I want to be upfront about something before I start: I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist.
I hold YieldMax ETFs. I collect covered call income every month. I have dividend stocks I’ve owned for years. I believe in the boring parts of personal finance — tax efficiency, diversification, not putting everything into one speculative bet.
But I also own Bitcoin. Have since 2014. And right now, watching the national debt blow past $38.86 trillion — climbing at roughly $7.2 billion every single day — I’m not panicking about my net worth. I’m actually grateful I made a bet on digital scarcity a decade ago.
Here’s what the numbers actually show, and why I think long-term income investors should at least pay attention to what’s happening in Washington.
TLDR
- US national debt hit $38.86T (March 2026), climbing $7.2B daily at current pace. Total unfunded liabilities exceed $113T.
- Traditional fiscal hedges (gold, real estate, bonds) operate within the same fiat system generating the problem. Bitcoin’s fixed 21M supply is not subject to government monetary policy.
- Long-term hedge thesis (5-10 year horizon), not a short-term safe haven. I hold 3-10% for income investors—survivable in drawdowns, meaningful if fiscal debasement continues.
The Scale of What’s Happening Is Hard to Comprehend
$38.86 trillion. That’s where the US national debt sat as of March 4, 2026, according to the Joint Economic Committee. It’s expected to cross $39 trillion around March 25 at the current pace.
Let me put that into numbers that mean something:
- $113,638 per person in the United States
- $288,283 per household
- $2.64 trillion added in the past year alone — roughly $7.2 billion per day
- $31.27 trillion held by the public; $7.59 trillion owed to other parts of the government
And that’s just the official debt. When you layer in unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations — the stuff that doesn’t show up in the headline number — total federal liabilities run north of $113 trillion. Interest expense alone is heading toward $1.25 trillion annually. That’s more than we spend on defense.
Debt-to-GDP is sitting around 125%. For context, that’s territory that historically makes bond market participants nervous. It’s not “collapse is imminent” territory, but it’s not “everything is fine” territory either.
I’ve been watching this number tick up for twelve years. What changed for me wasn’t a single moment — it was the slow realization that nobody in Washington is actually serious about fixing it. Not Republicans. Not Democrats. Not any administration I’ve seen since 2009. The incentives are broken. Debt is the path of least political resistance, and printing money to service that debt is the inevitable consequence.
That’s the context for why I own Bitcoin.
Traditional Hedges Have Real Limitations Here
The standard advice for protecting against fiscal irresponsibility is to own hard assets: gold, real estate, inflation-linked bonds. I own some of those too. But each one has problems when the government itself is the source of the risk.
Gold — I respect gold as a store of value. It’s held up over centuries. But it’s also been banned, confiscated, and heavily regulated by governments under exactly the kind of financial stress we’re building toward. In 1933, FDR made it illegal for US citizens to own gold and forced them to exchange it for paper dollars. The precedent exists.
Real estate — Also a legitimate inflation hedge. But it requires leverage, maintenance, tenants, and geographic concentration risk. Property taxes are a recurring liability. You can’t easily rebalance or move it.
TIPS (inflation-linked bonds) — These are government IOUs that promise to keep pace with CPI. The problem is that CPI is calculated by the same government that’s running the deficit. If you don’t trust their fiscal management, you probably shouldn’t trust their inflation measurement entirely either.
More cash, more bonds — This is the part that genuinely keeps me up at night. If the response to a fiscal crisis is money printing — and historically that’s exactly what happens — then holding paper assets is the worst place to be. The dollar doesn’t disappear, but its purchasing power erodes. We’ve already seen a preview of that with 2021-2022 inflation.
None of this means those assets are bad. I hold several of them. But they all operate within the same fiat system that’s generating the problem. Bitcoin doesn’t.
Why Bitcoin’s Fixed Supply Actually Matters Here
I’ve heard the “digital gold” argument so many times I used to roll my eyes at it. But here’s the thing about Bitcoin that keeps pulling me back after twelve years: there will only ever be 21 million of them. That’s it. Enforced by code, not by a central bank’s good intentions.
The Federal Reserve can print $4 trillion in response to a crisis. It did exactly that in 2020. Congress can increase the debt ceiling — again and again — because the alternative is too politically painful. The Treasury can issue bonds, monetize debt, defer consequences.
None of that is possible with Bitcoin. There’s no CoinFed. There’s no algorithm that responds to an economic emergency by creating 4 million more Bitcoin. The issuance schedule is fixed, the halving cycle runs on schedule, and no government can change it.
I want to be careful here because this is where Bitcoin maximalists make bad arguments. Bitcoin is not a short-term safe haven. During the March 2020 crash, it dropped 50% in 48 hours. In 2022, it fell 77% while the macro environment that “should” have supported it (high inflation, dollar debasement) was fully in effect. Bitcoin’s fixed supply doesn’t protect you from panic selling or liquidity crises in the near term.
The case for Bitcoin as a national debt hedge is a long-horizon thesis. Minimum 18-24 months to see the thesis play out. Realistically, 5-10 years. The argument isn’t “Bitcoin will pump when the debt headline hits $39T.” The argument is that as the debasement of fiat currency continues over decades, assets with genuinely fixed supply become increasingly scarce relative to the expanding money supply.
