🪙 The Rupee Illusion
Why 2025 Is the Year to Rethink Everything You Know About Money
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
— The Usual Suspects (1995)
Look at that note in your wallet. Feel it. Crisp, perhaps a little worn. You traded your time, your energy, your skill – a piece of your finite, precious life – for it. You trust it implicitly. You use it to put food on the table, to keep a roof over your head, to dare to dream a little for your children’s future. It’s the bedrock of your daily existence, the language of your transactions.
But have you ever truly stopped to interrogate it? Have you ever held it up to the light and asked:
What is this thing, really? Beyond the ink, the paper, the authoritative symbols – what power does it truly hold, and who grants it that power?
We’re born into this world of money. Rupees, dollars, euros – they’re just there. Like the air we breathe or the gravity that pins us to the earth. We absorb the rules by osmosis from our first breath: earn it, spend it, try desperately to save some of it. Just don’t question the game itself. It’s just… money. It’s just how the world works.
Or does it? Is that unquestioning acceptance a product of understanding, or of conditioning?
📉 The Ever-Shrinking Rupee
You’ve felt it. The quiet unease. The sense that no matter how hard you work, how much you plan, something is always off. That uneasy feeling? It’s not in your head. It’s not bad luck. It’s by design.
Think back to the stories your grandparents told. Of movie tickets bought with a few Anna. Of land that cost less than your monthly grocery bill. Of a rupee that meant something. Those stories now sound like mythology. But they’re not fiction. They’re a window into what we’ve lost.
Fast-forward to today: the cup of chai that gets pricier each year, the rent that climbs like it’s racing you, the school fees that make you question whether you’re saving for your child’s future or someone else’s. Your salary rises, sure – but never fast enough. You run harder and faster just to stay in the same place.
Why? Is this just “how it is”? Or is this treadmill part of the trap? Why is that? Is it just an inevitable, unfortunate law of nature, "how things are"? Or is it an engineered feature of the very paper in your pocket, a characteristic conveniently left out of the instruction manual nobody ever gave you? A silent tax on your future, bleeding you dry one day at a time?
Because once you understand how fiat works – once you see the game – you realize the devastating truth:
Your money is designed to lose value.
You are programmed to fail slowly, quietly, obediently.
It’s called inflation, but that’s a sterilized euphemism. Let’s call it what it is: theft. A system where ‘unelected bureaucrats can dilute your money at will – and you get to pay the price with your future, your life.’
🏛 Who Prints Your Reality?
Do you know who controls the supply of the rupee?
Who decides how many notes to print, how many digits to inject into the economy, how much purchasing power to silently delete from your life?
You don’t.
They don’t ask you.
They don’t tell you.
They don’t need your consent.
Central banks operate in closed rooms, issuing silent laws that reshape our life without ever touching a ballot. They call it "monetary policy."
You feel it as rising petrol prices, vanishing savings, and a future that slips through your fingers like dry sand.
But here’s the deeper scam — the one they buried under centuries of colonial narrative, academic fog, and economic jargon.
For thousands of years, India didn’t run on paper.
We ran on value.
On rūpya — silver. On suvarṇa — gold.
Panini spoke of it. Chanakya wrote in-depth about it in Arthashastra. Sher Shah minted it. The Mauryas, Guptas, Mughals — all honored it. Coined money backed by tangible metal. Real weight. Real worth. Real wealth.
Then came the British — with a smile and a ledger.
They took our silver.
They took our gold.
And they gave us promises.
Worthless paper notes backed by a foreign crown whose only asset was deception. In 1835, they imposed a mono-metallic silver standard. By 1898, they switched to a “limping” gold standard — not to protect Indians, but to control them. We weren’t invited to that conversation. We were collateral.
You see, the British didn’t conquer India with guns alone.
They did it with ledgers and lies.
They exported our wealth and imported inflation.
They devalued our silver and bought back our gold — cheap — with paper printed in London.
Between 1931 and 1941, over 43 million ounces of gold left Indian soil. Not looted by force, but extracted through trickery. Indians willingly gave up their family gold — their security, their legacy — in exchange for British IOUs with no intrinsic value. The same sleight of hand Roosevelt pulled in America. The same fiat con the entire modern world now kneels under.
