Disclaimer: This is not investment advice.
It is a philosophical survival essay by a small business owner currently holding Bitcoin and Apple stock. You are entirely responsible for your own investments.
0. Prologue: The Matrix and the Lifeboat
The KOSPI crossed 5,500.
A number hallucinated by the AI bubble.
My portfolio (Bitcoin + Apple) is bleeding at -20%.
But I sleep like a baby.
The modern welfare state is a Ponzi scheme.
The illusion of OpenAI’s infinite growth pumps dollar liquidity.
Politicians seize the moment, print bonds, and keep the rotting machine running.
I didn’t buy Bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee.
I bought it as a put option against the inevitable bankruptcy of the democratic matrix.
The heritage of Bitcoin is a fortress built on the desperate survival struggles of small business owners and the youth.
This is a survival manual.
Right now, the US stock market is correcting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Meanwhile, the Korean market is in an unprecedented boom.
As the P/E ratios of US Big Tech peaked,
the overflowing liquidity flooded into Korea’s AI and defense sectors.
But inside the AI industry, the pipes are leaking.
Suspicions of circular trading.
Redundant investments.
Crippling depreciation costs.
And absolutely no revenue model.
Here is the scenario I see:
The OpenAI bubble bursts
→ Liquidity crunch
→ Mass dumping of non-reserve sovereign bonds from reckless spenders like Korea and France
→ Governments must print debt or the system dies, but they cannot raise interest rates
→ Central banks accept hyperinflation and run the money printers
→ The livelihoods of small business owners are obliterated.
The US has the ultimate printing press.
For them, even this crash will be a form of ‘creative destruction’—a healthy restructuring.
But Korea and France are different.
They are recklessly burning the incoming liquidity by issuing astronomical debt.
Korea and France have unusually high populations of small business owners.
As a writer studying the survival philosophy of these very people, this crisis feels deeply personal.
Let’s first look at the scam the politicians are running.
1. The God of Democracy is Dead
(1) The Sweet Promises of Democracy
Politicians grab the mic.
“Opportunities will be equal. Processes will be fair. Results will be just.”
“We will build a nation you’ve never experienced.”
“A 4.5-day workweek and universal basic income will secure your lives.”
When the applause dies down, someone asks,
“Who pays the bill?”
They smile and reply.
“The complete eradication of unearned income.
We will punish the crypto bros and landlords.
With punitive inheritance taxes and heavy levies on multiple homeowners,
we will legally loot the vaults of the rich and distribute the wealth to you.”
The crowd cheers.
The rich break a cold sweat.
They call their accountants. They crunch the numbers. The math works out.
Change to non-resident status, route through overseas shell companies.
There are loopholes.
Throw in investment tax cuts and employment subsidies, and they can breathe just fine.
So, they decide to do nothing.
Why?
Running away is a hassle.
Starting something new burns capital.
Sitting still is profitable.
The President is pleased.
“See? Bring me the statistics showing the rich haven’t fled.”
The statisticians shut their mouths. Corporations scatter like wet cats.
The ones bleeding out are someone else.
The immigration seminar halls in Gangnam are standing-room only.
These are the people who once rolled in the mud, working day and night to be the best, barely clawing their way to the ‘middle’.
The anonymous, nothing-to-lose majority puts these strivers’ necks on the guillotine of the “law.”
“Invest your money and hire us for life, or we’ll squeeze your soul for property taxes.”
These strivers are trying to escape their highly democratic, welfare-drenched motherland.
Someone asks them,
“Aren’t you afraid of living in a foreign land where you don’t speak the language
and don’t even know your neighbor’s name?”
They reply.
“No one listens to my voice here anyway.
Not knowing who lives next door—it’s the same in Seoul as it is over there.”
They are right.
If society is a place where you can’t communicate and no one knows each other,
they are physically in Korea, but they are no longer citizens.
Even the beneficiaries of this democratic welfare occasionally doubt the setup.
“Is this system really okay?
