The Cathedral Problem

Bitcoin has established itself as an altar — technically sound, censorship-resistant, decentralized. The altar stands. But the cathedral around it — the institutional, legal, financial, and everyday architecture that any functioning economy needs — has yet to be built.

The Cathedral Problem asks what daily life looks like on a post-fiat monetary foundation. Written in the unit of the Sat, engineered rather than argued, it takes the operational questions that most Bitcoin literature stops short of and works them through to first drafts.

Across eighteen chapters, Christian Evertz sketches the architecture: banking and credit under full-reserve constraints; mortgages and duration in a deflationary regime; the state and taxation without seigniorage; work and wages in a hard-money economy; wealth concentration under r greater than g on a fixed monetary base; privacy, compliance, and the shadow economy; the geopolitics of a Bitcoin-denominated world.

This is the sequel work to Saifedean Ammous's The Bitcoin Standard and Allen Farrington's Bitcoin Is Venice. Where those books diagnose why hard money wins, The Cathedral Problem asks what society builds on top of it, once it has won.

For readers who understand that the interesting questions begin after the monetary diagnosis — and who want to see the mortgage contract, the tax interface, the Lightning granularity trade-off worked through, not just alluded to.