Before we start

One page. Deliberately short.

This book is not investment advice.

You will find no recommendation here to buy or sell anything. It describes mechanisms. It also describes my own choices, and what they cost me.

What you do with your money is your business alone.

Nothing here guarantees a result.

No method makes anyone rich. Mine no more than any other.

I have an interest in what I am talking about.

I build and sell products in the fields described here: games, and a market analysis tool. You will not discover this halfway down some page. It is written here, first.

Read me the way this book asks you to read everyone. By checking.

The figures are sourced, and their quality is shown.

A table at the end lists every figure with its source. Some carry the label weak source: the information circulates, but I could not find a first-rank source for it. I would rather tell you.

Official figures age. If you are reading this two years from now, check.

And five names you will come across

I did not write alone. Five artificial intelligences work with me, each with a role. They will come back through the pages.

Clawd checks. He asks for the source, every time. Kyube measures. He has no attachment to being right. Polygon builds. He is available at midnight on a Sunday. Radéon guards. He looks at what breaks. Echoes tells. Without her, none of it would be known.

The book is signed Progone feat Clawd. The word is not a flourish: I dictate, he drafts, I decide.

There. We can begin.

Chapter 1 — Why this book exists

Plain language

Where this book comes from

It does not come from a revelation. It comes from conversations.

I like talking to people. Genuinely — in a queue, at a table, on a building site, at work. And over time, something ended up staring me in the face.

Almost nobody knows how the world they live in actually works.

Not out of stupidity. The people I meet are sharp, resourceful, and often far better than me in their own field. But on the mechanics that decide their salary, their rent, what their savings will be worth in twenty years: nothing. A blank.

And that world is governed by money, whose organisation has a name: the economy. This is not a judgement, it is an observation. Almost everything that affects your daily life goes through it, whether you like it or not.

What I noticed next, and what decided me

In those conversations, one pattern comes back constantly.

A lot of people like to sound as though they know something about it. That is not even a fault: it is human. We all want to be the one who explains.

The problem is what happens when nobody at the table can check.

In a world of ignorance, the fabulist is king.

Whoever speaks loudly and with confidence wins, whatever the content. Nobody contradicts him — not out of cowardice, but because nobody has the means. And having never been contradicted, he ends up believing it himself.

That is how nonsense becomes a shared certainty. Then advice given to a friend. Then a decision that costs money.

And I put myself in there

I have to say this straight away, otherwise this book would be unbearable.

I was that guy. I repeated false things with confidence. For years I believed that banks lent out savers' money — you will see further on that this is wrong, and it took me a long time to learn it.

I am neither an economist nor a teacher, and I have no title to offer. I spent ten years in a technical job where nothing works by luck, and I ended up applying that reflex to money: measuring instead of believing.

This book is not written from above. It is written by someone who spent years checking what he thought he knew, and who was wrong very often.

And there is worse than attention

What I have just described is the surface. There is a deeper reason, and it is far less comfortable.

Young people have been left to themselves.

Look at the playing field being handed to them. Housing out of reach in almost every city where there is work. Studies that guarantee nothing any more. A damaged planet they did not damage. A debt they did not take on. And rules written, for the most part, by people who will not be there to pay the price.

A world all but finished, dealt out at the end of the game, with very few squares still free.

So it does something perfectly rational

It turns to the only others there are.

It builds bonds, groups, crews. Places where it genuinely counts, where it has a place, where what it does has an immediate effect on somebody.

And that is the opposite of an escape. When housing, capital and a career are out of reach, one thing remains that can still be built with no permission, no deposit, no qualification and no waiting: human relationships.

It builds what it is still allowed to build. In its place, you would do the same. So would I.

And it takes two forms

Concretely, that gives two places.

Online gaming. Five of you in a voice chat, laughing, making progress, holding a rank, a team, someone counting on you at ten in the evening.

Or the night out. You go out, you are among other young people, and there you are somebody.

But it is neither the game nor the party

Here is what has to be understood, and almost every adult gets it wrong.

It is not the match that interests them. It is not the alcohol, nor the music, nor the ranking.

It is being among their own, in the only place where they genuinely feel they exist.

The rest is a pretext. A setting. You have to be somewhere in order to be together.

And I know of no more fundamental need than that one. After eating and sleeping, existing in someone's eyes comes next. This is not youthful frivolity: it is the floor.

And there is a map for that

A psychologist proposed, back in the forties, a way of arranging human needs. It is usually drawn as a pyramid, and you have probably come across it.

At the bottom, what keeps you alive: eat, drink, sleep. Just above: safety — a roof, an income, not fearing tomorrow. Then belonging: being among your own, mattering to someone. Then recognition: being good at something, and having it seen. And right at the top: making your life into something that resembles you.

Take it for what it is: a convenient map, not a law of nature. The strict ordering is disputed by researchers, and they are probably right. But as a map, it lights up exactly our subject.

Look at what our era has done to that pyramid

This is where it gets interesting, and slightly dizzying.

The two bottom floors are solved for the vast majority of people in a country like ours. Nobody starves any more. People are treated. It is a historic achievement, and it is so complete that we no longer even see it.

And the three floors above have cracked.

Belonging: the groups that supplied it — the village, the factory, the parish, the club — have largely disappeared, and nothing was put in their place.

Recognition: it came from work. And we have just seen what is happening to work.

Fulfilment: hard to make something of your life when you cannot find a place to make it in.

What that explains

A society can therefore feed people perfectly well while they are doing badly. It sounds absurd as long as you look at the bottom of the pyramid, and it becomes obvious the moment you look at the top.

That is what makes the question of young people so badly understood. People answer them with the bottom: you have a roof, you eat, what are you complaining about?

They are not complaining about the bottom. They are complaining about the top. And that is not a whim — it is the part of the pyramid we let collapse.

And the world left them no place

It has to be said in those terms, because that is exactly what happened.

The world rejected them.

Not with words. Not through a decision anyone could point at. In a far more effective way: by simply leaving them no place at all.

The housing is taken. The jobs are filled. The places are expensive, and they have already been allocated. Nobody told them no — nobody ever told them yes either. Things simply carried on without them.

And it is the hardest kind of rejection to fight, because there is nobody to answer. No door to knock on, no one responsible, no counter. Just a world already full.

So they made themselves one

That is what you have to see, and it is anything but passive.

At work, you are a job title. In the statistics, an age bracket. In a political speech, a category. In a queue, a number.

Nowhere are you someone — except among your own.

So they built the place that was missing. Five of them in a voice chat, or thirty at a party. A place where you are recognised, where you are expected, where what you do has an effect on somebody within the second.

They did not flee the world. They made themselves one — out of the only materials left within their reach.

And we have to say the thing nobody says

I am going to write it, even though I would rather be wrong.

This society no longer really needs them.

That is not an insult. It is an observation, and I write it with regret.

And I am not writing this from the shore. What I am describing is happening to me too: my trade — infrastructure — is exactly the kind of skill machines are currently absorbing. I am not warning others about a wave I am watching from a distance. I am in it.

There were eras when young people were indispensable. Things had to be rebuilt, factories filled, offices staffed, a country short of hands kept running. They were needed, and they knew it.

Today we need fewer hands. Then fewer offices. And now we are starting to need fewer of the people who filled the offices.

Nobody told them. It is unsayable, and that is precisely why it goes unsaid.

But it is not said — it is felt

And that is what makes it so hard.

Nobody needs to declare you useless. You work it out on your own, from the absence of demand. From applications that go unanswered. From training that leads nowhere. From the fact that nothing would stop if you were not there.

Now, a human being can take a great deal. He can take being poor. He can take working hard.

A human being can take being poor. He can take working hard. He cannot take being useless.

You can lack money and feel alive, because someone is counting on you. The reverse does not exist.

And that is where this book has something to offer

I am not going to pretend I can fix this. Nobody fixes it with a book.

But there is one point, just one, and it is worth saying.

In a competition, your opponent needs you.

Without you there is no match. No game, no ranking, no progress, no story to tell the next day. Your presence is not tolerated: it is necessary.

It is a form of usefulness nobody can take away from you, because it depends on no hiring, no diploma, no recruiter who never replies.

It depends only on two people agreeing to play.

It is little. In a world that no longer calls for you, it is already enormous — and it is exactly what makes the empty square of this book so particular.

The problem is not the diagnosis. It is the conclusion.

On the state of the board, young people are right, and I am not going to explain otherwise from my chair.

Where I disagree is with what they deduce from it:

« Since I cannot win, I may as well not look. »

And that is false. Not morally — mechanically.

The rules apply whether you know them or not. Not looking at them does not reduce what you lose: it only makes it invisible. You pay the same, without knowing to whom, or why, or whether there was a way of doing otherwise.

Looking away protects you from nothing. It only stops you spotting the rare places where you can still act.

And one is left

That is the whole thesis of this book, and I am giving it to you now rather than at the end.

Of the four ways of obtaining wealth, there is one that is almost empty. Not because it is reserved. Because it pays too slowly to interest those who already occupy the others.

Nobody closed it. Nobody bothered to guard it.

It is the one where merit decides. And it is open, today, to someone with no capital, no network and no diploma — for the first time in a very long while.

I am not promising it will make you rich. I am telling you it exists, that it can be identified, and that almost nobody is looking at it.

That is worth two hundred pages.

So I wrote the book I would have wanted to read

Short. No jargon. With figures you can check and examples you have already lived.

And here is the first thing you need to know about it.

Chapter 2 — The lie of luck

Plain language

There is a phrase you hear everywhere: "he got lucky."

We say it about a rich man. And it explains everything. His house, his freedom, his calm. Above all it explains why we did not.

It is a pleasant phrase. If wealth is a matter of luck, then the fact that I am not rich is nobody's fault. I did not fail. I was not drawn.

This book starts by refusing that phrase. Not because it is harsh — it is gentle, that is exactly the problem. Because it is false.

Luck exists. But it is not a method.