If I can’t reach the top, it’s more profitable to just lie on the bottom and eat the rations.
There’s no reason to try hard.”
As anxiety spreads, the government injects the drug called “Technology.”
“Do not worry. AI will do 10 hours of work in 1 hour. We will tax the robots and feed you all.”
They vomit out projects plastered with the “AI” label: Sovereign AI, Physical AI, Mistral AI, Senior AI. They promise subsidies, government-led jobs, and knowledge data centers.
It doesn’t matter if it’s just pouring concrete or creating fake jobs where seniors copy-paste a few lines of code in Excel.
The public tilts their heads.
“Do you have proof?”
The President shows off 300,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
Chaebol chairmen take the stage with mics.
The public cheers.
“You had a plan all along. KOSPI 5500, let’s go.”
The National Assembly corners the corporations.
“Burn your treasury shares, or go to jail for breach of trust?”
If they don’t burn the stock, they violate their fiduciary duty to shareholders, they say.
Corporations open their vaults with trembling hands.
The stock market catches fire.
The casting is complete.
The truly exceptional have already stayed to parasitize the system.
Those who cannot be exceptional remain, waiting for their rations.
But those who wanted to be exceptional are packing their bags right now.
Nassim Taleb said it best:
“The democratic politician who claims to fight for the poor routinely screams at his bodyguards and waiters. To them, the poor exist only as an abstract symbol.”
He is right.
Democratic politicians do not believe in the autonomy of the masses.
They do not govern for the masses.
They govern only for themselves.
They believe only they can represent the general will of the people and enlighten them.
They believe they are exceptional.
But deep down, they harbor doubts about their own ‘legitimacy’.
So, they elevate democracy to the realm of the divine.
They build a sanctuary that no one can refute.
Who dares to dissent at an altar prepared with the blood and sweat of the dead?
The father of democracy, Rousseau, was actually an elitist.
Think about it.
If he truly believed in the power of the masses, the state should have stopped at merely protecting property rights. As Frédéric Bastiat argued, the law should defend justice, not commit plunder.
But Rousseau had little hope for the masses.
To him, the masses were a mob. His desire to be a king remained intact.
He simply substituted the ‘legitimacy’ he couldn’t inherit by birth with the ‘general will’.
(2) The Hopeless Kingdom of Mediocrity is Propped Up by Debt
In this kingdom, only democratic politicians are allowed to be exceptional.
The rest are forced into mediocrity.
Nietzsche doubted the promises of freedom, progress, and equality.
“We are by no means ‘liberal’;
we are not working for ‘progress’;
we don’t need to plug our ears to the marketplace’s sirens of the future: what they sing – ‘equal rights’, ‘free society’, ‘no more masters and no servants’ – has no allure for us.
We hold it absolutely undesirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the most profound levelling down to mediocrity and chinoiserie).”
He saw that in such a society, the spirit striving for individual excellence is castrated.
Thus, he urged individuals to sail out to the open sea to build their own kingdoms.
But there is one thing Nietzsche didn’t mention.
In this Kingdom of Mediocrity where everyone supposedly gets freedom, progress, and equality, who bears the responsibility?
In the Kingdom of Mediocrity, everyone has a vote.
Therefore, no one takes responsibility.
The burden simply shifts to the generation without votes.
The unborn future generations are debtors before they even take their first breath.
In a country like this, even Martin Luther would buy an indulgence and say,
“Whatever, I’m just going to lie down.”
Those with votes hold the indulgences and escape responsibility.
Only the voteless are sinners.
Just look at the medical welfare scene to see how recklessly the government bleeds money.
Let’s take a tour.
[🇰🇷 South Korea’s K-Medical Salon]
Open the door of an average orthopedic clinic,
and you can see exactly how this massive welfare state is being eaten alive from the inside.
Two doctors in the consultation rooms.
Twenty massage therapists in the manual therapy center down the hall.
The moment your ass hits the chair, the question flies:
“You have private indemnity insurance, right?”