I’ve owned Bitcoin through three bear markets: 2018 (-85%), 2020 (-50%), 2022 (-77%). I still own it. Because the thesis hasn’t changed — if anything, the fiscal backdrop has gotten worse every year.
I’m Not a Maximalist. Here’s How I Actually Think About This.
Let me tell you what my portfolio actually looks like, because I think the “Bitcoin maximalist vs Bitcoin skeptic” framing misses how most thoughtful income investors should approach this.
I run a YieldMax + BTC strategy. The YieldMax side — PLTY, TSLW, MSTY, and others — generates monthly cash flow through covered call premium. I lost money on some of those positions (I’ve written about the MSTY/CONY losses). The income is real, the NAV decay is also real, and the math is complicated.
The Bitcoin allocation is separate from that. It’s not generating income. It’s a long-term store-of-value bet that I fund from surplus cash flow, not from income I need for living expenses.
The way I think about it: the YieldMax strategy is the machine that produces monthly income. Bitcoin is the vault that holds a portion of the surplus, denominated in something the government can’t print more of.
That combination — cash-generating covered call income plus a hard-asset position in fixed-supply crypto — feels like the right architecture for the fiscal environment we’re in. Not because I think the system is about to collapse, but because I think the long-run debasement of the dollar is the path of least political resistance, and I want some exposure to an asset that doesn’t follow that path.
What $39 Trillion in Debt Actually Means for Your Dollar
Here’s a thought experiment I find useful. The US money supply (M2) in 2010 was about $8.5 trillion. By 2026, it’s north of $21 trillion. That’s a 150% increase in 16 years. Meanwhile, cumulative CPI inflation over that same period is roughly 50-55%.
So yes, the dollar lost purchasing power — but the money supply grew nearly 3x as fast as measured inflation. Part of the reason CPI looks “controlled” is that a lot of the newly created money went into financial assets (stocks, real estate, bonds) rather than consumer goods. Asset price inflation is real inflation if you need to buy a house or fund a retirement account.
Bitcoin’s supply grew from about 14 million coins to about 19.6 million over the same period. Not because someone decided to issue more — because the code says that’s the schedule and that’s all it allows. There’s no mechanism to accelerate it in response to a fiscal emergency.
Now think about what happens as the debt compounds. Interest expense heading to $1.25T annually isn’t a peak — it’s a floor. The Congressional Budget Office projects it climbing above $1.7T by 2030. At some point, the US government faces a basic arithmetic problem: tax revenue can’t realistically grow fast enough to close the gap without either cutting spending (politically impossible) or inflating the debt away (historically what happens).
Inflating the debt away means lower real interest rates, more dollar creation, and more purchasing power loss for people holding dollar-denominated assets. Gold has historically been the hedge against this. Bitcoin is newer but runs on the same basic logic — finite supply, no counterparty, immune to monetary policy decisions.
The difference is that Bitcoin is harder to confiscate, cheaper to store, and easier to verify than gold. Whether those properties ultimately make it more durable than gold as a monetary hedge is the open question. I don’t know the answer. But I think it’s a question worth having some exposure to.
The Patience Problem: Why Most Investors Get This Wrong
I want to be honest about the psychological difficulty here, because I’ve lived it.
When I bought Bitcoin in 2014, I had a long-term thesis about digital scarcity. By 2018, that thesis looked like a disaster. Bitcoin had dropped from around $20K to under $3.5K. The macro environment — rising rates, strong dollar, low inflation — was the opposite of what you’d expect to boost a “debasement hedge.”
I held. Not because I was sure I was right, but because the fiscal trajectory hadn’t changed. The debt was still growing. The Fed was still the primary holder of its own government’s bonds. The structural imbalances hadn’t been addressed. The thesis was still intact even when the price wasn’t cooperating.
That’s the discipline required to actually benefit from a macro hedge like Bitcoin. You need to be able to hold it through the cycles where the thesis is intact but the price isn’t reflecting it — which can last years. In 2022, Bitcoin dropped 77% while CPI was running at 9%. The “debasement hedge” was getting killed while the debasement it was supposed to hedge against was peaking. That’s not a contradiction — it’s a reminder that short-term prices are driven by liquidity and sentiment, not by macro theses.
The thesis plays out over a decade or longer. If you can’t hold through 75% drawdowns, you’ll exit at the bottom and miss the recovery. That’s what happened to most retail investors in every Bitcoin bear market.
Position size is the solution. I keep my Bitcoin allocation small enough that -75% is painful but survivable. That means I can hold with conviction instead of panicking at the bottom.
The Institutional Shift That Changes the Calculus
One thing that’s genuinely different about 2026 compared to 2014, when I first bought Bitcoin, is institutional adoption.
BlackRock, Fidelity, ARK, 21Shares — these aren’t small players. They’re managing trillions in assets and they’re now running Bitcoin ETFs with billions in AUM. MicroStrategy has turned its entire treasury into a Bitcoin accumulation strategy. Multiple sovereign wealth funds have disclosed Bitcoin positions.
