We're All Traders Now

Note: This post is an updated and expanded version of an article I originally wrote a few months back.

At the time I’m writing this, one Bitcoin is worth about $94,000 USD. But if you’re sitting in Istanbul, that same Bitcoin is worth 4.1 million Turkish lira. If you’re in Lagos, it’s 184 million Nigerian naira.

Same asset, wildly different realities.

Even with the market cooling off significantly in Q4, 2025 has been a massive year for crypto. For Americans, Bitcoin is actually down about ~5% due to a Q4 pullback - but in Turkey? It’s up nearly 240%. When your local currency is melting, "volatility" looks a lot like "insurance."

This isn’t just pointing out differentials in exchange rates - it’s a sign of a much bigger shift: that "money" isn't a physical thing anymore. Money is simply data.

The Death of the Bill Fold People still talk about "cash," but physical money is basically a ghost. Only about 8% of the world’s money exists as actual bills or coins. The other 92% of "cash" exists entirely an entries in databases—numbers on a screen, bits moving through a wire.

In other words - your net worth and mine isn't a stack of hundreds in a vault; it's a line of code in a bank’s ledger or a record on a blockchain. Even that $20 bill in your pocket only works because we’ve all agreed to pretend that specific piece of paper has value. It’s a social contract, not a physical reality.

Stablecoins: The New Plumbing A year or two ago, "stablecoins" were a niche crypto term. In 2025, they’re on track to process $18 trillion. That’s more than the volume of Visa and Mastercard combined.

This isn't "experimental" anymore—it’s the new plumbing of the global economy. Stablecoins are faster, cheaper, and they don't care about borders or bank holidays. They bypass the massive "interchange fees" that credit card companies live on. This is why you see the US passing the GENIUS Act and Europe implementing MiCA. Governments aren't trying to stop digital cash anymore; they’re trying to make sure they still have a seat at the table.

Programmable Money Bitcoin proved that you don't need a government to make money "real"—you just need consensus. If enough people agree a ledger entry has value, it has value.

But now, we’re taking it a step further: we’re making money programmable. We have platforms like J.P. Morgan’s Onyx that move money automatically when certain conditions are met. We have smart contracts where the money essentially has its own "brain." Money is becoming code that can move itself, tax itself, or even expire if it isn't used.

The Money Matrix Even the people in charge are admitting the game has changed. Jerome Powell calls Bitcoin "digital gold." Central banks are realizing that the US dollar's total dominance isn't a law of nature—it’s just a trend that might be ending.

Once you stop seeing money as "cash" and start seeing it as a "data stream," everything changes. Geography starts to matter less than which network you trust. Your financial reality depends entirely on which ledger you decide to live in.

We’re All Traders Now This is where it gets really interesting. Because money is now data, and we have AI that can process data in milliseconds, the "average person" now has tools that used to be reserved for high-frequency hedge funds.

We can see the gaps between different currencies and different realities in real-time. With 137 countries building their own digital currencies (CBDCs), we aren't just digitizing the dollar or the euro—we are completely reimagining what value even is.

The question isn't if money will become entirely digital and relative. We’re already there. Your wealth depends less on what you "own" and more on what kind of data you're holding.

Like it or not, the era of "set it and forget it" money is over. We’re all traders now. And we’re just getting started.