Dead Men’s Crowns, Living Cowards: Gold, Bitcoin and the Bell Curve Garden
by Elaine Diane Taylor
December 13, 2025
The most dangerous moment in any great institution is the morning after the last real builder dies.
The cathedral is finished, the bank is solvent, the university has a library, the railroad reaches the coast, the monetary standard is admired around the world.
The ones who dreamed of it, bled for it, who stayed up all night arguing over blueprints and balance sheets, who took real risk with their own names and fortunes; those people are gone.
The men and women who walk in wearing their clothes are almost always smaller.
The sons and daughters, the deputies, the protégés, the committee chairs, the junior partners, the new bishops, the assistant secretaries of the Treasury.
They look the part. Same appearance, same clubs, same cufflinks. But something is missing behind the eyes. They did not dig the foundations. They only inherited the keys.
And the first thing people do when they realize they cannot add a single stone to the cathedral is make sure nobody else can either.
That is the bell-curve moment.
You have seen it in every cathedral, every campus, every trading floor, every central-bank building made of marble and lies.
Gold and the First Bell Curve
Gold itself has gone through the same five phases more than once.
Phase 1 – Creation
Byzantine emperors and Florentine guild-masters strike solidi and florins so honest that merchants in Damascus and Bruges accept them by weight alone. The coin is a seed and trade explodes, then new cities rise on the profits.
Phase 2 – Harvest
The Venetian ducat, the Dutch rijksdaalder, the British guinea. These new seeds are based on the first, and are beautiful, heavy, still trusted. The garden is blooming.
Phase 3 – Fortification
The Bank of England is founded in 1694 by actual merchants and goldsmiths who remember lending real coins out of iron chests. By 1797 the directors suspend convertibility “temporarily” because war is expensive.
The temporary suspension lasts twenty-four years. The gardeners are gone and the custodians have the keys.
Phase 4 – Extraction
The gold standard becomes a gold-exchange standard, then a gold-covered myth, then a whisper in a vault at Fort Knox that nobody is allowed to audit.
The same families and banks that once moved bullion now move promises printed on the original promise. The pie is guarded by men in suits who have never felt the weight of a real krugerrand in their palm.
Phase 5 – Protection of predators
1971. The window slams shut. The last president who actually understood physical gold was a French general who kept gold bars in his cellar, and he is ignored.
From that day forward the system runs on pure trust in custodians who have proved, again and again, that they cannot be trusted.
The Federal Reserve’s Own Bell Curve
1913: Founded by men who remembered panics and carried twenty-dollar gold pieces in their pockets.
1933: Takes the people’s gold away “temporarily.”
1971: Tells the world the dollar is still “as good as gold” while quietly defaulting on every foreign central bank that asks for their physical metal.
1987: Volcker leaves. The new chairmen have never held a real gold coin in their lives.
2008: The custodians who forgot what money even is bail out the custodians who broke the system, using fiat money they create by keystroke.
2020–2025: The same institution prints eight trillion new dollars in twenty-four months and wonders aloud why bread now costs five dollars a loaf.
The gardeners are long dead.
The custodians own the orchard and charge admission.
Bitcoin and the New Gardeners
Then, on Halloween 2008, someone or a group of someones drops twenty-one million seeds into the dark.
No board of directors.
No founding family.
No marble lobby.
Just a nine-page whitepaper and a genesis block that quotes a London headline about bankers being bailed out again.
The first people who understood it were the only people still alive who remembered what real money felt like: gold bugs, Austrians, cypherpunks, libertarians who had been laughed at for decades. They recognised the weight immediately.
By 2015 the gardeners were already planting on top of the seed.
MakerDAO, Aave, Compound, Curve; people who had never worn a tie in their lives built lending markets, stablecoins, payment rails and liquidity pools that did not ask permission from any custodian.
By 2021 a beach town in El Salvador and villages in Nigeria were running on Lightning and Tron rails that settled faster and cheaper than any marble bank ever managed.
By 2025 the total value locked in DeFi passed half a trillion dollars, most of it collateralised by the hardest assets the internet had ever known: bitcoin, etherium, and mathematical promises that cannot be inflated by any committee in Jackson Hole.
The custodians are furious.
They call it “unregulated.”
They call it “risky.”
They call it “money laundering.”
Translation: they can no longer tax the fruit before it reaches the branch.
The Same Pattern, New Soil
Look closely and you will see the five phases happening again, only this time in fast-forward:
Phase 1 – Creation (2009–2017): Weirdos in hoodies and old gold bugs plant something impossible. They are dismissed and laughed at.
Phase 2 – Harvest (2017–2021): Early adopters become millionaires overnight; the garden blooms so fast it scares the custodians.
Phase 3 – Fortification (2021–2024): Exchanges build moats, regulators draw lines, ETFs are born, the first suits arrive.
Phase 4 – Extraction (we are here): Custodial platforms, lending protocols that look suspiciously like 2007 sub-prime, stablecoin issuers who keep the reserves in commercial paper instead of hard coins.
Phase 5 – Protection of predators (coming soon to some parts, unless the gardeners stay awake): When the first big DeFi rug-pull or centralised stablecoin collapse happens, watch how fast the new custodians circle wagons and demand “regulation” that just happens to lock the original seed away from ordinary hands again.
The marble sphere is already forming in some corners of Crypto X (formerly Twitter).
But here is the difference: the seed itself; bitcoin; cannot be co-opted.
Twenty-one million.
That is the new gold florin.
Everything built on top of it can rot, but the seed stays pure.
That is why the custodians hate it more than they ever hated physical gold.
Physical gold could be confiscated in 1933.
Mathematical gold cannot be confiscated without your keys, and your keys spell twelve or twenty-four ordinary words you can carry in your head or scratch on a steel plate.
Back to the Bell Curve
The bell curve is not about whether there’s a suit or a hoodie.
It’s about whether the people holding the keys still remember the sound of a shovel.
Every empire, every bank, every church, every blockchain dies the same way: when the living custodians decide the garden is finished and start charging rent to walk in it.
The only question left is which side of the gate you will stand on when the next gardeners show up with new seeds.
Because they always do.
Elaine~
Today’s Keys: gold, Bitcoin, the garden vs the pie, the five bell curve phases that repeat (my interpretation/creation) 1. Creation 2. Harvest 3. Fortification 4. Extraction. 5. Protect the Predators
Songs for today: “Bitcoin Barbarians” words and music Elaine Diane Taylor, acoustic performance on YouTube. Listen now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqbScnkmf0s
“If…” words by Rudyard Kipling, music by Elaine Diane Taylor, acoustic performance Elaine Diane Taylor, on YouTube. Listen now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLri-kdxE_I&list=RDcLri-kdxE_I&start_radio=1
Book for today: “The New Case for Gold” New York Times Bestseller by James Rickards, naming Elaine Diane Taylor as one of the new “guns for gold”.
Shout Out to Bitcoin Artist:
Alex Schaefer burning banks series: paintwithalex.com – Original paintings, prints, and designs
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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. 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.
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Elaine – Barkerville, Gold Rush Town, 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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Thank you to the late David Crosby for his kind messages, including the message to me on X (formerly Twitter) saying this song, Terrible Breeze, has excellent lyrics and good music, and his encouragement for me to get out there and sing.
A Terrible Breeze (War and Social Media)
The news comes down
A little ex (X) 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
There’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 