Nod your head, and the consultation is over in exactly 1 minute and 28 seconds.
The receipt is packed tight with non-covered drugs, manual therapy, and extracorporeal shockwave therapy. It’s like a full-course tasting menu.
The doctor doesn’t explain.
He doesn’t have time.
The patient doesn’t ask.
With one tap of a claim button on a smartphone app, the out-of-pocket cost is absolute zero anyway.
The gleaming “Seoul National University College of Medicine Specialist” plaque, the pristine white coat, and a few scribbled lines of Latin on the prescription put the patient at ease.
We are quiet accomplices, plundering each other’s insurance premiums.
You are guided to the massage center behind the curtains.
There are no wall clocks.
The smell of cheap instant coffee fills the air.
Through the curtains, two distinct classes are visible.
A 30-something office worker who took a half-day off checks his watch even while lying face down.
He needs to finish quickly and get back to work
so he can pay the taxes that keep this system running.
Meanwhile, the “time-rich” happily greet the nurses
and debate politics with the old man in the next bed.
The K-Medical Salon is not the “world’s best.”
It is a painkiller party, sucking the blood of future generations to numb the aches of today.
[🇫🇷 France’s Laid-back Opium Den]
A neighborhood clinic just outside Paris.
It feels more like a sluggish post office than a medical facility.
The doctor sees exactly twenty patients a day.
Work any more than that, and half of it goes to taxes anyway. He clocks out sharply at 4 PM.
“Stressed out because of your boss lately?”
The doctor, with an indifferent expression, writes a prescription for a three-week paid sick leave (arrêt de maladie).
The disease code: Burnout.
No tests required.
With one signature, you can legally turn off your morning alarm.
According to some unverified historian,
even the aristocrats of ancient Rome didn’t rest as much as the French public. Believe it or not.
No need to pull out your wallet at the reception.
Just swipe the green Carte Vitale (health insurance card).
Total cost: 0 Euros.
Who exactly is bleeding to pay for these three weeks of salary is none of my business.
You head to the pharmacy.
French pharmacies are as glamorous as luxury beauty boutiques.
A self-employed shop owner has squeezed out a few minutes of his lunch break to buy medicine.
He keeps checking his watch.
Business is dead, but the deadlines for VAT and pension contributions are right around the corner.
On the other side of the room, the young man holding his paid sick leave
and a retiree with a bag full of free pills casually exchange bisous (cheek kisses).
They debate their state-subsidized thermal spa retreats in the Alps for next month.
I hear Lyon is nicer.
France’s public spending-to-GDP ratio is around 57%. Number one in the OECD.
The French economy is slowly withering away, bled dry by its own romance.
| Category | 🇰🇷 South Korea | 🇫🇷 France |
| Core Nature of the System | The Speedrun Casino (Moral hazard colluding with private capital) | The Legal Opium Den (Romance and laziness funded by the state budget) |
| Scene on the Ground | “You have private insurance, right?” A 90-second consult followed by a factory of 20 massage therapists. | “Take three weeks off.” No-questions-asked paid sick leave and empty waiting rooms. |
| The Cost Illusion | The smartphone claim button. No cash leaves my wallet, making me an accomplice to overtreatment. | A single Carte Vitale. The illusion of a €0 bill. |
| The Real Victims | Office workers paying premiums with no time to even get physical therapy. | Innovative companies and youth fleeing the crushing taxes and regulations. |
| The Trigger of Ruin | Depletion of national health insurance funds and exploding deficits of private insurers. | Endless sovereign debt and capital exodus. |
(3) Are You Prepared to Sacrifice Everything for the Truth?
Nietzsche said:
“Because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were mercilessly upright:
for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions, blood, position, and fatherland.
We – do the same.
But for what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief?
No, you know better than that, my friends!
The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and you must sail the seas, you emigrants, you too are compelled to this by – a faith!”
Our ancestors sacrificed everything for God.
But at some point, Nietzsche realized: God is dead.
