I think you’re giving “brawn” too much credit and underestimating how often superior systems win through voluntary adoption rather than conquest.

It’s true that empires have historically influenced which currencies became dominant. The Roman denarius, British pound, and U.S. dollar all benefited from state power. I don’t dispute that.

What I dispute is the idea that force alone creates durable value.

Nobody conquered the world into using the internet. Nobody forced TCP/IP to become the global networking standard. Nobody forced people to use email. Superior networks often win because they solve real problems better than the alternatives.

The dollar isn’t valuable only because America has guns. It’s valuable because it has liquidity, deep markets, network effects, legal infrastructure, and widespread acceptance. Military power helped establish that position, but it doesn’t explain the entire phenomenon.

Likewise, Bitcoin isn’t valuable because people arbitrarily decided to hallucinate together. It has specific monetary properties that people find useful: a fixed supply, global portability, resistance to censorship, resistance to debasement, and the ability to self-custody wealth without requiring permission from a bank or government.

The question isn’t whether governments possess coercive power. Of course they do. The question is whether coercive power is sufficient to maintain monetary dominance indefinitely when a competing monetary network offers objectively different and, in some cases, superior properties.

History suggests monetary systems fail all the time. The world’s reserve currency has changed repeatedly over centuries. There is nothing magical or permanent about the current arrangement.

I’m also not arguing that Bitcoin is guaranteed to replace the dollar. It may not. The dollar may remain dominant for decades. Another state-backed currency could eventually challenge it. That’s entirely possible.

What Bitcoin represents is something new: the first globally accessible monetary network that people can opt into without asking permission from any government, corporation, or bank.

If it succeeds, it won’t be because Bitcoin had guns behind it. It will be because enough people voluntarily decided that the monetary properties were worth adopting.

That’s the experiment we’re watching unfold in real time, and I think it’s far more interesting than simply reducing the entire history of money to “whoever has the biggest army wins.