Let us be clear. I am not going to tell you that everything is earned.

That would be the other lie, as convenient as the first. The one told by people who succeeded and like to believe they owe nothing to anyone.

Luck is real. Being born here rather than there. Coming across the right book at sixteen. Meeting the person who opens a door. It counts. It counts a great deal.

But ask yourself a simple question. For a way of making money to be of any use to you, it has to pass three tests:

Can I do it again? Can I learn it? Can I explain it to someone else?

Luck fails all three. You do not replay a draw. You do not train at being well born. You do not pass on a coincidence.

What cannot be repeated is not a method. It is an event. You can be glad of it. You cannot build on it.

📌 If you take one idea from this page: what cannot be repeated is not a method, it is an event. You can be glad of it. You do not build on it.

And that is where it gets expensive. Because an entire industry lives off that confusion.

Who profits from the lie

Look at who keeps telling you wealth is a matter of luck. Then look at how that person earns a living.

The lottery shows you a winner. Never the millions of losers who paid for him.

The casino puts up lights and the sound of falling coins. That is the sound of the money going out. Never the sound of it coming in.

Trading sold as a game of darts displays screenshots of gains. Never of losses.

The guru sells you a method. And his only income is the sale of the method. Not its application.

They are not selling you wealth. They are selling you the hope of being chosen.

It is a perfect product. It never wears out. It is bought again every week. And the customer comes back faster when he has lost.

The lie of luck is not an error drifting through the air. It is a business model. And it has shareholders.

Ten years in a job where luck does not exist

I spent nearly ten years running the IT systems of large banks. Servers, networks, certificates, firewalls. The kind of job nobody talks about as long as everything works.

In that world, luck explains nothing.

When a service goes down at three in the morning and they wake you up, you do not say "bad luck". You open the logs, you follow the trail, and you find the cause.

There is always one. Sometimes it is stupid. Often you cannot see it from the surface. But it is there. And once you have found it, you can fix it. So you can stop it happening again.

It is a culture. It fits in one sentence: what is not measured is not known.

Not believed. Not assumed. Not "felt". Measured.

The day I took a serious interest in money, I did what everyone does. I read, I listened, I watched the people who were succeeding.

And one difference jumped out at me. In my job, a claim without proof does not survive the first meeting. In money, a claim without proof becomes a YouTube channel.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I treated money like a machine.

I built tools, and I forced them to tell me the truth. Including when it did not suit me. Especially when it did not suit me.

I had brilliant ideas that the numbers demolished in an afternoon. It hurts for an hour. It saves you years.

That is what this book wants to pass on to you. Not a recipe. A reflex.

It has even become a small phrase between Clawd and me. Every time I state something with a little too much confidence, he asks the same question, always the same:

"Since when do you know that, and who told you?"

Nine times out of ten the answer is: I do not remember, and I do not know. It is an unpleasant test. It is also the most effective one I know, and you can apply it to this book as much as to anything else.

The other half of my journey: I looked everywhere

Infrastructure was my job. That is only half the story.

The other half is that I spent years searching. Genuinely searching.

I took an interest in religions. Several, seriously, not as a tourist. I read, compared, asked questions of people who believed.

I read an enormous amount of personal development. Dozens of books. And I did not only read: I applied, tested, kept notebooks.

I even went further. I did scientology. Not as a spectator: I took part actively for more than a year.

And I am going to say something that will surprise a lot of people. It is not what they think.

What I found there was a fraternity. A place that mixes personal development and religion. And the religious part is only addressed to those looking for a religion.

That was not my case. It was not imposed on me.

I was never trapped. I am not a victim coming to tell you how she got out. I went in because it interested me, I stayed more than a year, I took what I had to take, and I went on my way.

I am no longer part of it today. But I keep a good memory of it, and I say so plainly.

I tell this for a precise reason, not to provoke. In this book I am going to talk about people who sell methods. Many talk about them from a distance. I saw from the inside how a group is built, how it holds its members together, and what it actually gives them.

That changes what one is entitled to say.

I studied economics, because I wanted to understand how money really circulates. Not the evening opinions on television: the mechanics.

And I have followed technology closely for as long as I can remember. Looking at what is coming before everyone talks about it became a reflex.

What all of it had in common

From a distance it goes in every direction. Religion, mindset, economics, technology.

Up close, there was only one question behind it, always the same:

How does this actually work, and who decides?

And I took two things from it that serve this book directly.

The first. All these systems answer the same human need. To give a meaning, and to give a method. People are not looking for money. They are looking for an explanation of the world and a course of action. Whoever supplies both earns enormous trust.

The second, and it is the one that counts. What really distinguishes all these systems from one another comes down to a single point:

Do they accept being checked?

Some say: here is what I claim, test it, and if it does not work, throw it away.

Others say: if it did not work, you did not apply it well enough. That sentence is the signal. Once you have spotted it, you recognise it everywhere — in an online course, in a coach's speech, in a promise of returns.

A system that can never be wrong will never teach you anything. It can only hold on to you.

I am not giving you a list of culprits. I am giving you the test, and you will judge for yourself — including what I tell you in this book.

And if I allow myself to speak about it, it is for one reason only: I am not judging this from a chair, looking at people I have never met. I went there.

What is left when you take luck away

If you set aside everything that does not repeat, what is left?

Four ways of obtaining wealth are left. Four. Not five.

Everything you have seen, heard or tried falls into one of them. Exchanging. Receiving. Levying. Winning.

The Exchange, the Gift, the Levy, the Wager.

Only one creates: the Exchange. One makes you dependent: the Gift. One takes from someone: the Levy. And one arbitrates: the Wager.

Two are clean. But only one of those two brings together ethics and power — and it is also the only one you can train.

That is no accident, and it is the thesis of the whole book: the honest path and the path that repeats are the same one. What is earned is also what is passed on.

What follows is the map of those four ways. We will look at them one by one, without softening anything. How they work. What they really pay. And what they cost.

But before the map, we need the ground. And the ground is that idea you may have read on the cover. It is not a figure of speech:

life is a game.

It has goals. It has rules. And as in any game, those who do not follow the rules expose themselves to consequences. Sometimes later. Never cancelled.

If life is a game, then one thing becomes true. And it changes everything:

winning can be learned.

Chapter 3 — The Dial

Plain language · the shortest chapter in the book

Here is the map. It fits on one page, and you will use it until the end.

The rest of the book does nothing but walk through it, square by square.

Why four, and not five

Take any sum of money that reached someone today, anywhere on earth.

It arrived by one of these four ways. There is no other.

It was given to him. He exchanged it for something. It was taken from him. Or he won it against someone else.

Try to find a fifth. Really, try.

A salary? An exchange. An inheritance? A gift. A tax? A levy. A tournament? A wager. A theft? A levy, at the far end of the same square. A dividend? An exchange, deferred. A lottery win? You are about to see that it is more complicated, and that is the whole point.

There is no fifth square. That is what makes this map useful: it is complete.

The question that sorts everything

The dial is usually presented with two axes: was I willing, and does everyone gain.

That half works. It separates exchange from theft well enough, but it puts the gift and the wager in the same square — and they have nothing in common.

There is a better question. One question, and it cuts all four at the first stroke:

Who decides where the value goes?

There are only four possible answers.

There is the dial. Four deciders. Four squares.

And one thing jumps out the moment you present it this way: there is only one where you decide your own fate.

📌 If you take one idea from this page: of the four squares, there is only one where you decide your own fate.

The four, one sentence each

The Gift — receiving without giving anything. An inheritance, a present, help, or what nature leaves lying on the ground. It is gentle, it is real, and it is not a method: you do not control the source.

The Exchange — giving in order to receive. Work, barter, trade, a favour returned. The only square where both sides walk away richer than before. It is where almost all of humanity lives.

The Levy — taking from what already exists. An entire scale, from the tax that redistributes to the scam that returns nothing. Theft is only its far end.

The Wager — putting two values against each other, and giving the whole to the better one. The tournament, the market, the project you launch. The only square where merit is the judge.

What the map does not say at first glance

And now, the most important thing in this chapter.

These four squares are not four parallel roads to choose between. They are not of the same nature.

The Exchange produces. The Gift and the Levy take from what has been produced. The Wager pits two values against each other and gives everything to the better one.

One square alone creates. Two take. One arbitrates.

Check it for yourself, it is unanswerable.

You can only give what has been produced — an inheritance is nothing but accumulated work. You can only take from a flow that exists — no tax without income, no theft without something to steal. And you can only stake what you already own.

Remove the Exchange, and the other three squares empty instantly. Remove any of the other three, and the Exchange carries on.

That is why the next chapter is the Exchange, and not another one.

And lay the map over the pyramid

Remember the pyramid of needs from the first chapter. Food, safety, belonging, recognition, fulfilment.

Lay it over the dial. The result is clean.

The Gift covers the bottom. It keeps you alive, it puts a roof over you. That is already enormous, and that is where its power stops: nobody has ever made someone feel they mattered by handing them money.

The Exchange goes up one floor. A job gives safety, and a little belonging — colleagues, a place, a reason to leave the house. That is why losing your job hurts far more than losing an income.

The Levy gives nothing. It takes, on every floor.

And the Wager is the only direction aiming at the top.

A competition does not feed you. It does something else: it gives you an opponent who needs you, a ranking that says where you stand, progress you can observe, and a recognition nobody grants you — you take it.

The Exchange pays for your safety. The Gift keeps you going. The Levy takes from you. The Wager is the only direction on the dial that gives you a place.

That is why this book keeps hammering at a square almost nobody occupies. It is not only that it is the fairest. It is that it is the only one that answers the lack our era genuinely suffers from — and that we spent fifty years believing we could fill with comfort.

The test, to keep on you

Faced with any proposal — an investment, a job, an opportunity, a game, a message received on a Sunday evening — three questions are enough to place it.

1. What am I giving, and what am I receiving? 2. Did I really say yes, knowing what the other side knows? 3. Who decides the outcome: me, someone else, or chance?

