In the grand theater of history, empires rise like swelling tides and fall in crashing waves.
Their fates are tied to the pendulum swings of value—from centralized power with centralized money to the decentralized fringes where innovation and new tech dances with peril.
The new challenges the old, with clash after clash, until the old is overwhelmed and the old edge creates its own center to start again.
Over and over. This is the pendulum swing of empires.
Today, as silver surges past $51 per ounce, cresting a 2025 high amid market jitters, and gold holds steadfast, we see another cycle repeating.
The tempestuous token seas of DeFi are roiling, there was a double storm, driving sailors back to the ancient anchors to ride it out.
Echoes from Rome
Echoes of this swing resound through history.
See it in Rome, where the denarius was a beacon of stability at 4.5 grams of nearly 100% pure silver in 211 BC.
But the tech of clipping and metalurgy led to relentless debasement.
By Nero’s reign in 64 AD, its silver content dropped to 94%, then plummeted further to 50% by the early third century under the Severan emperors.
This fueled hyperinflation that eroded the empire’s economic foundations and sped up its decline, with prices soaring up to 200 times in some areas.
They were in effect borrowing for war and woe.
Then the lights went out in Rome.
Spain’s Overreach
Similarly, Spain’s empire in the 1500s was bloated by a massive increase in silver from New World mines like Potosí (producing 45,000 tons between 1550 and 1800).
This lit up the Price Revolution: prices quadrupled across Europe, with Spanish inflation hitting 4-6% annually.
It weakened the Habsburg dynasty and sowed seeds of the fall of their centralized imperial overextension.
DeFi’s Crypto Storm
Fast-forward to November 3-4, 2025, when DeFi’s wild waves hit a hard storm and crypto prices crashed.
Balancer, a DeFi company, suffered a $128 million hack, and Stream Finance endured a $93 million loss from a leverage contagion. Twin blows that triggered a crypto storm, slashing total value locked (TVL) by $20 billion.
In such chaos, money moved with lightning speed, fleeing platforms in mere hours as liquidity evaporated and fear cascaded through the interconnected chains.
This frenzy echoes Elias Canetti’s insights in Crowds and Power:
“Panic is a disintegration of the crowd within the crowd. The individual breaks away and wants to escape from it because the crowd, as a whole, is endangered. But, because he is physically still stuck in it, he must attack it,” amplifying chaos.
So the capital fled like a digital herd in panic fleeing the wolves.
A centralized authority cannot act fast enough to stop that kind of capital movement in digital finance. Not yet. And do we want them to? Or do we want the new system to have a backstop for the global economy while individuals are sovereign with their wealth?
The BIS, centralized central bank of central banks, is developing ways to look down YOUR capital for their benefit, with programmable CBDCs (central bank digital currency), meaning they want to control the stability of a current global money system, as it is, in ways that take your power and benefit them as the managers.
As in, the current system but even worse for you.
The current system has always been at the individual’s expense. You got stability (they said but not really as we have crisis after crisis) at the cost of being thwarted by high fees, debt monopoly and lack of entry to ways to hold and build your own stable wealth.
Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, sayst:
“The long age of Commodity Money has at last passed finally away before the age of Representative Money. Gold has ceased to be a coin, a hoard, a tangible claim to wealth… It has become a much more abstract thing–just a standard of value,”
The medium IS the message—shifting from gold’s tangible weight to fiat, to digital forms of both, and to DeFi’s ethereal code reshapes societal trust, with huge swings in “value” as the new fights the old and we swing again from central control to the edges of the turning wheel.
Gold and Silver as Safe Havens
Yet, in these swings, precious metals remain the safe ground.
They hold value through storms, as silver’s 50%+ rally this year attests.
Still, new technologies like blockchain offer opportunities to expand individual holdings. A fairer system is being built, where individuals have more control, and payments (among other things) are being redefined to settle with almost zero fees and in seconds. The new developing system will repeat the cycle of rise and fall.
And we can look at these cycles, go to the hub with our metals, and also take advantage of the ideas as they are being built.
