Today, pensions face a cascade of challenges — aging demographics, negative real yields, and a monetary system addicted to debt. For decades, the traditional 60/40 portfolio provided stability and predictable returns.
But that foundation is cracking. Bonds no longer hedge risk. Equities are increasingly correlated with central bank policy. And the math behind long-term promises no longer adds up. In this environment, countless investors are asking the same question: where can real value still be found?
For me, the answer started with an unexpected detour.
In the spring of 2020, I was running a successful benefits consulting practice that included several pension plans. When the Canadian government closed the country down and paid everyone to stay home, I became curious about the effects of money printing and inflation.
I spent lockdown reading economics textbooks until Amazon handed me The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth. Booth's thesis is that the natural state of the free market is deflation, and we are unable to achieve deflation in prices because our monetary system requires ongoing inflation to remain solvent. The system that is making life progressively more unaffordable is not broken; it's working exactly as it's meant to.
Bitcoin solves this problem by offering global access to a finite form of money, money whose supply cannot be inflated. A simple solution to a problem faced by every economic actor- what is the best way to protect capital in a system where money devalues by design? The answer is money that cannot be arbitrarily diluted.
What began as curiosity quickly turned into obsession. Bitcoin wasn't just a speculative asset — it was a paradigm shift. The more I learned, the more I began to wonder what it meant for the world I had spent my entire career thinking about: employer-sponsored savings plans.
How does a finite currency save a pension system built on inflationary money? My initial reaction after understanding Bitcoin was that every pension would need to own it; however, the further I delved into the topic, the more I realized that a more fundamental change is required.
Bitcoin and the Limits of Institutional Thinking
For a century, pensions promised safety through collective management. Professionals invested on your behalf, smoothing volatility and ensuring a predictable retirement. That approach worked in an era of population growth and steady inflation — but that world is gone. Pensions have been slow to consider Bitcoin because it doesn't look like an institutional asset. Its volatility, independence, and transparency don't fit the molds built for predictability and control.
Pensions are bureaucratic by nature. Layers of trustees, consultants, and actuaries exist to diffuse responsibility, not to hold conviction. Every decision is filtered through committees that fear volatility more than insolvency. Bitcoin, by contrast, rewards conviction and punishes hesitation. When it falls seventy percent, an individual might see an opportunity; a pension board calls an emergency meeting.
The mismatch runs deeper than temperament. Bitcoin's fixed issuance schedule extends to 2140 — a timeline marked by halvings and generations. Pensions think in quarters and election cycles. One thrives on scarcity, the other on inflation. Pensions depend on rising prices to appear solvent, while Bitcoin preserves purchasing power. Bitcoin is grounded in energy and mathematics; pensions, on the other hand, rely on faith — faith in policy, in promises, and in the ever-changing guidance of central bankers.
Even the definition of "safety" diverges. To pensions, safety means stability — achieved by accepting slow, predictable loss of purchasing power. Bonds guarantee real losses, equities ride inflation, and real estate depends on endless credit. Diversifying across fiat assets doesn't protect anyone from the fiat system itself. True safety means diversifying across monetary systems — something only individuals can do.
That's why "institutional Bitcoin" will always be a façade. Adding Bitcoin to a pension portfolio may boost returns on paper, but that's not the same as owning Bitcoin. ETFs and custodians repackage their freedom into paper claims and compliance wrappers — exposure without sovereignty.
When you hold Bitcoin yourself, you hold final settlement. When an institution does, it holds a paper promise for you. Bitcoin is digital money: borderless, permissionless, and designed to be held by the owner.
The Individual Solution: Become Your Own Pension
If pensions can't hold actual Bitcoin, who can? You can. Your employees can. Your coworkers can. Bitcoin is the most secure savings technology that has ever existed. It was literally made for this purpose.
For the first time in history, ordinary workers can save in a money that doesn't decay. Buying Bitcoin is moving wealth from a system where units of currency become worth less as the total number of units grows, to a system where the total number of units can never change.