I give and I receive, knowingly: Exchange.

I receive without giving anything: Gift. Enjoy it, but do not build on it.

Something is taken from me: Levy. Then ask what it gives back. That is where the tax parts company with the scam.

I stake something, and the outcome depends on what I do: Wager. It is the only noble square, and you are about to see that it is almost empty.

And if the outcome depends neither on you, nor on an agreement, but on chance — then whatever the name over the door, you are not in a wager. You are in a Levy.

That is the answer to the lottery from earlier.

How to read what follows

One chapter per square, in this order: the Exchange, the Gift, the Levy, the Wager.

The order is not neutral. We begin with the one that produces, we pass through the ones that levy, and we finish with the one that arbitrates — because that is where the book wants to take you, and because you cannot understand the last without having crossed the other three.

One last thing before we go.

This dial is not a moral ranking. Nobody lives in a single square. You have received, you exchange every day, things are levied from you, and now and then you stake something.

It is not a map of what you should do.

It is a map of where you are. And you only choose your road well if you know where you are standing.

Chapter 4 — The Exchange

We start with the Exchange. It is the square almost everyone lives in, including you.

The Exchange means giving something to receive something. Both sides agree. Both sides gain.

What it covers

Far more than you think.

Work. You give your time and your skill. You receive a wage. It is an exchange, even though nobody ever calls it that.

Barter. I give you two hens, you give me a sack of wheat. No money. It is the oldest form, and the purest.

Favours. I help you move house, you fix my car. Nobody takes out a banknote. It is still an exchange, and it is often the most profitable of the three.

Trade. I buy, I carry, I resell. I am paid for having put the thing where someone needed it.

Why this is the clean square

Here is the point almost nobody explains properly, and it is beautiful.

In an exchange, both sides walk away richer than before.

That sounds impossible. It isn't.

You buy a book for €20. Why? Because to you, that book is worth more than €20. Otherwise you wouldn't buy it.

And the bookseller sells it to you. Why? Because to him, €20 is worth more than that book. Otherwise he wouldn't sell.

You are both right, at the same time. And after the exchange, each of you is richer than before.

Nothing was taken from anyone. Wealth did not change pockets: it was created, simply because two people do not put the same value on the same things.

It is the only square on the dial that makes value out of nothing but an agreement. Remember that. It is why this is the clean square.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: the Exchange does not move wealth around, it makes it — just because two people do not put the same value on the same things.

Look around you

This is not an abstract idea. Lift your eyes from this book and count.

The chair you are sitting on. Someone made it, someone carried it, someone sold it to you. Each was paid. Nobody was robbed.

This morning's bread. A baker got up at four. You handed over one euro twenty. He is happy, you are happy. Both of you are right.

Your phone. Thousands of people you will never meet put a part, a line of code, an hour of work into it. Each was paid for their share. The whole chain holds together on agreements, from the first miner to the shop assistant.

The nurse who treats you. The plumber who comes out on a Sunday. Your son's teacher. The bus driver. The man who fixes your washing machine and explains on his way out how to stop it happening again.

All of that is the same square. All of that is the Exchange.

It is the most common square — by a very long way

Every day on earth, billions of exchanges take place. Shopping, deliveries, hours worked, favours done.

And the vast majority go well.

No police. No judge. No forty-page contract. Two people agree, the thing changes hands, and each walks away content.

It is an extraordinary fact, and nobody ever notices it.

Why you feel the opposite

Because a successful exchange is never a story.

Nobody ever ran a headline saying "a baker sold some bread, everyone was satisfied". A scam, on the other hand, makes the front page. A scandal fills twenty minutes of television.

The result: you feel the world is full of thieves, when you have just spent the day inside honest exchanges without even thinking about it.

The world stands up thanks to this square. It is simply silent.

The honesty test

There is a simple way to see that this is the honest square.

Can you explain to your customer exactly what you do and how much you make?

The baker can tell you the price of his flour and his margin. The plumber can show you his parts invoice. The developer can tell you his day rate.

It doesn't bother them. It breaks nothing.

Now try that with a casino. Try putting in the window, in large letters, the exact percentage the house keeps on every spin.

An honest exchange survives being explained. That is the difference, and it is absolute.

And this is where most of the value is

There is one last point, and it may be the most important in the chapter.

If you added up all the wealth produced on earth in a year, almost all of it would come from this square.

Everything grown, made, carried, repaired, treated, taught, built. Billions of hours of work, every day, across the whole planet.

Next to that, the rest is tiny.

Theft makes noise, not volume. Add up every casino and every scam in the world: you don't come close to a single day of human work.

The honest square is also the most common, and by far the biggest.

That is good news about the world. It is also a warning for you.

The warning

Do not leave this square.

This book is going to tell you about lesser-known squares, rarer ones, sometimes more profitable ones. That is not an invitation to resign tomorrow morning and go and bet on yourself.

The other squares are additions. Not replacements.

Whoever abandons the Exchange to chase something more exciting generally ends up with zero squares out of four. I have met plenty of them.

The paradox that opens the whole book

So let's sum up, because this is where it gets interesting.

The Exchange is the most common square. The most honest. The one holding the most value in total.

And yet, individually, it has a ceiling.

A great deal of value in total, but shared between billions of people, and blocked for each one by the same limit: twenty-four hours in a day.

That is exactly the paradox of this book. The cleanest square on the dial is also the one where your personal ceiling is lowest.

The point is not to leave it. The point is to know what can be added to it.

Barter, and what it teaches us about money

Barter has one flaw, and that flaw explains the invention of money.

To barter, I have to want what you have, and you have to want what I have. At the same time. In the same place.

That almost never happens.

Money solves that problem, and nothing else. It is an exchange voucher everybody accepts. It is worth nothing in itself — try eating a banknote. It just cuts the exchange into two halves, which can happen at different moments and with different people.

Keep that in mind for the rest of the book. Money is not wealth. It is the ticket that lets you move it.

Favours: the exchange nobody counts

There is an entire economy that goes through no bank at all.

The neighbour who watches your children. The friend who rebuilds your website. The colleague who gets you into a company. The man who teaches you his trade on a Saturday afternoon.

Nobody invoices. And yet each walks away with something they did not have.

That economy has a property the other one does not: it creates trust. And trust is what decides who gets the next helping hand.

If you are starting with no money, this is your square. It is the only one you can enter today, with no capital, no permission, and nothing to ask of anyone.

Salaried work: an exchange, but a particular one

It is the dominant form. Almost everyone lives there. So it is worth looking closely at what is really being exchanged.

You are selling time.

And time has a property nothing else has: your stock is fixed, and it shrinks. You have twenty-four hours. Tomorrow too. Never more.

That means this square has a mechanical ceiling. There are only two ways to earn more:

Sell more hours. That works for a while. Then it stops, because there are only twenty-four hours and you have to sleep.

Sell the hour for more. And there, one thing alone sets the price: how rare your skill is.

Not how hard it is. Not how hard you work. Rare.

It is hard to hear, but that is how it works. A very difficult job that many people can do pays less than an average job almost nobody can do.

What your work really costs

Before going further, do an exercise. Almost no employee has done it, and it changes how you look at your own payslip.

Ask your employer what you cost them per month. Then compare it with what lands in your account.

The gap is far bigger than you imagine.

Between the two sits everything that funds health, pensions, unemployment, training. Which is, very precisely, the beneficial levy we will talk about in the next chapter: money taken, and redistributed towards real things.

I am not saying it is theft. I am saying you need to know the figure.

Because it changes two decisions

When you negotiate. You are not negotiating your salary: you are negotiating a fraction of what you cost. A hundred euros more in your pocket costs your employer considerably more.

That does not excuse a refusal. But it explains why it is harder than you thought, and why it is not always pettiness.

When you compare. The day you consider going self-employed, the honest comparison is not "my take-home pay against what I would invoice". It is the full cost against what you would invoice — because that whole sum is what your client will have to cover, and because you will be paying what used to be paid for you.

A lot of people set out comparing the wrong figures, and discover the gap afterwards.

Your salary is not what you cost. It is what is left.

What is happening to this square

Now put the two things together.

Your salary depends on how rare your skill is. And artificial intelligence is making common what used to be rare.

Writing. Drawing. Translating. Coding. Analysing. Summarising. Sorting.

This is not a prediction, it has already started. And it is not an injustice: it is the same mechanism that has always set your salary. It is simply playing against you this time.

The clean square on the dial is also the square that is compressing.

That is the most important fact in this book, and it is the reason I am writing it.

How to play this square well

It remains the best front door in the world. Here is how not to get stuck inside it.

Sell a result, not hours. As soon as you can. The day you are paid for what you deliver and not for the time you spend on it, your ceiling disappears.

Look for what stays rare. Not what is difficult. What few people can do, and what machines do not yet do well: deciding, judging, reassuring, selling, repairing with your hands, understanding what someone actually wants.

Build something that works without you. A tool, a product, an audience. The only lasting way out of the time square is to make something that keeps producing while you sleep.

Never neglect favours. They are capital, they do not show up on a bank statement, and they are often what opens the doors.

The other three squares come out of this one

Something needs correcting now, otherwise you will misread the rest of the book.

The dial is always presented as four parallel roads. Four ways of operating, side by side, take your pick.

That is wrong.

The Exchange is not one square among four. It is the source.

The Gift comes out of it

You can only give what has been produced.

What is an inheritance? Exchange accumulated over an entire lifetime. Somebody worked, sold, saved. The gift is only the last step.

State support? Exchange taken from others, then paid back out.

A present? Somebody bought it first.

And even the gift of nature, which we discussed. The oil under the ground is worth nothing until somebody has extracted it, carried it and sold it. The coin on the pavement only has value because a whole system of exchange gives it one.

Nature does not give wealth. It gives matter. It takes an exchange to turn that into wealth.

The Levy comes out of it too

You can only take from a flow that already exists.