Imagine this:
You bake ten loaves of bread — honest, hard-earned, tangible value.
Then someone with a magic oven prints a thousand identical loaves overnight.
Suddenly, your ten loaves mean nothing.
That’s fiat.
That’s the game.
That’s the scam that replaced our sovereign coin with colonial control — now repackaged in Reserve Bank logos and ₹ symbols.
Your time is being counterfeited.
Your labour is being debased.
And you’re told to be grateful.
But what they won’t tell you is this:
You’re not using money. You’re using permission slips.
Slips that can be revoked. Frozen. Inflated.
Slips that represent nothing but trust in a system that has historically betrayed you.
This isn’t just about inflation.
This is about sovereignty.
And until you hold your wealth in something they can’t print, inflate, or confiscate —
you are not free.
Bitcoin doesn’t ask for permission.
It doesn’t need a governor’s signature.
It doesn’t steal your wealth while you sleep.
It is the antithesis of fiat.
It is the undoing of this 200-year-old scam.
The rupee was once a coin of silver.
Now it’s just a symbol of how easily a nation can be tricked into giving up value for paper.
🖥 How Modern Money Is Printed into Existence
Hint: It’s not you. It’s not your elected leaders. It’s not even your government.
Today, money isn’t printed in the way most people think — with physical notes rolling off some minting press. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The real money — the bulk of it — is created digitally, at the push of a button, by central banks like the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Federal Reserve in the U.S., the European Central Bank, and so on. And in coordination with them are commercial banks that expand this money supply further through fractional-reserve lending, whaich makes a bulk of our money supply today.
Let’s break this down.
Step 1: The Central Bank’s Magic Keyboard
Central banks have the exclusive power to create base money — also known as high-powered money. In India, that’s done by the RBI, which controls the issuance of the rupee.
But this power doesn’t just mean printing physical cash.
Most of the money created today is digital. The RBI simply ‘adds numbers’ to the balance sheets of commercial banks. This is called monetary expansion.
How?
It buys government bonds (IOUs) from banks. (A glorified piece of paper)
To pay for them, it credits the bank’s account at the RBI.
Where did that money come from? Nowhere. It was conjured into existence.
This is called Open Market Operations. It’s the central bank’s way of injecting liquidity — i.e., creating money — into the financial system.
But that’s just the first act. The bigger scam starts now.
Step 2: Commercial Banks Multiply the Illusion
Enter fractional-reserve banking — the real money multiplier.
Let’s say the RBI gives ₹1,000 crore in base money to a bank. The bank can then legally lend out a multiple of that amount — often up to 10x or more — based on “reserves” held.
So from ₹1,000 crore in actual central bank money, the bank can generate ₹10,000 crore in credit out of thin air.
That’s right: when you take a loan — for a house, a car, a business — the bank doesn’t lend out deposits. It creates new money by typing it into your account. It’s all keystrokes.
Every time a loan is issued, new money is born.
Every time you repay a loan, that money disappears.
The entire fiat system is debt-based. Money only exists because someone, somewhere, is in debt. And to keep the system alive, more debt must always be created.
Step 3: The Government Spends the Borrowed Illusion
Governments don’t fund themselves with taxes. That’s a myth.
Taxes are just a backdoor method to destroy purchasing power and control behavior, a mere means to keep the illusion alive.
When governments need money, they issue bonds — IOUs.
These are then bought by:
Banks
Insurance companies
Foreign central banks
Or... in times of crisis, by the central bank itself
When the RBI buys Indian government bonds, it’s essentially monetizing the debt — financing government spending with freshly printed money.
This causes the money supply to balloon. But there's a catch: no new value is created, only new claims on existing value.
The result? Inflation — the hidden tax that slowly bleeds your savings, erodes your salary, and punishes prudence.
So How Is This a Ponzi?
Because it requires constant growth of new debt to pay off old debt. Just like a Ponzi scheme:
The system must keep expanding.
New money must keep being created.
More people must take loans.
Interest must be paid on this ever-expanding debt.
When growth stops? The whole illusion collapses.
In a real economy, growth comes from productivity. In a fiat economy, growth comes from debt and manipulation.
