Cortez on Nostr: Long read part 2. Working Class Bitcoin Adoption and what happens next. Every story ...

Long read part 2.

Working Class Bitcoin Adoption and what happens next.

Every story about Bitcoin adoption is told wrong. It is told as a story about technologists. About libertarians. About venture capitalists and Silicon Valley. About Elon Musk tweets and institutional treasury allocations. That story is not wrong. But it is the least important part. The most important story, the one that changes everything, has not been told yet. It is the story of the working class and Bitcoin. And it is just beginning.

Let us start with a truth that Bitcoin maximalists often miss. The working class were always the natural Bitcoin adopters. Not the tech class. Not the investor class. Not the libertarian philosopher class. The working class. Because the working class are the people who have always felt, most acutely and most personally, exactly what fiat money does to human beings. They did not need a whitepaper to understand it. They lived it.

What does fiat money feel like from the bottom? It feels like working overtime and still falling behind. It feels like a savings account that shrinks in real terms while your landlord’s property doubles. It feels like the food shop getting more expensive while the packaging gets smaller. It feels like being told that interest rates are rising to fight inflation while your mortgage payment jumps four hundred pounds a month and the person making that decision owns seven houses. The working class do not need an economist to explain monetary debasement. They experience it viscerally, monthly, in their bank balance. They just did not have a name for it. Or an alternative. Bitcoin is both.

Here is the historical parallel that nobody draws. In the nineteenth century, the trade union movement did not begin with political theory. It began with people who were being crushed by a system that extracted their labour for someone else’s accumulation and who slowly, painfully, at great personal cost, organised a different way of relating to that system. They did not have Das Kapital in their pocket. They had a felt sense of injustice and a willingness to act collectively. The theory came after. The solidarity came first. Bitcoin adoption by the working class will follow the same arc. Not through reading about Austrian economics and becoming convinced of the soundness of a fixed supply monetary base. But through a mate getting paid in Bitcoin, showing you the wallet, the money actually there, actually yours, actually sent in seconds, no bank, no charge, no waiting. Experience first. Theory later. Revolution always.

Let us talk about who the working class actually are in 2026. They are not a 1970s caricature of factory workers and coal miners. They are the delivery driver who is paid by an algorithm and has no employment rights. The care worker whose wages are set by a council contract negotiated a decade ago. The young teacher whose starting salary has lost twenty percent of its real value since 2010. The single parent who uses a food bank between paydays. The market trader who operates entirely in cash because card reader fees eat their margin. The gig worker in four cities simultaneously, paying tax in all of them, claiming benefits in none. These people share one thing. They are paid in a currency that works against them. And they have learned, by experience, that the institutions meant to protect them, banks, unions, government, the welfare state, are either captured, diminished, or structurally hostile. They are, quietly, already post-institutional. Bitcoin meets them where they are.

The mechanism of working class adoption is not going to look like an app download. It is going to look like this. A market trader in Liverpool starts accepting Lightning payments because a customer offers to pay that way and it saves him one point four percent in card fees. He tells his neighbour at the next stall. His neighbour’s daughter is seventeen and uses SatsRewards at school. She already has a wallet. She already understands Lightning. The daughter helps her mum set up a wallet for the stall. Three weeks later, two stalls are accepting sats. Within a year, it is a dozen. The market has a reputation. A journalist writes about it. This is not a prediction. This is a description of how every monetary transition in history has actually happened. Not from the top down. From the ground up. One transaction at a time.

Now let us talk about the specific vulnerabilities of the working class to fiat, the ones that Bitcoin directly addresses. There are approximately nine million foreign-born workers in the UK. Many send money home regularly. Western Union charges between three and eight percent per transfer. On a three hundred pound remittance, that is up to twenty four pounds gone before the money even moves. Lightning Network sends the same three hundred pound equivalent in satoshis in under a second for a fee measured in fractions of a penny. This is not abstract. This is twenty four pounds back in the pocket of a nurse in Birmingham who is supporting her mother in Lagos. Multiply that by millions of transactions across millions of workers every month. The remittance industry extracts billions from the working class globally. Bitcoin ends it.

In the UK, approximately one point one million adults are entirely unbanked. A further several million are underbanked, holding accounts but unable to access credit, mortgages, or meaningful financial products. The banking system excludes people based on credit history, residency status, minimum balance requirements, address verification, and employment status. Bitcoin requires none of these. A phone. A wallet app. An internet connection. That is the entire barrier to entry. For the unbanked, many of whom are the poorest and most exploited by payday lenders and cash advance services, Bitcoin is not a financial product. It is the first time the financial system has ever actually included them. Not because it was designed to be inclusive. Because it was designed to be permissionless. The result is the same.