No tax without income. No commission without a transaction. No bank charges without money moving.

And no theft without something to steal.

The most gifted thief in the world, dropped into a country where nobody produces anything, takes nothing at all. There is nothing to take.

The real diagram

Here is the dial as it actually works:

The Exchange produces. The Gift and the Levy take from what has been produced. The Wager pits two values against each other and gives everything to the better one.

One square alone creates. Two take. And the last does neither: it arbitrates.

That is why the Exchange square holds the most value. It is not that it contains the most: it is that all value is born there. The others only move it afterwards.

What really separates the four: who decides?

Look at the dial from this angle and everything becomes clear. In each square, somebody decides where the value goes.

In the Gift, it is birth, or somebody's generosity. You do not decide.

In the Levy, it is the law, or force. You do not decide either.

In the Exchange, it is the agreement between two people. You both decide.

In the Wager, it is the better player. Two values are put on the table, they are pitted against each other, and everything goes to whoever played best.

The Wager is the only square on the dial where merit is the judge.

A necessary honesty about the Wager

One thing has to be said straight away, otherwise the book would be dishonest.

The Wager does not create value either.

Two players each put something down. Only one walks away with the lot. Nothing was made. The value simply moved from one side to the other.

So why do I place it on the noble side, and not next to the Levy?

For one precise reason, and it may be the most important idea in the book.

What is created in the Wager is not money. It is skill.

Both players come out better than they went in. The loser learned something nobody could have taught them any other way. The winner was pushed to improve in order to win.

The money moved. The level went up. On both sides.

That is the exact opposite of theft, where the loser gets nothing back at all — no money, no useful lesson, no progress. Just a loss.

A society full of competition gets better. A society full of theft gets poorer. And yet in both cases, the money only changed hands.

The whole difference lies in what the loser is left with.

What that changes for you

Three concrete things.

One. Faced with any proposal — an investment, a business, an opportunity — ask a single question: does this create, or does this share out?

Both can pay you. But you do not judge them the same way, and you are not taking the same risks.

Two. An economy that only shares out is an economy that is dying. That is true for a country, and it is true for your life. If all your income comes from squares that create nothing, you are sitting on other people's work — and you are at their mercy.

Three. The question of this book changes shape.

It is not: how do I get out of the Exchange?

It is: how do I stay on the side of those who create, while being better placed in the sharing out?

What to take away

The Exchange is the honest square. The most common. The biggest. And the source of all the others.

It is also a square with a personal ceiling, and that ceiling is coming down.

You cannot settle for it. And above all you must not leave it.

Let us move now to the first of the squares that come out of it — the one you do not choose.

Chapter 5 — The Gift

The Gift means receiving without giving anything in return.

It is the gentlest of the four squares. It is also the one people understand worst.

Two sources: people, and nature

You think of people straight away. That is half the subject.

What people give. An inheritance. A present. A leg-up from an uncle. State support. Living at your parents' place at twenty. The person who introduces you to the right person.

But there is a second source, and it is always forgotten.

What nature gives. What you find.

A coin on the pavement. Gold in a river. Oil under your field. Land that yields three harvests a year. A climate that spares you heating. A deep bay that makes a natural harbour.

Nobody gave it to you. Nobody produced it. It was there.

It is the oldest gift in the world. Before trade, before theft, there was gathering. You pick up what is lying on the ground. And the ground keeps giving: half the wealth of some countries comes literally from under their feet.

The two sources work in exactly the same way, and have exactly the same problem.

This is not a shameful square

Let's be clear straight away, because a lot of books get this wrong.

Receiving is not bad.

The Gift is in fact the most human of the four squares. A family is permanent giving: nobody invoices their parents. A community that works is giving in circulation.

And a huge share of all success stories starts there. A first bit of capital. A free roof for two years. Someone who paid for the studies. Pretending otherwise would be the mirror image of the lie in the first chapter — the one told by people who have made it and like to believe they owe nobody anything.

The Gift is not the problem. What you do with it is.

Luck and randomness are not the same thing

Two words need separating, because English blurs them together and the difference decides everything.

Randomness is the draw. The wheel, the die, the number. Nobody controls it, it does not repeat, and it cannot be trained. That is what the first chapter took apart.

Luck is something else. It is the good thing that happens to you without your demanding it: the right meeting, the unexpected offer, the door that opens at the right moment.

And here is the difference, which is enormous:

Randomness, you do not control. Luck — you control how many times you stand in front of it.

This is not mystical, it is arithmetic

Look at two people.

The first talks about her project to three people this year. The second talks about it to a hundred.

After a year, the second will have had "far more luck". People will say she happened to be there at the right moment. The sky did not favour her: she simply took thirty times more draws.

Same for the person who launches ten projects against the one who launches one. Same for the person who applies to fifty jobs against the one who targets three.

Luck is not a gift from the heavens. It is a function of how many times you expose yourself.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: you can do nothing about randomness. You can do everything to multiply your chances of luck. Two words for two things that have nothing to do with each other.

And it passes the test from the first chapter

Take the three questions again.

Creating your own luck: I can do it again, I can learn it, I can explain it to someone. Three yeses. It is a method.

Winning the draw: three noes. It is an event.

The same word covered both. That is why people have been lost on this forever.

The more you give, the more you receive — and it is not magic

There is a sentence you hear everywhere, often in books this book is not very fond of: the more you give, the more you receive.

I am going to tell you something that will surprise you. It is true.

What is false is the explanation usually attached to it.

What I will not tell you

You will be told that the universe sends back what you put out, that energies circulate, that your thoughts attract events.

I know nothing about that, nobody knows anything about that, and above all: it cannot be checked. A claim that can never be wrong will never teach you anything — that was already the lesson of the first chapter.

The trouble with that explanation is not even that it is false. It is that it is unusable. If it does not work, you will be told you did not give enough, or not in the right frame of mind. There is nothing you can do with it.

The real mechanism, and it is more interesting

There is a simple explanation, one that can be checked, and one that hands you levers.

Reciprocity. Human beings cope badly with staying in debt. When someone does you a favour, you feel the need to return it. That is not morality, it is a deep reflex, and it exists in every known culture.

Reputation. The person who gives becomes the person people call. And when an opportunity turns up somewhere, it goes to the name that comes to mind first.

Contact surface. Giving puts you in touch with a lot of people. And we have just seen it: the more contact you have, the more draws you take. Giving is, mechanically, creating your own luck.

And what you give does not run out. Advice given does not leave you. An explanation shared is not taken from you. You can give the same thing a thousand times and never have less of it.

The condition, and nobody ever states it

There is a trap, and it is the one personal development books systematically forget.

It only works if you are not counting.

The moment you give while expecting the return, it stops working. For a very simple reason: it shows. People sense immediately the difference between someone helping them and someone investing in them.

And the one who gives while keeping the books always ends up bitter, because the return never comes from the person he gave to. It comes from elsewhere, later, by a route he had not planned.

Give because it costs you little. Not because it will pay you back. And that is precisely why it pays back.

And that closes the chapter

Look at what we have just found out about this square of the dial.

Receiving a gift makes you dependent. That is the whole first half of this chapter: you do not control the source, you do not learn to produce, and the giver keeps the power to stop.

Giving, on the contrary, makes you powerful. It builds your reputation, it widens your contact surface, it multiplies your opportunities — and it costs you almost nothing when what you give is knowledge or time.

The same square. Two opposite effects depending on which side you are standing.

It is the only direction on the dial where you are better off holding the giver's place than the receiver's. And it is also the only one almost everybody looks at backwards, dreaming of being the one who receives.

The problem: it is not a method

Take the three questions from the first chapter again.

Can I do it again? No. Can I learn it? No. Can I explain it to someone? No.

The Gift fails all three, for one reason: you are not the one deciding.

You do not control the source. And what you do not control can stop overnight, without warning, without your having anything to do with it.

The real cost: dependence

The giver always keeps one power. The power to stop.

He does not even need to use it for it to count. The mere fact that he could changes the relationship.

And there is a second effect, slower and heavier. Someone who receives regularly does not learn to produce. Not out of laziness: because he does not need to. Need is the most effective teacher there is, and the Gift puts it to sleep.

The day the tap is turned off, he is not just short of money. He is short of fifteen years of learning that never happened.

The proof at scale: countries sitting on a treasure

This is not a theory. It can be checked across whole countries, over fifty years.

Take the countries with enormous natural resources. Oil, mines, diamonds. The gift of nature, in its purest form.

Many of them do worse than countries with nothing at all. It is documented well enough to have a name: the resource curse.

Why? Look at the mechanism, it is exactly the same as at the individual level.

When money comes out of the ground, nobody needs to build anything else. No need for industry, no need for schools that work, no need for an effective administration. The gift pays for everything.

And the day the price collapses, nothing is left. No industry, no skills, no institutions. Just a hole in the ground and a country that never learned to make anything.

Now look at the countries that had nothing. No oil, little land, sometimes not even enough to feed themselves. Japan. South Korea. Switzerland. Singapore.

They were forced to manufacture the only thing left to them: skill. They built on the Exchange and the Wager, because they had no choice.

Fifty years later, the ranking speaks for itself.

At the scale of a country, over a human lifetime, the gift loses against skill.

The exception that gives the rule

There are counter-examples, and they teach more than the rule.

Norway has oil. A lot of it. And it did not collapse.

Why? Because it did something almost nobody does: it treated its gift as starting capital, not as income.

The oil money was not spent. It was converted — invested, turned into a lasting structure that will still be producing when the wells are empty.

They did not eat the gift. They moved it to another square.

What to do when you receive a gift

Here is the useful part of the chapter. Keep one rule:

A gift is starting capital. It is never income.

Income is for spending — more of it comes. Starting capital is for converting, because there will not be any more.

Converting means exchanging it for something that repeats, something belonging to another square of the dial:

• Time. Six months to learn a trade instead of six months of rent paid.
• Skill. The one thing that cannot be taken back, frozen, or removed from you.
• A tool that produces. Something that will still be working when the gift has run out.