Just like a Ponzi scheme, the fiat system is unsustainable without endless new entrants and new victims.
But this is worse than Madoff. This is legalized, institutionalized theft — sanctioned by governments, enforced by law, and sold to you as “economic policy.”
What Does This Mean for You?
Your savings are being silently taxed.
Your labour is being devalued year after year.
Your wealth is being siphoned upwards through inflation, asset bubbles, and financial repression.
You have no vote. No consent. No opt-out.
Unless... you choose the one exit door they can’t control.
The Fragile Promise: Built on Trust or Quicksand?
What truly stands behind that colourful piece of paper in your hand? Once, perhaps, it was a claim on something tangible, like gold or silver – a solid anchor. What is it now?
A promise?
A collective belief?
Blind trust?
If it's a promise, whose promise is it, and what are the terms and conditions, buried deep in fine print you've never seen? What happens if that promise becomes… flexible, convenient to reinterpret, or even quietly broken over decades of monetary manipulation?
If it’s trust, is that trust blindly given, a relic of a more innocent age, or is it continuously earned through transparency and sound stewardship?
Look around. Does it feel like stewardship, or something else entirely?
The Rebellious Spark: When Discomfort Means You're Waking Up
These questions might feel uncomfortable. They might churn your insides. They might even feel a bit… subversive, rebellious. Good. That means you're alive. That means the anaesthesia of conformity is wearing off.
This isn't about finding all the answers today, or even tomorrow. It’s about daring to ignite the spark of questioning. It's about taking that first, hesitant, but crucial peek down a rabbit hole you perhaps never even noticed was there, a hole that might just reveal a vastly different reality about the very foundation of your economic life.
What if this "money" you've trusted, toiled for, and built your dreams upon your entire life is more of an elaborate illusion than a steadfast, reliable store of your hard-earned value? What if its primary function has subtly shifted from empowering you, to controlling you?
Perhaps you think these are lonely thoughts, whispers in a void. They are not.
🍕 Bitcoin Pizza Day India Meetups
This coming Thursday, on May 22nd, small groups of people — just like you, who began with a question, a doubt, a flicker of curiosity — will be gathering across India to celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day.
They meet, they talk, they share ideas, and yes, they often eat pizza. They are not "experts" you need to be intimidated by; they are everyday individuals exploring these very questions, seeking clarity in a world designed to obscure.
If these words have struck a chord, if that flicker of curiosity is burning within you, maybe it’s time to see you’re not alone. The journey down the rabbit hole often begins not with an answer, but with a conversation, a shared moment of realization.
Meetups are happening in cities across India this Bitcoin Pizza Day. Miss that dinner party if you must. Reschedule that movie night. But if you’ve felt the pull — the quiet intuition that something isn’t right — come join us. ⤵️
📍Bengaluru: Thursday, May 22nd | 7 PM | Bitspace, HSR
📍Goa: Thursday, May 22nd | 7 PM | Olio's Benaulim
📍Chennai: Thursday, May 22nd | 7 PM | Lazy Leopard
📍Indore: Thursday, May 22nd | 7 PM | Little Italy
📍Hyderabad: Thursday, May 22nd | 7 PM | Bourbon & Breeze
📍Chandigarh: Thursday, May 22nd | 7 PM | Oven Fresh, 35C
📍Golaghat, Assam: Thursday, May 22nd | 12 PM | The Tea Factory Cafe
📍Bhubaneswar: Saturday, May 24th | 6 PM | The Average Guy Cafe
📍Mumbai: Sunday, May 25th | 12 PM | Terttulia, Dadar
You can find more details and RSVP below.
No pressure. No agenda. Just an opportunity to listen, to meet others who are looking beyond the paper in their wallets, who dare to ask "why?".
We’ll be there. We’ve been where you are.
And the pizza’s pretty good too.
🛤️ The First Step: Dare to See
Start wondering. Start questioning. Hold that note again. Feel it.
And ask: What is this really worth — and who decides?
You might not like the answer. But you’ll never see the world the same way again.
The choice, as always, is yours. But once you start asking, once you truly start seeing, there's often no going back to blissful ignorance. The journey of a thousand miles begins with this single, courageous question.
⚡Stay sovereign. Stack sats.
~Satori