But only if we can navigate the storms, keep the anchor with us, and look out ahead at the new shores.
Elaine~
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References
Fortune: Current price of silver as of Wednesday, November 12, 2025 (https://fortune.com/article/current-price-of-silver-11-12-2025/)
FinancialContent: Silver’s Shimmering Ascent (https://markets.financialcontent.com/wral/article/marketminute-2025-11-13-silvers-shimmering-ascent-a-dual-powered-bull-run-ignites-the-market)
Chronicle Journal: Crypto Market Plunges into ‘Extreme Fear’ (https://markets.chroniclejournal.com/chroniclejournal/article/breakingcrypto-2025-11-4-crypto-market-plunges-into-extreme-fear-as-investors-embrace-risk-off-stance)
Blockeden: Anatomy of a $285M DeFi Contagion (https://blockeden.xyz/blog/2025/11/08/m-defi-contagion/)
Yahoo Finance: DeFi Sentiment Rattled (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/defi-sentiment-rattled-steep-tvl-141932349.html)
Wikipedia: Denarius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius)
The Collector: The Debasement of Roman Coinage (https://www.thecollector.com/inflation-third-century-crisis/)
ScienceDirect: Reconstruction of the Spanish money supply (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001449832100019X)
Wikipedia: Price revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution)
Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (http://cast.b-ap.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2015/09/canetti.pdf)
Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media (https://designopendata.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/understanding-media-mcluhan.pdf)
Elaine Diane Taylor on X @ ElaineDTaylor
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Thank you to Jim Rickards for including me in his New York Times bestselling book The New Case for Gold.
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Nothing on this site is intended as investment advice. Just an artist expressing what I see and a bit of what I’m doing. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Gold is at historic highs because trust in government and legacy systems is at historic lows.
Digital Money and cryptocurrencies are rising because the tech allows for a fairer global decentralized movement, storage and exchange of value/money.
Elaine – first Bitcoin machine in the world – Vancouver, BC, Canada
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Elaine – Barkerville, Gold Rush Trail, British Columbia, Canada
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Thank you to Mike Maloney for including my song Coins and Crowns in Episode 1 of his bestselling YouTube series Hidden Secrets of Money.
Coins and Crowns
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
Coins and Crowns is featured in Episode 1 of Mike Maloney’s bestselling series Hidden Secrets of Money.
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Not Much of a Holiday (Bank Holidays and Media Persuasion)
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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A Terrible Breeze (War and Social Media)
The news comes down
A little bluebird sings
Words of war
Fire and furious things
Of testing might
‘Til no patience knows
If keeping still
Still keeps you safe at home
It’s a terrible breeze
They speak of today
Of threats that used to live a world away
We all know wind
Can blow both ways
And a terrible breeze can blow it all away
A worldwide net
Sees our village grow
Until we all forget
What each one used to know
How a blind bird’s wings
Can reach the shore
And turn the wheel of peace and war
Village fools sinking down, down, down
Debt and gold wound in numbered shrouds
Deal of a life it’s bread and clowns
Can we afford another go around?
The news comes down.
It’s a terrible breeze. The news comes down.
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Preparing for the Fall is a live boutique album available for digital download — featuring Wag the Dog, Black Swan Dive, American Pie and Gods of the Copybook Headings. Also available on iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Music and major digital distributors.
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings
words by Rudyard Kipling and music by Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Preparing for the Fall.
The copybooks of the early 1900s gave us all the wisdom we need. The sayings that were copied are the truths, the gods of our world. All the empires who followed the gods of the marketplace have fallen, and there’s terror and slaughter when the gods of the copybook headings return. The lyrics are by Rudyard Kipling. One of my gurus.
Another Week on Wall Street
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Coins and Crowns.
“A little grease (Greece) is floating out to sea, and little pigs (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are bobbing up and down, they’ll send a storm and we’ll see, when the tide goes out who’s naked on the beach“. The world is changing as we know it.
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Nothing on this site is intended as individual investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Elaine Diane Taylor 