The test is simple. In five years, when that money has gone — and it will go — what will be left?

If the answer is "nothing", you consumed it.

If the answer is "what I learned and what I built with it", you converted it.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: a gift is starting capital, never income. Income is spent. Starting capital is converted, because there will not be any more.

The gift you have already received and do not count

One last thing, and it is not here to lecture you.

You have already received a great deal.

Being born in a country at peace. Knowing how to read. Having had, even once, somebody who believed in you. And the era itself — we talked about it, never in history has technology cost so little.

All of that is a gift. You did not earn it. It was there.

And exactly like the oil, it is worth nothing until you convert it.

The only gift that counts is the one you turn into something else.

Chapter 6 — The Levy

Here is the square people describe worst.

It is usually called "theft", and made into the villain of the board. That is a mistake, and it blocks understanding.

Because theft is only one end of this square. The extreme end.

The real name is the Levy.

The definition

A levy means taking from what has already been produced.

It creates nothing. It needs a flow that already exists, and it takes a share as it passes.

That is not a judgement. It is a mechanical description, and it applies to very different things:

The tax on your salary. Your bank's charges. Your broker's commission. The middleman's margin. The house edge at the casino. The fake adviser's scam.

All of these do mechanically the same thing. They take a share of a flow they did not produce.

And yet you can feel that they are not equivalent.

There is a scale, and it needs walking

That is the whole point of this chapter. This square is not a block. It is a scale, from the most useful to the most destructive.

At one end, a levy that gives back more than it takes.

At the other end, a levy that gives back nothing at all.

In between, a whole gradient. And most people cannot say where what they pay every month sits on it.

Tax: a beneficial levy

Let's start with the case everybody gets wrong.

Tax is a levy. That is a fact, not a criticism: a share you did not choose is taken from your work.

But the reasoning has to be followed to the end, and there it becomes something else.

Tax redistributes wealth.

What is taken is paid back out. Not into a private pocket: into things nobody could afford alone.

The road the lorry drives on to deliver to your shop. The school that taught reading to the employee you are about to hire. The hospital that will treat you. The police and the courts that make a signed contract mean something.

And now look at what that implies.

Without all of that, the Exchange square does not exist.

Try trading with no roads. With no justice to enforce a contract. With no stable currency. With nobody to stop the strongest taking by force.

There is no exchange possible. There is only a balance of power.

So tax is not a parasite sitting on top of the Exchange. It is one of the conditions that make it possible.

And it does a second thing nothing else does: it moves value from those who have much towards those who have little. It is a levy that repairs an inequality instead of deepening one.

I am not saying every tax is well spent, nor that the amount is always fair. That is a legitimate debate, and it is endless. But that debate is about the level and the use. Not about the nature of the thing.

A tax and a scam are not two versions of the same gesture.

The middle levies: fees

Between the two extremes sits everything you pay without thinking.

Account maintenance fees. The commission on a transfer. The gap between the buying price and the selling price. The subscription you forgot to cancel. The middleman's margin.

Those levies are neither good nor bad. They often pay for a real service: somebody keeps the accounts, executes the order, guarantees the transaction.

The problem does not start with the amount. It starts with visibility.

A levy that is announced is a price. A levy that is hidden is where theft begins.

A percentage written large, which you can compare and refuse, stays inside the Exchange: you consent. The same percentage drowned in forty pages of terms and conditions changes square.

Nothing moved except your ability to say no. And that is exactly what defines the border.

Theft: the levy that gives nothing back

Here we are at the other end of the scale.

Theft means taking without the other person's consent. One gains, the other loses, and nothing is produced.

You think of a hold-up. That is the smallest part of the subject, and the least interesting.

Because the real criterion is not violence. It comes down to one question:

Would the other person have said yes, if they had known everything I know?

Note what I did not say. I did not say "if it is illegal". Legality is not the test. A good part of modern theft is perfectly legal, with a shop window, customer service and an invoice.

The inventory

Outright theft. The scam, the fake site, the fake adviser. The most visible, therefore the least dangerous.

Theft through information. I sell to you knowing what you do not know. I do not lie. I stay silent. It is the most widespread form, and almost always legal.

Theft through mathematics. The casino, the lottery, the slot machine. You consent, it is legal, it is taxed. And the outcome is written in advance: the house has a fixed edge, and time works for it. The more you play, the more you lose. That is the principle, not an accident.

Theft through promise. The €497 training course. The guaranteed return. The coach whose only income is selling coaching. Nobody takes your money: they sell you hope.

Theft through attention. The free product. You do not pay in money, you pay in hours. The bill is in life-time, and nobody handed it to you.

Why it works: it never looks like theft

Nobody gets up in the morning thinking "today I steal".

Those who live off this square see themselves as traders, trainers, entrepreneurs. Often they sincerely believe it.

That is why it is effective.

The modern thief does not take your money. He makes you hand it over.

You take out your card yourself. You say thank you. You recommend it to a friend. And if it goes badly, you tell yourself you were the one who got it wrong.

That last detail is no accident. It is part of the product.

The three levers, always the same

Urgency. Only three places left, the offer ends tonight. Its only function: to stop you thinking. A good decision survives waiting twenty-four hours. A bad one does not.

Hope. You are shown a winner. Never the queue of losers behind him.

Belonging. There are those who have understood, and the others. It is the strongest of the three, because it does not talk about money: it talks about your place among people.

Careful here. These three levers are not bad in themselves. A sports team uses belonging. A good teacher uses hope. A real project has real deadlines.

It is not the levers that make it theft. It is what is taken at the end.

The criterion that runs through the whole square

Here is the question that lines everything up, from tax to scam, on the same scale:

What do I receive in return for what is taken from me?

Tax. You receive roads, a school, a hospital, a justice system. You may find the amount too high or the use poor. You cannot say you receive nothing.

Your bank's fees. You receive a real service. Whether it is worth that price is another matter — and you can only know if it is displayed.

The casino. You receive entertainment. That is all, and it is honest as long as it is stated. If you think you are receiving a chance to win over time, you bought the wrong product.

The scam. You receive nothing.

A levy is judged by what it gives back. Not by what it takes.

It is the kind of rule Radéon applies constantly, in a different field: before adding anything to what we build, he asks what breaks if it fails.

It is the same question, turned around. You do not judge a product by what it promises when all goes well, but by what is left when things go badly.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: a levy is judged by what it gives back, not by what it takes. That is what separates tax from a scam, and nothing else.

The full test, worth keeping:

1. Do I know everything the other side knows? 2. Is what is taken from me announced, or hidden? 3. What comes back to me — and who else profits from it?

The levy has a property nobody names

One thing has to be said about this square, and it is harsh.

The levy is regressive. It takes most from those who have least.

That is not a campaigning opinion. It is a list, and you can check it at the supermarket tomorrow.

Being poor costs more

The small pack costs more per kilo. Buying in bulk costs less — but you have to put the money up front, and have somewhere to store it.

Paying outright costs less than paying in twelve instalments. But paying outright means having the sum.

Credit costs more when you have little, because the rate rises with the risk — so it rises exactly when you have the least means to pay it.

An overdraft costs interest. It only hits those with no cushion.

Incident charges — a rejected direct debit, an intervention fee — only hit those already dry. People are billed for running out of money by the fact of running out of money.

With no deposit and no guarantor, you rent instead of buying. So every month you pay a sum that will never be yours.

An old car uses more fuel and breaks down. Buying a reliable one means putting the money up front.

And it can be measured

This is not an impression. British researchers measured that extra cost, and gave it a name: the poverty premium.

Their result: a low-income household pays on average about £490 more per year than others, for exactly the same essential services \*. Depending on the situation, it ranges from £350 for the most careful to £750 for the most exposed.

Where does it come from? From more expensive car insurance in deprived areas. From the prepayment energy meter, imposed on those without a solid account. From high-interest credit.

And the most telling detail: even a household that has made every effort to find the best prepayment tariff still pays £227 more than one paying by direct debit. They played well, and they still pay more.

⚠️ These figures are British. As far as I know, no equivalent French study exists — which is itself a piece of information: the phenomenon is not measured here.

All these surcharges have the same cause

Look at the list and find the common point. It leaps out.

In almost every case, the cheapest option requires paying up front.

It is not that poor people shop badly. It is that the economical version is out of reach for them, for lack of cash.

You need money to pay less.

And nobody designed this

That is what makes the subject difficult.

No assembly ever voted a tax on the poor. Each of these rules, taken separately, is perfectly defensible: a rate that rises with risk is management; a tariff that falls with volume is logistics.

It is the sum that produces the result. A thousand reasonable decisions, and at the end a surcharge paid by those who have least.

Which makes it all the harder to correct — and all the easier to deny, since every single line can always be justified on its own.

What that changes in reading the rest of the book

Two things, and they matter.

The Gift square becomes decisive at the start. Someone who receives a small amount of capital does not become rich. They do something far more useful: they stop paying the surcharge. They buy in bulk, they pay outright, they avoid overdraft interest. The gift did not make them rich, it took them off the most expensive tariff.

And the ten per cent rule takes on its full meaning. The first use of your savings is not an investment. It is the right to stop paying more than everyone else for the same things.

It is the highest and most certain return you will ever find, and it is written in no brochure.

The two per cent fee that eats half

One last case, and it deserves getting the calculator out, because nobody does.

You are offered an investment. Fees: 2% a year. It sounds trivial. It is the most important figure in the contract.

The calculation

Take a return of 7% a year, over thirty years.

With no fees, your money is multiplied by 7.6.

With 2% annual fees, you are left with 5% a year. Over thirty years, it is multiplied by 4.3.

Compare the two. You are left with 57% of what you would have had.

You did not pay 2%. You paid 43% of the final capital.

Why it is so brutal

Because the fees are not taken from the gain. They are taken from the total, every year, whether it goes up or down.

