Café Bitcoin | John Haar Returns for Macro and Mining, 55 Years Off Gold | Day 28 of 50

John Haar, back for his first Café appearance since leaving Swan for Blockware, opens on the 55th anniversary of the Nixon Shock. His argument: gold's own physical properties, the time, trust, and armed transport required to settle in it, are what let the 1971 dollar-gold break happen and stick. No one could credibly refuse. Asked whether the US might literally "back" the dollar with Bitcoin, John pushes back on the framing. He doesn't see explicit convertibility returning; more likely a sovereign-wealth-fund-style holding that supports confidence in the currency without any fixed exchange rate. Confiscation history, and 1971 counted as one. Executive Order 6102 in 1933, a little-known 1959 Australian law forcing gold surrender to the Reserve Bank, and a 1966 UK law capping residents at four gold coins. John's read: severing convertibility was itself an indirect seizure, since dollar holders lost access to the metal without a single coin being confiscated. The confiscation trade-off, stated plainly: Bitcoin can vanish in an instant through a mistake; fiat vanishes slowly through inflation. John argues neither risk profile is fully solved, which is why he expects Bitcoin and fiat to coexist for a long time, and why he points listeners toward collaborative multisig self-custody (Vault, Unchained, Casa) over solo cold storage. The debt numbers, from three directions at once. US debt crossed $40 trillion this week; annual interest has passed defense spending and sits behind only Medicare and Social Security. Suze: UK debt interest is running around £109 billion a year, more than the entire education and defence budgets combined, about £3,220 per working person. Roxana adds a year-by-year US/UK comparison back to 2021, the pandemic as the shock that reset the baseline. ⭐ A genuinely sharp MMT critique from John, anchored to a receipt: Larry Summers, a mainstream economist with no sound-money priors, posted in 2022 that 2022's CPI would have peaked near 18% under the old inflation methodology instead of the reported 9%. John's broader point: Modern Monetary Theory's post-2008 "QE doesn't cause inflation" claim was really about QE backfilling a contracting money supply, and MMTers overextended that into a general rule that collapsed against 2022's numbers. Frank Corva's field report from a 2023 screening of the MMT documentary "Finding the Money": a viral clip of establishment economist Jared Bernstein fumbling a question on how money is created was cut by MMT advocates to claim the mainstream doesn't understand money either, while, per Frank, the film's own thesis pushes further left than the Keynesian it mocks. His two go-to informed politicians on this material: Nick Begich (introduced the Bitcoin Act) and Warren Davidson. Frank's number of the day: minimum wage measured in gold. Federal minimum wage has gone from $1.60/hour in July 1971 to today's rate; priced in gold instead of dollars, that 1971 wage would be roughly $198/hour, about $8,000 a week now. Cory joins from Istanbul to argue the dollar remains "the cleanest shirt in the dirty laundry" globally, that gold has again overtaken Treasuries as the top central-bank reserve asset, and that today's AI capex bubble likely resolves in a Bitcoin-negative risk-off phase before capital rotates back in, on a multi-year timeline. ⭐ Mining block: John lays out five reasons Bitcoin's 2021-2025 hashrate growth won't repeat, tied throughout to the AI buildout competing for the same capital, chips, and power contracts: the unrepeatable 2021 mining economics, public miners pivoting to AI/HPC data centers, slowing ASIC development as chipmakers prioritize AI silicon, AI's ability to lock long-duration power contracts miners can't match, and the sheer physical scale needed to double an already-large network. At current ~920 exahash, he estimates a nation-state attack would require roughly 2 million frontier ASICs and $10 billion in capex, still a high bar.