The payday lending industry in the UK charges APRs of up to fifteen hundred percent. These are not loans taken by people who are reckless. They are loans taken by people who are two hundred pounds short on Thursday and paid on Friday. The working class pay a liquidity premium, a tax on being poor, that the middle and upper class never encounter. A Bitcoin literate working class with self custody wallets and Lightning access is a working class that can build an emergency savings pool in sats, outside the banking system, immune to confiscation, accessible to anyone in the network instantly. Informal mutual aid networks, which have always existed in working class communities, become with Bitcoin global, instant, and trustless. The savings clubs, the put a bit away with the neighbour systems that working class communities have always run informally. Bitcoin makes them mathematically sovereign.

This needs to be said plainly. Inflation is not neutral. When the Bank of England creates money, through quantitative easing, through emergency bond purchasing, through any mechanism, that money enters the economy through asset markets first. The people who own assets, property, stocks, bonds, see their net worth increase before the inflationary effects ripple through to consumer prices. By the time inflation reaches the working class, in food prices, energy bills, rent, the asset owning class has already benefited. This is the Cantillon Effect in its most brutal application. The working class are not at the back of the queue for new money. They are the people who absorb the cost of creating it. A fixed supply currency eliminates this mechanism entirely. There is no new money to create. There is no queue. Everyone’s purchasing power is protected equally by mathematics. This is not a political position. It is an arithmetical one.

Now something more uncomfortable. The working class has historically been let down not just by the right, by capital, by landlords, by bankers, but by the left. By the labour movement that became bureaucratic. By the socialist parties that became managerial. By the progressive institutions that became captured by professional class interests. The institutions built to protect working people from capital became, over generations, part of the same institutional fabric that capital inhabits. The working class voter who switched from Labour to Brexit, or to any populist alternative, was not being irrational. They were expressing a perfectly rational loss of faith in institutions that had stopped working for them. Bitcoin speaks to this directly. Not because it is a right wing project. Not because it is a left wing project. But because it requires no institution. No party. No union. No bank. No government. It asks nothing of the working class except this: do you want to hold your own money?

This is where SatsRewards becomes structurally important in a way that goes beyond education. When a working class student in a state school in a deprived area receives sats, they are not just getting a reward. They are receiving their first interaction with a monetary system that does not require their parents to have a bank account, does not require a credit score, does not require a fixed address, does not charge a fee, does not expire, cannot be taken by a debt collector, cannot be frozen by a court order against a parent, and cannot be inflated away by a Budget statement. For a child whose family is in rent arrears, in debt, unbanked, or in the grey economy, this is not a lesson about money. This is the first honest money they have ever touched. That moment is irreversible.

Adoption curves are not linear. They are exponential, with a long flat period that looks like nothing is happening and then a vertical period that looks like everything happened at once. We are in the flat period for working class Bitcoin adoption. The signals are there if you look. Lightning Network capacity is growing. Bitcoin accepted at point of sale is normalising in pockets globally. Developing nations have demonstrated mass adoption at the street level. In the UK, Bitcoin ATMs are now in corner shops, newsagents, and betting shops, working class infrastructure. The flat period is ending. The vertical is coming.

What does the tipping point look like when it arrives? Not a single event. A cascade. A major employer, perhaps a logistics company, or a care provider, or a hospitality group, offers the option to receive wages in Bitcoin. Not mandated. Offered. Ten percent of workers choose it. Within a year, twenty percent. Those workers talk to their families. Their families talk to their neighbours. Their neighbours talk to their local market traders. The Lightning Network routes value through communities that the banking system has always treated as unprofitable to serve. And then a politician notices. And tries to regulate it. And finds that the network does not care.

Now the consequences. Because this is where it becomes genuinely world altering. Central banks use interest rates to manage the economy but they also use them, and this is less discussed, to manage social behaviour. Low rates encourage borrowing and spending. High rates encourage saving and suppress wages. This mechanism only works if everyone is inside the fiat system. A working class that holds a meaningful portion of its wealth in Bitcoin, a currency that no central bank controls, is a working class that is partially immune to monetary policy transmission. That immunity grows as adoption grows. At some threshold, nobody knows exactly where it is, monetary policy loses its grip. Central banks will still set rates. They will simply matter less. This is a transfer of power so fundamental that it has no historical precedent in peacetime.

The working class are the primary consumers in every economy. Their consumption is largely debt funded, credit cards, personal loans, buy now pay later, payday lending. This is not because they are irresponsible. It is because their wages have not kept pace with the cost of living for fifty years and debt has been the mechanism by which they have maintained consumption standards while real wages fell. A Bitcoin literate working class begins to reject this model. Not because of ideology. Because Bitcoin’s deflationary property, the tendency for purchasing power to increase over time rather than decrease, makes saving rational in a way that fiat makes saving irrational. In a fiat world you spend now because tomorrow your money is worth less. In a Bitcoin world you save now because tomorrow your money is worth more. That shift in temporal preference, from present consumption to future security, is one of the most profound behavioural changes imaginable. The consumer debt industry, worth hundreds of billions globally, begins to unwind. Not all at once. Slowly. Then suddenly.