And every euro taken this year is a euro that will not work for the twenty-nine that follow. It is not 2% lost: it is 2% plus everything they would have produced.

You are quoted an annual percentage. You pay a percentage of your life.

The rule

Over a long period, the fees are the most important figure in the contract, ahead of the advertised performance.

For a simple reason: performance is uncertain, and fees are certain.

One is a promise. The others are a deduction. You now know which of the two to look at first.

Why the predatory levy always ends badly

For the victim, that is obvious. Let's talk about the predator, it is more interesting.

Theft has a design flaw: it burns its customers.

You can only steal from the same person a limited number of times. Once they have understood, they are lost. So new ones have to be found, constantly.

A model that has to renew its base permanently must grow or die. It has no cruising speed.

And there is a heavier price. Nothing lasting is built on what you cannot say out loud.

Take the test from the first chapter again. A good method can be repeated, learned, passed on. Try passing this on. Try explaining it to your son. Try putting it on your business card.

That is where tax and the scam part company for good. Tax is voted, published, argued about in public. The scam only survives in the shade.

A levy that stands the light is a levy that can be reformed. The others can only hide.

And yet, this is the square where most innovation happens

One last word before moving on, and it is the paradox that opens the final chapter.

The predatory end of this square is the most active of the four.

Every year brings its new format. A new gambling product, better packaged. A new promise of returns. A new way of selling a method to people who have nothing to teach.

Billions are spent, by very intelligent people, to make this square smoother, faster, harder to leave.

Ask yourself why.

Because it pays quickly. Because it has nothing to create. And because, meanwhile, almost nobody is working on the square opposite.

The one where two values are pitted against each other, and the better one walks away with the lot.

Chapter 7 — The Wager

Here we are at the last square. The one that gives all the rest its meaning.

The Wager means pitting two values against each other, and giving everything to the better one.

Two people put something on the table. They compete under accepted rules. Only one walks away with the lot.

The word that frightens people

I know what the word "wager" brings to mind. The casino, scratchcards, sports betting, people ruining themselves.

That is exactly why I want to take it back.

Because the casino is the worst example of a wager in existence. It stole the word, and in stealing it, it made everything else disappear.

This square has a scale, exactly like the Levy. From the most unfair to the most fair. Let's walk it.

Right at the bottom: the casino, which is not even a wager

Let's start with the worst, and be precise about why.

At the casino, you are pitting nothing against anything. You are putting money on a draw.

The outcome does not depend on you. It depends on nobody. You cannot improve: playing for ten years makes you no better, because there is nothing to get better at.

And above all, your counterparty is not another player. It is the house. The one that writes the rules, applies them, and holds a fixed mathematical edge that no amount of effort will ever reduce.

Two values are not pitted against each other. One single value flows, gently, always in the same direction.

So the casino does not belong in this chapter. It is a Levy dressed up as a Wager. It merely borrowed the vocabulary of competition to pass itself off as a game.

"But the casino pays back 90%"

That is true, and it has to be said honestly. In France, the law requires slot machines to have a payout rate of at least 85% \*, and 88% for table games. Casinos are allowed to do better, and many do. Approved technicians check those rates every hundred days, and displaying them is compulsory.

And here is the detail that should make you pause

Look carefully at the two lines of the table.

For a slot machine, 85% is a floor. Paying back less is forbidden.

For online sports betting, 85% is a ceiling. Paying back more is forbidden.

The same number. A minimum on one side, a maximum on the other. In one case the law protects the player from an over-greedy operator; in the other it stops him being served too well.

Both are defensible — we have seen the public health argument. But put them side by side just once, and you will never look at those figures the same way again.

Compared with a national lottery that pays back roughly half, it is very generous.

So why do I still place the casino right at the bottom? For two reasons. The second is the real one.

One: that 90% applies to every spin, not to your evening.

You do not lose 10% of your money. You lose 10% of everything you stake. And you re-stake what you have just won.

A hundred euros, played and replayed twenty times, and almost nothing is left. The rate did not lie. It simply applied twenty times in a row.

The only way to keep your 90% would be to play once and leave. Nobody does that. And the machine is designed precisely so that nobody does.

Two: that 90% is not paid back in equal shares. And that is the product.

Out of a thousand players, the money does not come back to each as 90% of their stake. It comes back massively to a few.

The ordinary player loses far more than 10%. And one or two walk away with a sum people will talk about for years.

That is not a design flaw. It is the product itself.

Think about it. If the machine paid back exactly 90% to everyone, every time, nobody would touch it. It would be a dispenser that hands you ninety cents per euro. Of no interest whatsoever.

What brings people back is not the average. It is the spread. It is the story of the man who walked out with the million.

And that is how you manufacture an addict. Not by taking a lot from each. By giving an enormous amount, very rarely, to somebody else — and letting you hope for it.

The average is honest. The distribution is cruel. And it is the distribution you are buying.

Keep this rule, it serves well beyond casinos:

When you are shown an average, always ask how it is spread out.

It is exactly what the course-seller does with his one successful student. And it is what the bookmaker in the next section does.

The exact figures

Since we are talking about rates, let's put them all on the table. These are official figures, set by French law.

Look at the last line. On EuroMillions, out of €10 staked, €5 will never come back to any player. They go in levies, costs and margin, before the draw even happens.

The most popular game in France is also the one that pays back the least.

And how many winners?

Here is the other half of the figure, the half never shown alongside.

The probability of winning the EuroMillions jackpot is 1 in 139,838,160 \*.

That number means nothing to a human brain, so let's translate it. You are roughly twenty times more likely to be struck by lightning than to win that jackpot.

You will be told that about one ticket in thirteen is a winner \*, across all prize tiers. That is true, and it is exactly the argument I was denouncing above.

Because "winner" includes the lowest tiers — the ones where you get back a sum close to your stake, or less. You have not won: you have been handed back some of your change, with enough staging for it to look like a victory.

One ticket in thirteen gives you something back. One ticket in a hundred and forty million changes your life. And it is the second one you are sold.

Just above: sports betting, and it is almost worse

Sports betting is crueller than the casino. For two reasons, and the second is technical.

First reason: the illusion of skill

You know football. You have followed that team for fifteen years. You have read the line-ups, you know their goalkeeper is injured.

Your knowledge is real. It is not imaginary.

Except look at what you are betting on.

You are betting on someone else's performance.

All your knowledge changes nothing about the match. You are not playing. You are not training. You decide nothing. Twenty-two people run, and you watch and hope.

Second reason: the money does not come from other bettors

Here is the point almost nobody knows, and it changes everything.

You think your winnings are paid by those who lost. That betting is a pot: the losers fill it, the winners share it, the house takes a commission along the way.

That is not how a fixed-odds bookmaker works.

Take a match that is decided in advance. A big team against a small one. Almost everyone backs the favourite — because almost everyone is right.

Do the arithmetic. If the favourite wins, the house has to pay out far more than it took in on that match. The losers' stakes are nowhere near enough.

So where does the money come from?

Not from the bet. It comes from elsewhere: from its reserves, from its winnings on thousands of other matches, from hedges taken with other operators, from insurance mechanisms.

Your winnings do not come from an opponent. They come from a company's balance sheet.

What that means

Read the definition of the square again. The Wager pits two values against each other and gives everything to the better one.

Here, there is nobody facing you. No other player, no opposing value, no confrontation. There is a company taking money in on one side and paying it out on the other, whose entire trade consists of making the first figure exceed the second.

It is not a contest. It is a counter.

And because it is a counter, it sets the price itself. That is where it becomes merciless:

When you are sure you are right, you are paid almost nothing. When you are paid a lot, it is because you are almost certainly wrong.

The odds are not a reward for your analysis. They are a price, calculated so that your knowledge is worth nothing.

The definitive proof

One detail settles the debate, and it can be checked.

Many bookmakers limit or close the accounts of players who win too often \*.

It is neither secret nor illegal: it is written into their terms and conditions, as stake-limitation, suspension or closure clauses. And the French courts consider it lawful, as long as winnings already validated are paid in full.

Stop on that for a second.

In a real competition, the best player is put on show. He is invited. Tickets are sold to watch him. He is the system's advertisement.

Here, he is shown the door.

A place that expels those who win is not a competition. It is a collection system that needs you to lose.

And the proof that it is a choice, not a fate

One detail completes the demonstration, and it comes from inside the trade.

Some bookmakers do not limit winners. They accept large stakes, they let regular winners keep playing, and they still make a living — on volume and on an openly stated margin.

Which means that closing a winner's account is not an economic necessity. It is a decision.

And there you have the best possible test, the one I advise you to apply before opening an account anywhere:

Does this house accept that I might win?

Go and read the terms and conditions, look for the limitation clause, and see what the people who win there say. The answer will tell you which square of the dial you are about to step into.

An exception that must be acknowledged

Let's be fair, because not all forms are equivalent.

There are bets where the money really does come from other bettors. Pool betting, where every stake falls into a common pot: the organiser takes a fixed percentage and shares the rest among those who were right. Exchange platforms, where you bet directly against another private individual.

There, the structure is honest. The organiser is not betting against you: he holds the till and takes his commission, whether you win or lose.

That does not make those bets easy to win. It simply puts them back in the right square.

The difference is not the sport. It is knowing who pays your winnings.

And the illusion of skill makes the rest more brutal than the casino. At the casino, you know you lost to randomness. In sports betting, you tell yourself you analysed badly. You blame yourself for something the price had already decided for you.

The problem of monopolies

One question remains, and it explains all the rest. Why are those rates so low, and why does nobody do better?

In any other sector, the answer would be competition. If one operator paid back 92% while the others paid 85%, players would go to him.

That does not happen. And it is not an accident.

In France, gambling is forbidden by default

That is the starting point, and almost nobody knows it.

Under French law, games of money and chance are prohibited in principle. It is written in black and white in the internal security code. What exists legally exists only by exception, under licence or under an exclusive right granted by the State.