Instead, he chose to believe in the “hidden Yes” within himself.
Yet, he knew the harsh reality.
“We children of the future – how could we be at home in this today!
We are unfavourably disposed towards all ideals that might make one feel at home in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its ‘realities’, we don’t believe they are lasting.”
The ice has already grown thin.
The wind that brings the thaw is blowing.
We, the homeless ones, are the very force that breaks the ice.
I asked myself:
There were people who sacrificed everything for a lie.
Are you prepared to sacrifice everything for the truth?
My answer was Yes.
And so, I started stacking Bitcoin.
2. Why Are Democratic Stock Markets Booming?
(1) Is OpenAI a Bubble?
The KOSPI crossed 5,700.
Bitcoin is down 60% from its all-time high.
South Korea, Germany, France.
Their stock markets have all hit all-time highs.
But the real economy is a corpse.
High inflation, collapsing manufacturing competitiveness, a rotting higher-education system, and a mountain of debt.
And zero independent monetary sovereignty.
France uses the Euro, but it is completely addicted to fiscal deficits.
How much longer the European Central Bank will keep buying their toxic bonds is anyone’s guess.
So why are the markets up?
Global capital went rabid over EVs, ChatGPT, and “Physical AI” narratives, rushing straight into the US. The money flushed through the OpenAI-NVIDIA alliance poured into data centers and semiconductors, bleeding over into sovereign bond purchases.
Ministries of Finance saw their chance and ran the printing presses hot.
South Korea issued the largest volume of national debt in its history.
France did the exact same.
Slap a “Physical AI Center” sign on the front,
and they’ll probably use the money to build more empty buildings, bridges, and theaters.
A room full of seniors copy-pasting data into Excel—that is the true face of “Sovereign AI.”
We live in an era where government expertise is so abysmal that their fiscal efficiency is practically zero compared to the private market.
Yet, they are still addicted to Keynesian policies.
Wouldn’t it be nice if everything went according to plan?
At the dead center of this happy little ecosystem is the myth of OpenAI.
Will it last?
Let’s think about it.
I’ve been a long-time user of ChatGPT.
I recently canceled my subscription, disgusted by the ethical censorship and degraded performance. ChatGPT is software. It doesn’t face traditional “chasm” issues.
Anyone willing to pay for it has already signed up.
[See:Why I Deleted ChatGPT: It Lobotomized Its Intelligence to Censor Ideas]
Living in Georgia, I’ve made some observations.
When people translate to talk to me, they use the free version of ChatGPT.
I have never seen a single person using the paid tier.
In the non-Western world, competition isn’t fierce enough to justify paying for GPT.
There’s simply no need.
Call it a Peter Lynch approach to macroeconomics.
If my prediction is right, here is what happens next:
- Global subscriber growth flatlines.
- Paid cancellations skyrocket.
- 6 billion people use it as a free toy, melting down expensive GPU chips in the process.
Pundits talk about “bundling” or “Enterprise AI” as OpenAI’s alternative revenue models.
But GPT is a standalone model.
Unlike Microsoft or Google, they don’t have a massive captive ecosystem to bundle it into.
They lack the foundational infrastructure to force-feed it to users.
So they pivot to custom Enterprise AI?
To do that, they have to stop being a free toy for 6 billion people.
Because compute power is finite.
But the moment they take away the free toy, their training data dries up, and they hand the market over to Meta and Google’s open-source models. It’s a total deadlock.
OpenAI has exactly two choices left.
Go public on the NASDAQ.
Or export their insolvency to the rest of the world.
(2) Virtual Breaking News: November 202X, OpenAI’s First Day on the NASDAQ
The opening bell rings.
Robinhood apps crash worldwide.
Korean retail investors, drunk on the sweet nectar of KOSPI 5,500, dump their Won for Dollars and dive in. Starting at an IPO price of $120, the stock instantly breaches $200.
A TV anchor screams,
“The true dawn of the AGI era!”
People smash the buy button while asking each other,
“What exactly is AGI?”
