Last week, my girlfriend and I did the unthinkable and attended a small gathering. Nothing major, just some of my high school buddies and their own significant others.

I hadn't seen them since the outbreak, so it felt appropriate to exercise some of my immuno-privilege as a young, healthy male sans preexisting conditions, and reconnect with some old pals. The rendezvous was humanizing, and reminded me that we can't exist in isolation, that we need each other to live, grow, and thrive.

It was also a great opportunity to gauge how my friends' views on politics, economics, and the like have shifted during the shitfest that 2020 has become.

One of them, a Bitcoin holder with light conviction, has been reading up more on banking and finance, and was asking me questions about how QE works. Each point in my explanation was accompanied by physical contortions, almost as if by impulse: a frown, a wrinkle of the nose, an eyebrow raise, an eye bulge.

The more I described how the US financial system actually works, the more animated his face became.

Eventually, my ravings inspired a question.

"What would they do if we all just stopped working tomorrow?"

Of course, my friend is not the first person to propose a general strike, but the suggestion caught me off guard a bit given the rarity of striking here in the US. The problem with a strike, my friend was quick to point out, is that there is no other market to opt in to. Sure, you could move to another city, county, state, or country, but the systems in place will be the same: there will be those at the top who control the flow of money, and then there will be the rest of us. Plus, strikes are only tenable if everyone is on board and stays loyal. Once the other guy gives in and wants his salary back (or they find replacement workers), you've lost all of your leverage. 

"There is no free market", my buddy finally concluded.

It was nice to have someone reach this conclusion on their own, instead of having to go "we don't have true Capitalism, bro" mode on them. But my gratification aside, it also showed me that once people have all the facts laid out and can actually see how the system works, the system sounds absurd, detrimental, and even counterintuitive. 

My friend, who admittedly owned a little bit of Bitcoin before this interaction, tends to subscribe to socialist-light tendencies, like many young, college educated young professionals in my generation. This is the same generation who owns a paltry 3% of the world's assets (as opposed to 21% for the baby boomers when they were our age), and whose starter homes in even mid-sized American cities are $300k+. This is the same generation who threw its hopes and votes behind Bernie Sanders, in part because he told them he was going to give them a financial lifeline, when many of them can barely afford the security deposit on their 500 sq/ft, $2,000/month (or worse) studio apartment, let alone a 10% down payment on a $300k house. But millennials also believed in Bernie Sanders because he didn't bullshit us like all the other shitheads and sycophants in DC. His policies can take a walk, but at least he was consistent. 

The wellspring of support for Bernie, and the contingent millennial propensity toward Democratic socialist policies, have been my generation's call to arms to correct very real economic grievances. None of them own houses, or any of the other assets bid up to record highs thanks to the disproportionate purchasing power of the Cantillon Effect's principal beneficiaries. Half of them have received, or are currently receiving unemployment benefits that paid more than their day jobs.  Many of them fall into the "40% of Americans who can't pay for a $400 emergency" bucket. 

They've identified that there's an illness eating away at their prospectus for a healthy future. Many have just been wrong about the source of the illness, however, and the panacea. Some will tell you it is industrial capitalism, and blame megacorporations. They're not wrong that these companies are complicit, but I don't need to tell you that the system the US operates under, is by no means pure capitalism. It is actually a corrupted form of socialism, a corporate socialism where state actors insure private interests against failure at the expense of the country's citizens. To confuse this corporatism with capitalism would be as egregious as equating democratic socialism with full-blown communism. And capitalism has been conflated and confused, much to the benefits of the elite classes, who gorge themselves on the state's monetary honeypot with no regard for consequence. 

This system is inherently unjust, and my generation recognizes it, only they've been lied to about who to blame by their own leaders ("It's those greedy CEOs!") and about how the financial system operates ("There's no inflation or inequality, because that's what the FED is for!").

We're waking up, though.

Since Black Thursday in March of this year, I've had more conversations with friends about America's labyrinthian financial system, the shape of its economy, and the like, than I had since I started working full time on Bitcoin in 2017. People see headlines blazoning "RECORD UNEMPLOYMENT" next to ones advertising the stock market's "RECORD HIGHS", and something doesn't add up. As the whirring of the state's cognitive dissonance begins to become increasingly clear, they're going to ask where the music's really coming from. 

Or to play to this article's title, once they start smelling the fumes (and stop believing that "they're not fumes"), they're going to ask where the gas leak is.

And once they figure out where the leak is, they're going to ask where they can go to escape it before they asphyxiate. 

My friend is smelling the gas, and the general strike he proposed is one method for escape, although one that is almost certain to fail. Of course, he's right that opting out is the only answer, though you need a truly free market and an apolitical monetary system to opt in to, in order to escape the economic binds of the modern nation state.

Bitcoin is this alternative.

It is the collective strike.

It is the gas mask.

And the millennial generation has been one of its primary proponents for good reason: we've known that we've been financially fucked for some time. Some of us looked towards political philosophies. But others looked for solutions outside of the nation state, something exogenous to the system itself, that would create a bedrock for a new, fairer system.

This new system sounds like common sense when compared to the financial circus that our current one has become. This is why Bitcoin will win out: not only because is it reasonable and fair, but also because you can only fool people for so long, once they have a proper point of reference.

With Bitcoin as a point of reference for how toxic the global financial system truly is, the gas lightning is wearing off - and the people are starting to figure out where they can go to breathe easy again.