This matters for the national debt hedge thesis because institutional investors are making the same calculation I’ve been making for 12 years. The difference is scale. When BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF has $50B in AUM, that’s $50B in institutional capital that has looked at the fiscal environment and decided to own fixed-supply digital assets.
That institutional adoption doesn’t guarantee Bitcoin goes up. But it does mean the “digital scarcity hedge against fiscal irresponsibility” thesis has moved from fringe speculation to a position that sophisticated capital allocators are taking seriously. That changes the risk profile for long-term investors.
The Crypto Skeptic’s Best Counterargument
I want to steel-man the other side, because I’ve thought about this too.
The best argument against Bitcoin as a national debt hedge is: the US government can simply regulate it away. They could prohibit ownership, restrict on-ramps, tax it into oblivion, or create a CBDC that makes private crypto illegal or impractical.
That’s not a paranoid scenario. It happened with gold in 1933. It has happened with crypto in China and India. Governments that face fiscal stress sometimes respond by restricting capital alternatives.
The counter to this is twofold: first, the US now has too much political capital invested in crypto (multiple ETFs, public companies holding it, a large and politically organized holder base) to make outright prohibition likely. Second, even if the US restricts it, Bitcoin is global infrastructure — it still exists and still functions, just with less liquidity for US investors.
I weigh this risk as low but non-zero. The ETF route (IBIT, BTCO, FBTC) mitigates it somewhat since it’s regulated within the existing financial system, but it also means your Bitcoin is custodied by someone else. If you want true sovereignty, self-custody is the answer. I use both.
The Numbers That Would Change My Mind
I’m not ideological about this. Here’s what would make me reduce my Bitcoin allocation:
- A credible fiscal consolidation plan — if Congress passed meaningful structural reforms to entitlement spending and the debt-to-GDP ratio started declining, the debasement thesis weakens. That’s not happening. The projections point the other direction: $50T+ by 2030 under current trajectories.
- A regulated, government-controlled “digital dollar” that displaces Bitcoin — a CBDC that people actually adopt and trust at scale. Possible, but CBDCs are themselves programmable fiat, which is arguably worse from a hard-money perspective.
- Bitcoin losing the institutional adoption narrative — if the ETF flows reversed consistently, if MicroStrategy-style treasury allocations fell out of favor, if the hedge fund community walked away. So far, the trend has gone the other direction.
I update my views based on data. The data right now — $7.2B in new debt per day, $1.25T in annual interest expense, no political will to change it — still supports the thesis.
What This Means Practically for Income Investors
If you’re an income investor reading this who doesn’t own Bitcoin, I’m not going to tell you that you need to run out and buy it. What I will say is this:
The fiscal case for Bitcoin is not hype. It’s not about price predictions or crypto Twitter enthusiasm. It’s a basic observation about what happens to paper currency over time when governments can’t stop spending. Every reserve currency in history has eventually been debased. The US dollar has already lost about 97% of its purchasing power since 1913.
Bitcoin’s value proposition isn’t that it will go to $1 million. It’s that it’s one of the few assets in existence that a government can’t inflate away by running a budget deficit.
How much to own? That’s personal. I keep my Bitcoin exposure sized so that a 75% drawdown — which I’ve lived through twice — doesn’t permanently impair my income-generating portfolio. For most income investors, that probably means something in the 3-10% range. Enough to matter if the thesis plays out over a decade; small enough not to ruin you if it takes longer than expected.
I’d rather have 5% in Bitcoin and be wrong than have 0% and watch the national debt hit $50T while fixed-supply assets compound.
If you’re ready to get started or add to your position, I buy through Coinbase and Robinhood Gold (which removes crypto transaction fees). Both are solid for getting exposure without dealing with custody complexity until you’re ready to move to a hardware wallet.
The Bottom Line
The US national debt just crossed $38.86 trillion and is climbing at $7.2 billion per day. Annual interest expense is heading toward $1.25 trillion. Unfunded liabilities across Social Security and Medicare add another $78 trillion to the picture. Debt-to-GDP is at 125%.
None of this is a secret. It’s all public data from the Congressional Budget Office and JEC. The question isn’t whether fiscal irresponsibility is happening — it clearly is. The question is how you position your portfolio for a world where the government’s response to its own debt problem is to print more dollars.
I’ve held Bitcoin since 2014 through three bear markets and multiple times where I questioned the thesis. I still hold it — not because I think it’s guaranteed to work, but because it’s the clearest fixed-supply alternative to an infinitely inflatable fiat currency that I’ve found.
That’s not maximalism. That’s just math.
Start building your Bitcoin position:
- Buy Bitcoin on Coinbase — simplest onboarding, hardware wallet export when you’re ready
- Robinhood Gold — buy crypto with no transaction fees for Gold subscribers
Related reading on this site:
- How I’ve survived three crypto bear markets — what the -85%, -50%, and -77% crashes actually looked like from the inside
- The Fidelity $60K Bitcoin floor thesis — why institutional macro support matters
- Ten years of crypto investing lessons — what actually changes after a decade in the market
Nothing in this article is financial advice. I’m sharing what I actually do and why I do it. Crypto is volatile. Position size accordingly.