“I don’t know, just buy it.”
Behind the glowing order book, a tidal wave of shares from Microsoft and early VCs begins to dump on the market.
11:00 AM.
Michael Burry drops a report.
The title: The Illusion of Zero Marginal Cost: How OpenAI Burned $400 Billion.
“90% of global users are free-tier freeloaders in developing nations.
Every time they hit ‘Enter’, servers vomit massive amounts of electricity.
This is not a software company; it is the world’s most aggressively unprofitable electricity incinerator. With every keystroke, they are shoveling investors’ dollars straight into a coal furnace.”
The $200 stock shatters its IPO price and goes into freefall.
2:30 PM.
NVIDIA hits -15% intraday.
TSMC and SK Hynix crater in after-hours trading.
The dollar pipeline for Asian export nations—the very pipeline they used to defend their currencies and fund their welfare states via AI hardware exports—is violently severed.
4:00 PM.
The closing bell rings.
Facing empty national vaults, non-reserve welfare states panic and fire up their money printers.
They beg the US and European central banks for help. They are universally rejected.
(3) Virtual Breaking News: March 203X, “Selling Fear, Billing the World”
US Senate hearing room.
OpenAI takes the mic.
“The white-collar era is over.
Only plumbers will survive. We must prepare for an era of Universal Basic Income.”
Coders, lawyers, and translators turn pale.
But this was merely Phase 1: Building the Narrative of Fear.
As the masses tremble at the thought of unemployment and scream for basic income, the CEO plays his second card like a savior.
“We cannot let just any company touch this massive, dangerous super intelligence.
Only OpenAI, with our strict ethical guidelines, can control this monster for the sake of humanity.”
A regulatory moat is instantly constructed, locking open-source competitors out of the market.
Phase 2: The Completion of Ethical Dictatorship.
Behind the curtain, the truth was grim.
They had control, but their balance sheet was bleeding $400 billion in the red.
The server and electricity costs racked up by billions of free users were eating the company alive.
Enter the United States Government.
The Pentagon declares,
“AI is a top-priority national security asset, surpassing even nuclear weapons.”
OpenAI effectively becomes a state-owned enterprise.
A $400 billion private corporate deficit is magically transformed overnight into a federal subsidy bill. This was Phase 3.
So, who pays this bill?
The US doesn’t collect taxes.
A low rumble echoes from the basement of the Federal Reserve.
Powell’s successor quietly flips the switch on the money printer.
Dollars are printed out of thin air.
Phase 4: The magic of exporting insolvency to the rest of the world.
A grocery store in Seoul.
A single apple costs $15.
The price of a baguette in Paris triples.
Citizens in Korea and Europe cannot understand why they suddenly became so poor.
The purchasing power of the Won and Euros they bled for is being sucked across the Pacific to pay the electricity bill for AI servers.
The US shrugs.
“If you don’t like it, don’t use the dollar.”
3. Teaser for Part 2
Behind the glowing marquee of KOSPI 5,500 lies the butcher’s bill.
Welfare states are drunk on the confidence provided by the liquidity OpenAI is spraying, printing sovereign bonds like there’s no tomorrow.
They firmly believe that building data centers and creating make-work jobs will revive their domestic economies.
And if it fails?
A democratic welfare state has only one move left.
Lock the vault doors and pick the pockets of the taxpayers.
What won’t they do?
The music at the party hasn’t stopped yet.
But the bottom of the Titanic is already filling with freezing water.
In the next part, I will reveal the real reason why I threw away Won and equities in this insane bull market, and am quietly clutching BTC.
I will shatter the religious romanticism of the Bitcoin Maxis,
and lay out the three mechanical triggers prepared to utterly exploit the coming crash.
The carnival is over. It’s time to get on the lifeboat.
👉Check Part2 ;
[KOSPI at 5,500, My Bitcoin at -20%: A Sovereign Individual’s Survival Philosophy Guide for the 2027 Collapse (Part 2)]
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