There's no fund manager, no middleman, and no permission required. No need to gamble hard-earned wages on sectors and markets. It's simple. Averaging into Bitcoin over time builds real wealth that no traditional portfolio can replicate. Bitcoin savers are accumulating money that is permanently scarce under the premise that, over time, scarce money will become valuable to a growing audience who come to the same realization that Jeff Booth did. The value of your money and everyone else's must be sacrificed to keep our debt-based money system solvent.
This is the premise behind the Bitcoin Savings Plan — to use the workplace as an access point while preserving individual ownership. Employers facilitate; employees own. No trustees. No actuaries. No opaque fund structures. Just savings in the hardest money ever discovered.
Saving in finite money is a rational response to understanding that government currency is infinite. Saving in Bitcoin is opting out of inflation. How can I secure my savings for the future with confidence? The answer is with the only asset whose characteristics will be the same 20 years from now as they are today.
Twenty-one million Bitcoins will exist, with a fixed monetary policy in effect until 2140. Most people working today won't still be retired when the last Bitcoin is issued.
The Cultural Shift: From Dependency to Sovereignty
Bitcoin isn't just a financial change; it's a mental one. It gives responsibility back to the individual. Holding your own keys means controlling your future. It requires discipline, planning, and the willingness to face the consequences.
The pension system is paternalistic: Don't worry, we'll take care of it for you.
Bitcoin flips that idea: No one is coming to save you — you have to do it yourself.
This change can feel difficult because it removes the safety net of blame. But it also brings dignity and hope back. Prepare for the future by saving in an asset designed to thrive in a world with ongoing inflation. It's the ultimate digital asset for a digital age.
A New Definition of Retirement
Retirement used to mean the end of one's working life. In a Bitcoin world, it means the end of dependency. When money loses value as quickly as ours does today, most of us have to trust someone else to gamble ours well enough to give us a chance at having enough when we need it later in life. Bitcoin provides us a simpler and more empowering path.
When savings are self-custodied and portable, financial freedom is no longer something that arrives at 65. It's a by-product of consistent, disciplined saving in sound money. Individuals can step back, move, or reinvent themselves at any point — because their wealth isn't trapped in a bureaucratic vault labeled "future." Every dollar converted to Bitcoin is spent time preserved in a financial battery engineered to avoid decay.
Freedom now, not later. I think this is something that will resonate more with the saver who is thinking less about 40 years in the future. Who has less trust in institutions, less faith in the government, and less appetite for slow-moving strategies.
Bitcoin offers liquidity at the expense of tax deferment. For the saver, that means you can access your funds at any time. Long-term thinking and discipline are required. It also means you can benefit from your accumulated savings as you live your working life. Want to buy your first home? Saving in Bitcoin is the simplest way to get there. A house in Canada in 2015 was worth 1,000 Bitcoin, and today it's roughly 6.
The Hard Truth
This isn't an argument against pensions; it's an argument for a systemic upgrade. The current system isn't malicious — it's obsolete. It was designed for a world of stable demographics, industrial growth, and predictable money. That world no longer exists.
Trust in institutions is fading. Soaring grocery prices are showing us all that an infinitely expanding money supply doesn't work. The pension model depends on both. Bitcoin relies on neither. The answer isn't to reform the old system — it's to transcend it.
Fix the Saver, Not the System
Bitcoin won't save the pension system. However, it can save the people trapped inside. And maybe that's the only kind of rescue that matters today.
We believe we need complex financial strategies because the world we live in is full of risk and uncertainty. It's natural to think the greater the disorder, the more we should rely on someone else for help. Why would anyone gamble their money if they could save it and have confidence that the strategy would work?
Organizations will consider helping their employees save Bitcoin one by one, just like the adoption of every other previous information technology, such as email, instant messaging, and AI, which ultimately became normal over the past 70 years. Today, for many, the idea is scary, but the truth is the current tools are not designed to uphold the promises being made to the hard-working people who give their time and energy helping their employers thrive.
Start a Bitcoin Savings Plan at your company today.
Every saver in Bitcoin is penalized the later they start.