Currently, to receive a wage, you need a bank account. To have a bank account, you need documentation, an address, a credit history. To maintain your financial life, you need to remain legible to a set of institutions that have the power to exclude you. This legibility requirement is a form of social control. People who cannot afford to lose their bank account, which is most people, cannot afford to challenge the institutions that provide it. You cannot picket a bank that holds your salary. You cannot meaningfully resist a system when your access to your own money depends on your compliance. Bitcoin breaks this dependency. A worker paid in Bitcoin via Lightning needs no bank. They cannot be de banked. They cannot be financially excluded as a form of punishment. Their money is theirs in a way that no fiat wage has ever been. This restores a form of economic sovereignty to the working class that has been steadily eroded since the paperless pay revolution of the 1980s.

Trade unions collect dues. They hold strike funds. They disburse hardship payments. All of this currently flows through the banking system. A union whose strike fund is held in a Bitcoin multisig wallet, requiring multiple signatories to release, is a union whose funds cannot be frozen by a court injunction targeting a single account. This is not theoretical. In Canada in 2022, during the trucker protests, the government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts of protesters and donors. It worked. The movement collapsed almost immediately. With Bitcoin, that mechanism fails. You cannot freeze a private key. You cannot compel a multisig to sign. You cannot issue an injunction against the blockchain. Collective action, funded and coordinated through Bitcoin, becomes structurally more resilient than any form of collective action in history.

Currently, wealth concentrates in cities, specifically in the financial centres of cities, because proximity to the money creation infrastructure creates enormous economic advantages. London is wealthy partly because it is close to the Bank of England, to the City, to the clearing houses, to the legal and financial infrastructure that intermediates money. Bitcoin eliminates the geographic advantage of proximity to monetary infrastructure. A farmer in rural Wales with a phone and a Lightning node has the same access to the global monetary network as a trader in Canary Wharf. A market in a deprived northern town can settle international transactions as efficiently as a City law firm. The economic geography of the fiat world was built around chokepoints, banks, clearing houses, currency exchanges. Bitcoin has no chokepoints. The redistribution of economic access that follows from this is staggering.

The nation state derives enormous power from its monopoly on the currency. It can tax, inflate, sanction, exclude, fund wars, and bail out its allies. All of these powers depend on the currency monopoly. Bitcoin does not end nation states. It ends their monetary monopoly. Nations will still exist. They will still collect taxes. They will still provide services. But they will do so in competition, for the first time in history, with a monetary system that their citizens can access without their permission. That competition will make them more accountable. Or it will make them more authoritarian. There is no third option. And the path taken will be determined, in large part, by how many of their citizens understand Bitcoin well enough to resist authoritarian capture. Which is why what happens in the classroom matters more than anything happening in Parliament.

There is a student from a family with rent arrears and a payday loan. A student whose parents are anxious about money in the way that only people who have never had enough of it can be. That student earns five hundred sats for a good essay. They go home. They show their dad. Their dad, sceptical, overworked, tired, looks at the wallet. He asks can we spend it. The student says on some things yeah but also you can save it. It does not go down. The dad pauses. Because he has never in his life had money that does not go down.

That pause is the moment. That is the tipping point at the individual level. Not a whitepaper. Not a podcast. Not a price chart. A working class father holding his child’s phone, looking at a balance that cannot be inflated, cannot be confiscated, cannot be touched by the bank that sent the debt collector last Tuesday. Realising for the first time that there is a different way. That pause, repeated across millions of households, is the revolution.

What does the world look like when it has fully tipped? Not utopia. Bitcoin is not utopia. But monetary policy cannot be used to silently transfer wealth from savers to asset holders. The unbanked are banked, not by a bank, but by a protocol. Remittances flow freely, cheaply, instantly, across every border. Collective action funds are structurally unsuppressible. Savings are rational for working people for the first time in a century. The curriculum teaches Bitcoin because a generation of parents who hold Bitcoin demands it. Governments must justify their spending in a world where citizens can opt out. The geographic advantage of financial centres erodes as the network equalises access. The working class holds, for the first time, a monetary instrument that does not discriminate. It is not the end of inequality. Inequality is a function of many things, education, social capital, opportunity, health. But it is the end of monetary inequality. The end of the system where the currency itself is rigged against you. That is not everything. But it is foundational. Everything else becomes possible once the foundation is sound.

There is a line often attributed to Buckminster Fuller. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. The working class has been fighting the existing reality for two centuries. Sometimes winning. Often losing. Always fighting a system that adapts faster than the fight. Bitcoin is the new model. Not because it was built for the working class. But because it works for the working class in a way that no monetary system ever has. Permissionless. Borderless. Fixed supply. Instant settlement. No intermediary. SatsRewards puts this model in the school. The school puts it in the family. The family puts it in the community. The community puts it in the economy. And one Tuesday morning, period three, somewhere in Liverpool or Leeds or Liverpool again, the ground shifts. Not with a bang. With a sat. And then another. And another. Until the weight of them changes everything.