Plunging Bitcoin shows why hard currency is a safer bet

In Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep, the novelist imagines a world hundreds of years in the future where humanity has regressed to a mediaeval standard of living, population and way of thinking.

Towards the end of the book we learn what might have caused this calamity: not a pandemic, meteorite strike or nuclear war but a complete collapse in the digital economy.

From payment systems to just-in-time supply chains and the wealth of machinery that supports our lifestyles, the modern economy is almost wholly dependent on digital instruction.

If everything went down all at the same time, a state of anarchy would rapidly establish itself. In the ensuing chaos, it would be every man for himself with likely devastating consequences for lives and civilisation more widely.

It is admittedly hard to imagine what combination of circumstances might completely and lastingly disable the digital economy – nonetheless, cyber threats are very much a real, present and fast increasing danger.

Once that demand stabilises or falls then the whole store-of-value illusion begins to collapse. 

Whether the threat from quantum computing is real or not, it’s giving plenty of pause for thought and appears to be quite seriously damaging attempts by Donald Trump’s White House to normalise crypto as a respectable asset class.

Jeremy Warner Telegraph 04 February 2026

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/04/the-quantum-existential-threat-to-crypto/


The closest thing is Leave the World Behind, which vividly depicts the chaos into which this country would descend if all our technology — from our iPhones to our Teslas — simultaneously stopped working.

When Americans switch on their flat-screen TVs, they seriously want to Leave the World Behind. Rather than contemplate dystopian futures, they prefer to immerse themselves in the Taylor Swift cult — a form of mass escapism that recalls the mania for screen goddesses in the isolationist 1930s.

Niall Ferguson Bloomberg 11 februari 2024

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/02/alternative-histories-of-major.html


Robert Harris Fatherland 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56842.Fatherland

Alternate History

https://internetional.se/bookskontrafaktisk.htm

Books that imagine that history took a different course

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/11/books-that-imagine-that-history-took.html


The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-doom-loop.html


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