Civilizational cycles and the Bitcoin moment
Long-wave history and where Bitcoin sits inside it.
The civilizational-cycle frameworks that contemporary Bitcoin thinkers invoke to argue Bitcoin is emerging at a particular historical moment — a window when generational, financial, geopolitical, and technological cycles converge to make new monetary systems possible. The load-bearing argument is the convergence…
Primary frameworks
Four notes, one per civilizational-cycle framework. Each follows the model-note template established by The Power Law model — Why this matters → conceptual structure → causal mechanism → empirical fit → predictions for the present moment →…
Strauss and Howe's generational saeculum theory; four ~20-year generational archetypes (Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist) rotating through four ~20-year turnings (High → Awakening → Unraveling…
Ray Dalio's interlocking framework: ~8-10 year short-term debt cycle, ~75-100 year long-term debt cycle, ~250 year Big Cycle of empires (rise → peak → decline of the reserve-currency…
Moss's stacked-cycle synthesis: the 4-year Bitcoin halving cycle, the ~50-year Kondratiev/technology cycle (with Carlota Perez's academic refinement folded in as background), the ~80-84…
synthesizes the technology-cycle dimension of the Davidson-Rees-Mogg framework (the existing source page The Sovereign Individual - Davidson and Rees-Mogg covers the book itself; this note…
Synthesis notes
Two notes integrating across the primary frameworks. These deviate from the strict model-note template — they retain the Why-this-matters / Counter-arguments / Open-questions / Canonical-sources / Related-notes anchors but with novel…
the load-bearing synthesis. How the four primary frameworks plus their supporting voices (Turchin, Perez, Minsky, Kondratiev, Glubb, Ibn Khaldun) converge on the same prediction for the…
the Bitcoin-specific synthesis. Brandon Quittem's evolved thesis ("Bitcoin is Fourth Turning money") fully developed; Lyn Alden's fiscal-dominance framework as the contemporary…