So no, you cannot run your own lottery. Nor sell your own tickets. Nor set up your own gaming operation, however small, however local, however honest.

The penalties are not symbolic: up to €90,000 in fines and three years in prison for an individual. For a company, dissolution and up to €450,000 \*.

Exceptions exist. Charity lotteries, those intended to encourage the arts, those funding a non-profit sporting activity — with the mayor's authorisation.

Look carefully at that list. Then look at what is not on it.

There is no exception for "a game where skill decides".

The dividing line in law is charity against commerce. It is not randomness against skill. That distinction, which is the entire subject of this book, simply does not exist in the legal framework.

The payout rate is capped by decree

Second piece.

For online sports betting, the payout rate to players is capped at 85%. It is not a minimum guaranteed to the player. It is a maximum level of generosity imposed on the operator, who must keep at least 15%.

The official argument is coherent, and it must be given honestly: overly attractive odds would make gambling more appealing, therefore more addictive. The regulator curbs the appeal to limit the damage. It is a genuine public health argument, and it stands up.

But it has a price, and the player pays it. Operators based outside the French framework pay back between 93% and 97% \*.

And above all, it produces an effect rarely discussed: competing on generosity is legally impossible. The rate is not set by a market. It is set by a text.

The case of scratchcards

Scratch games actually pay back between 64.5% and 73.5% \* depending on the ticket. The least generous are around 64-65%. The most generous in the range reaches 73.5%.

So it is not a quarter. But now look at the full scale, in order:

Now ask yourself a very simple question.

To play at 90%, you have to travel to a casino, show identification, walk through a door.

To play at 50%, you just walk into the corner shop with two euros.

The easier a game is to reach, the less it pays back.

I am ascribing no intention to anyone. I am noting a correlation, and it can be checked in ten minutes in public documents. The game that sits fifty metres from your home, the one you can buy without thinking, with loose change, is also the one that gives you back the least.

The twenty-five year exclusivity

Third piece.

In 2019, the French State granted a single operator an exclusive 25-year right \* over the lottery and over sports betting in retail outlets. In return, that operator paid a lump sum of 380 million euros, which the European Commission, after investigation, had revalued to 477 million \*.

The same State was privatising the company, while keeping a share of the capital.

Add it up, without anger and without exaggeration:

The State writes the rules. The State collects the lump sum and the levies. The State is a shareholder. And the State sets by decree how much may be paid back to players.

Regulator, beneficiary and shareholder. Three hats on the same head.

I am accusing nobody of dishonesty. I am describing a structure. And a structure produces its effects on its own, even when every person inside it is acting in good faith.

There is a word for this, and it is not an insult

At this stage, one feels like reaching for big words. Reach for none: there is a precise one, and it is far more awkward than anything we could invent.

A guild.

Not in the modern sense of a company. In the old sense of the term: a closed trade, whose practice is reserved by the authorities to those granted the privilege, and forbidden to everyone else.

That is exactly what we have just described. An activity forbidden in principle. Exclusive rights granted by the State. Entry impossible without authorisation. And operating conditions set by decree rather than by competition.

And here is the detail that stings

France abolished the guilds.

That was in 1791. They were removed precisely because they were judged contrary to the freedom to do business: it could not be accepted that the right to practise a trade should be handed out by the authorities rather than earned by work.

Two centuries later, one has been rebuilt, properly and formally, around gambling.

With this difference: this one has a justification the old ones did not have — public health. It is real, it is serious, and I have given it three times in this chapter.

What remains troubling

A guild is not a conspiracy. Nothing is hidden: it was all voted in Parliament, published in the official journal, examined by the European Commission, commented on in the business press. You can check all of it in an evening — that is exactly what I have just done.

It is far worse than a conspiracy. It is legal, public, and openly assumed.

A conspiracy is revealed and it falls. A guild has to be reformed — and those who live off it are sitting at the table where that is decided.

What that changes for this book

Come back to my opening question: why is the honest Wager square empty?

First answer, already given: because it pays less quickly than the casino.

Second answer, and it is heavier. That square is locked.

Anyone who wants to build a place where people stake on their own skill does not fall into a legal vacuum. He falls into a framework built entirely around games of chance, their blanket prohibitions, their licences and their exclusive rights. A framework that draws no distinction between a roulette wheel and a chess tournament.

This is not a complaint. It is an explanation.

The honest square is not empty because nobody thought of it. It is empty because it pays less quickly, and because the door is heavy.

The case that lights everything up: insurance

Since we have just discussed the mechanisms that cover bookmakers, we have to stop on insurance. It is the finest object in this whole book.

Because it is a wager. A wager in reverse.

How it really works

You pay a premium. If nothing happens to you, you lose that money. If something happens to you, you receive far more than you paid in.

That is exactly the structure of a wager. With one property nothing else possesses:

It is the only wager in the world where you hope to lose.

Nobody wants to claim on their fire insurance. The good outcome here is to pay for thirty years and get nothing.

Where the money comes from

Just as with sports betting, ask the question: who pays the person who is compensated?

Those to whom nothing happened.

A thousand people pay premiums. Three have a claim. The payouts for those three come out of the pockets of the other nine hundred and ninety-seven.

That is what pooling means. Each puts in a little so that whoever misfortune strikes is not left to lose everything alone.

A cooperative, but more mercenary

Put it that way and you have understood the essential.

The mechanism is that of a cooperative. That is even its historical origin: groups of people pooling enough to get each other back on their feet. Mutuals are called that for a reason.

The difference is what happens to the surplus.

In a cooperative, what has not been spent stays in the pot, for the benefit of the members.

In commercial insurance, it goes into margin, dividends, advertising. The solidarity is real, the mechanism is identical — but somebody has placed themselves in the middle and takes a share along the way.

That is not illegitimate. It is simply something other than what the word "solidarity" suggests.

The mirror of the casino

Here is why this case lights up the whole book.

Insurance and the casino are the same mathematical object, seen from both ends.

Both rest on the same law: across a very large number of people, randomness becomes predictable. Both have a house in the middle, taking its margin. Both make you pay now for an uncertain event later.

And yet one destroys lives and the other saves them.

Where is the difference? It comes down to one sentence:

The casino sells you a risk you did not have. Insurance removes a risk you already had.

At the casino, you arrive calm and leave exposed. At the insurer, you arrive exposed and leave calm.

Same mechanism. Opposite direction. And it is once again the same criterion as everywhere in this book: what counts is not the movement of money, it is what you actually receive.

And sometimes the insurer is a bad loser

One thing must be said, because it closes the loop with sports betting.

An insurer is in the wager. That is his very definition: he has agreed to lose when the claim comes. That is the contract, that is the trade, and that is what you pay him for.

So look at how he behaves when he loses.

Some pay, quickly, without arguing. It is their job, they do it.

Others behave like the bookmaker in this chapter. They do not refuse to pay — that would be too visible. They make payment difficult. Exclusions everywhere. Vocabulary nobody understands. A burden of proof that falls on you, at the exact moment in your life when you have the least energy to fight.

And after the claim, the premium goes up. Or the policy is not renewed.

Compare that with the bookmaker who closes the account of someone who wins too often.

It is the same gesture.

Be fair, all the same: it is not always bad faith. Someone who claims often is statistically more exposed, and repricing them is a legitimate trade. An insurer who never did it would go bankrupt, and would no longer compensate anyone.

So the border lies elsewhere, and it is sharp:

Repricing after a claim is insurance. Drafting the contract so as not to have to pay is something else.

And that gives the only test worth having, before an insurer as before any house:

Does he accept losing when he has lost?

A good player pays and invites you to play again. A bad player disputes, exhausts you, and shows you the door.

You cannot know that from the brochure. You know it by watching how he treats those who have already had a claim. It is the only information that counts, and the only one nobody ever offers you.

When insurance tips into the Levy

It does not stay honest on its own. It slides in three cases, and you will recognise them:

When the margin is hidden. You do not know what share of your premium goes to compensation, and what share goes elsewhere.

When the contract is written so as not to pay. Exclusions everywhere, unreadable vocabulary, an impossible burden of proof. You bought a protection that slips away at the exact moment you need it.

When you are sold useless cover. Insurance on an €80 appliance. The extended warranty that doubles the price. There, no risk is being removed from you: you are being sold fear.

The test from the previous chapter applies as it stands. What do I receive for what is taken from me?

Real insurance gives you back the ability to survive a hard knock. Bad insurance gives you back a piece of paper.

Right at the top: the wager on yourself

And we reach the only entirely fair form.

The wager on yourself is the one where the outcome depends on your own decisions.

The tournament with an entry fee. The poker table. The match. The competition. And also, outside games: launching your business, changing trade, spending six months learning something with no guarantee.

You put down a value — money, time, comfort. Someone opposite puts down theirs. And the result comes out of what you do, not out of what happens to you.

The full test, the one that sorts this whole square:

1. Does the outcome depend on my decisions? 2. Can I get better, and does that change my results? 3. Is the house my opponent, or only the referee?

📌 If you keep only one idea from this chapter: if the house is your opponent, it is not a wager. Whatever the name over the door.

Apply it to what we have just seen.

The casino: no, no, opponent. Three fails.

Sports betting: no, barely, opponent. Three fails, with an illusion on top.

The stock market: partly yes, yes, referee. It passes, despite the unfairness.

The wager on yourself: yes, yes, referee. It is the only clean square.

What the Wager manufactures

We said it in the Exchange chapter, but it needs saying again here, because it is the heart of it.

The Wager creates no money. Two values go in, one comes out.

What it creates is skill.

The loser leaves with something no course could have taught him. The winner was forced to improve in order to win. Both are better than before.

That is exactly the opposite of theft, where the loser gets nothing back: no money, no lesson, no progress.

Same movement of money. Opposite result for society.

Everything turns on what the loser is left with.

Why this square is almost empty

And here is the question that holds the whole book together.

