits in fixed-supply assets (like Bitcoin) versus how much sits in currency that's losing purchasing power. Comparing how your average contribution price in local currency and USD evolves against other assets — gold, treasury bonds, the S&P 500, a local stock index — helps make visible, with real numbers, what usually stays hidden inside "the price of things."
What to do with this information
The next time you feel like "everything is expensive," it's worth making this small mental shift: instead of asking "why did this get so expensive?", ask "what happened to my money that it now needs more units to buy the same thing?"
This isn't investment advice, nor a promise of returns — it's an invitation to reflect on how we measure value and on the structural incentives of each monetary system. It's up to each person to study, understand the risks, and make their own decisions responsibly.
Track the real evolution of your wealth
Use BSafe's portfolio-tracking tool to monitor your contributions, average price in USD and your local currency, and compare your performance against Bitcoin, gold, bonds, and the S&P 500.
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