Bitcoin Magazine
The 2036 Issue: What Choices Will You Make On The Way To A Multipolar World?
As I write this in 2026, the world is becoming more multipolar, and I expect that trend to continue over the next decade through 2036.
In reality, it was this recent unipolar period that was historically anomalous. Starting from the end of World War II in 1945 and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has existed as the world’s sole hyperpower. For the first time in history, telecommunications and industry connected the whole world, enabling a truly global reach.
Prior to that point, multipolarity was the norm. Even during the height of the Roman Empire nearly two millennia ago, there were other similarly powerful regions of the world, including the Han Dynasty and other Asian kingdoms and empires. That was at a time when distance truly mattered, and great powers could exist simultaneously with only limited contact.
The other side of this multipolar aspect of power was the multipolar nature of money. For thousands of years, it was gold and silver, along with lesser commodities, that served as money. There was no sovereign ledger big enough to serve the whole world, and so only nature’s decentralized ledger could suffice.
But in the age of telecommunications, as commerce and money began to flow at the speed of light in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even gold wasn’t good enough. The United States dollar became the primary currency for cross-border lending and contract pricing, while the United States treasury bond became the primary reserve asset for central banks. People often point to the existence of prior reserve currencies, such as the British pound sterling or the Dutch gilder, but they weren’t the same thing as the dollar. They were proxies for metal, and gold itself was the real reserve currency in those eras. But during this unipolar hyperpower era, the free-floating dollar and its bond market surpassed the known market capitalization of gold and became by far the largest holding in sovereign reserves.
Many people viewed this unipolar era as the end of history, even though of course history never does end. China and India gradually recovered their economic might from the depths of colonialism and war that defined their 19th and 20th centuries, with China in particular becoming the world’s largest steel producer, electricity generator, and manufacturer now in the early 21st century. The United States, meanwhile, suffered from the Triffin dilemma: in order to maintain the world’s reserve currency, the nation must supply the world with units of its currency, which they do by running deficits. Those deficits, and the associated hollowing-out of industry that they contribute to, is what eventually weakens the trust in that currency.
Now, many of those in power in the United States no longer want the costs of issuing the reserve currency, though few would say it out loud. The i