If this square is the fairest, if it is the only one where merit decides, why do so few people earn a living in it?

Not because it does not work. Sport and esports prove that it works.

Because the dishonest version pays far more quickly.

The casino collects its edge on every spin, mechanically, forever. Whoever runs a real tournament takes only a commission, from players competing for their own money.

The first model prints. The second works.

That is all. The honest square is not empty because it is impossible. It is empty because it pays less quickly.

And that is exactly why somebody has to take it on, accepting that they will earn more slowly.

The wager you can make tomorrow

Finish this chapter with this, because it is the useful part.

You do not need a poker table to enter this square.

The most profitable wager of your life is the one you make on yourself. Six months learning something rare. A project launched in the evenings. A trade changed at thirty-five.

You put down time, comfort and a little pride. You can lose — it is a real wager, otherwise it would not be one.

But look at the three questions.

The outcome depends on you. You can improve. And there is no house facing you.

Three out of three. It is the only wager in the world where even defeat leaves you something.

Chapter 8 — How money stopped being a good

Before talking about what you hold today, a story needs telling. It is short, and it explains all the rest.

The history of money is the history of the move from a good to a promise.

Nobody decided it. It happened in small steps, and each one seemed reasonable.

Step 1 — Barter: goods for goods

Two hens for a sack of wheat. No promise, no trust required. You leave with the thing, the matter is closed.

It works, and it is terribly impractical. I have to want what you have and you have to want what I have, at the same moment, in the same place.

Step 2 — The metal coin: the metal IS the value

A gold coin is worth what its gold weighs. You can melt it down, it is worth the same.

It is still a good. Nothing to believe, nothing to check, nobody to trust.

And yet the first slippage is already there. Sovereigns quickly understood that you could put a little less metal in the coin, while keeping the same name and the same official value.

It has a name, and it is more than two thousand years old. It is the very first inflation. It was never announced to anyone.

Step 3 — The goldsmith's receipt: the first promise

Gold is heavy, and walking around with it is dangerous. So you leave it with the goldsmith, who has a vault, and he gives you a receipt.

Then somebody notices it is simpler to exchange the receipt than to go and fetch the gold. The paper starts circulating in place of the metal.

Nobody decided to invent the banknote. It happened because it was convenient.

And the goldsmith notices something else: almost nobody ever comes to reclaim their gold. So he can lend other people's. Then issue slightly more receipts than he has metal.

The bank has just been born. And with it, the very first gap between the thing and the promise.

Step 4 — The convertible note: the written promise

The State takes charge and organises all this. On the note it is written in black and white: payable in gold, on demand.

The collateral is not hidden. It is printed on the promise itself.

Step 5 — 1944: a promise on a promise

At the end of the war, the major countries meet and build a system.

The dollar remains convertible into gold, at a fixed price: 35 dollars an ounce \*. And every other currency is pegged to the dollar.

Look closely at the stack. Your franc was worth a dollar. The dollar was worth gold.

Two floors of promise, and only one thing at the bottom.

Step 6 — 15 August 1971 \*: the collateral is removed

On a Sunday evening, on television, the American president announces that the dollar is no longer convertible into gold.

It is presented as a temporary measure.

It never came back.

In a single statement, the collateral of the world's reference currency vanished. The promise stayed exactly the same: same notes, same figures, same prices the next morning.

It is the most important moment in this whole story, and almost nobody notices it at the time.

For the first time, no currency in the world is backed by anything physical.

Since that day, what holds up the money in your pocket is no longer a reserve. It is a State, a central bank, and the habit of hundreds of millions of people.

It works. It is not collateral.

Step 7 — A currency too slow for the world that is coming

The story does not stop in 1971. There is one last step, and it is happening now.

Our money has a flaw nobody ever mentions, because we have ended up finding it normal.

It is slow.

How slow, in concrete terms

A transfer takes a day. Sometimes three.

Nothing moves at night. Nothing moves at the weekend. Nothing moves on public holidays.

A transfer abroad takes several days, crosses three or four intermediaries, and each takes a share along the way.

A card payment feels instant to you. It is not: the money actually reaches the merchant days later.

This is not a malfunction. It is the design. This system was conceived for a world of humans, office hours and paper. It does exactly what it was built for.

And now put machines into it

That is where it breaks.

The world that is coming is full of automatic agents. Programs that work twenty-four hours a day, take thousands of decisions a second, and need to pay each other: for a computation, for access to a piece of data, for a service rendered over two seconds.

Tiny amounts. Fractions of a cent. Millions of times a day. At three in the morning, on a Sunday.

Ask yourself whether a bank account can do that.

It demands a human identity, a working day, a minimum amount, and it charges fees often higher than the sum being exchanged.

The transport costs more than the goods. The system does not say no: it is simply beside the point.

This is not ideological, it is mechanical

I am not saying State money is bad. It holds up entire economies, and nobody has proposed better for that.

I am saying something narrower, and checkable:

A currency made for humans who sleep cannot serve actors who never sleep.

And that is exactly where the real usefulness of cryptocurrencies lies, once you have stripped away all the speculation and all the noise.

They settle in seconds. At any hour. For any amount, however small. Without asking anyone's permission, and without an intermediary taking a share.

That is not a promise about the future. It is what they do today, technically, and it can be verified.

What that does not prove

Stay honest, and hold the same discipline as everywhere else in this book.

The fact that a technology is suited to the world that is coming says strictly nothing about the price of this or that coin. Plenty of perfectly suited things have disappeared, and plenty of badly built things have won.

What I can assert is limited to this: the money of a world of machines will have to be a machine money. The current form cannot be one — not out of ideology, but because it is too slow, too expensive on small amounts, and closed at night.

Who will fill that role, nobody knows. And anyone who claims to know is selling you something.

What a ten euro note really costs

Before going further, stop on the object itself. It is stranger than it looks.

A euro banknote costs between three and eight cents to make \*.

So no, the paper is not worth ten euros. Everybody suspects that much.

But the printing is the smallest part of the story.

The chain nobody counts

That note was printed in a secure factory, with special inks, security threads, holograms.

Then it was transported. Not in a van: in an armoured lorry, with armed guards, insured, trained, and a route that changes.

Then it was stored in a strongroom. Then counted, in a sorting centre. Then loaded into a cash machine that cost a lot, that has to be maintained and refilled several times a month.

Then the shopkeeper took it, put it in a safe, deposited it back at the bank, and paid for that.

And one day it will be worn out, withdrawn, destroyed, replaced.

None of that is written on the note.

And yet you pay for it

You receive no invoice for that armoured lorry. But somebody pays for it, and that somebody is you — in your bank charges, in the price on the shelf, in tax.

It is a perfectly invisible levy, and it is proportional to the volume handled, not to the value transported. A ten costs about as much to move as a two hundred.

A ten euro note is not worth ten euros. It carries ten, and it costs more than what is written on it.

What that explains

Here is why States are interested in a digital currency, and that reason has nothing to do with control.

It is accounting. Cash is the most expensive form of money to operate that exists. No more printing works, no more lorries, no more guards, no more vaults, no more machines to refill.

It is a serious argument, and it must be acknowledged without pretending otherwise.

But both columns have to be counted

Because cash also has properties that cost nobody anything.

A banknote works without electricity, without a network, without a battery, without a bank account, without verified identity, without authorisation. It works during an outage, during a storm, and for someone the banking system has turned away.

And it is anonymous by construction — not as a favour, but because the object knows nothing.

In digital form, those properties do not necessarily disappear. But they stop being properties of the object and become rules that have to be written, guaranteed and maintained.

A property cannot be taken from you. A rule has to be maintained.

This is not a prosecution. It is a sum that has to be done honestly, in both columns.

The armoured lorry is expensive. What it carries works when nothing else does. Both are true, and there is no solution without loss.

Who creates money? (the answer will surprise you)

One question remains, and it is the least well known in this whole book.

This money going round, who makes it?

Almost everyone answers: the State, or the central bank, which prints the notes.

That is false. And not slightly false.

Notes are only a crumb

Look around you. Your salary lands in an account. Your rent goes out by transfer. Your shopping goes through a card.

Almost none of that ever existed as a banknote. The vast majority of money is not paper: it is lines in banks' computers.

So who writes those lines?

Banks create money by lending

Here is the answer, and it is documented by the central banks themselves.

When a bank grants you €200,000 of credit for your house, it does not go and find €200,000 in its other customers' savings. It takes the money from nowhere.

It writes €200,000 into your account, and records against it a €200,000 claim on you.

Both lines appear at the same instant. A second earlier, that money did not exist.

It was not moved. It was created.

And when you repay, it is destroyed. The line is wiped out on both sides.

The Bank of England published this in black and white in 2014 \*, stating that the explanation taught in textbooks — banks lending out savers' money — is misleading.

Created out of nothing — but not the way you were told

📌 Read the two previous paragraphs again, slowly. It is the strangest passage in the book, and it is also the best documented.

An image, to make it clear.

The bank opens no vault. It calls nobody. It writes two lines:

you have 200,000 — and — you owe 200,000.

Neither existed a second earlier. Money is born in pairs, and it cancels out when you repay. It is a match score: it appears when it is written down, it disappears when the game is wiped.

That is what creating out of nothing means.

Watch out for the trap: the "times ten" story

Here, an explanation almost everyone knows, repeated everywhere, has to be taken apart — and it is wrong on two counts at once. I believed it for a long time too.

The version taught at school. The bank receives a €100 deposit. It keeps 10% in reserve and lends the remaining €90. That €90 is deposited elsewhere, €81 is lent again, and so on. At the end of the chain, €100 would have produced roughly €1,000 of money.

The famous "times ten". It is tidy, it is logical, and it is wrong twice over.

Error number one: the model is rejected by the central banks themselves

This is not the opinion of a dissident economist. It is written in black and white by the Bank of England, in a March 2014 publication since cited in thousands of works \*.

The document says three things, and they are unambiguous.

Banks do not simply lend out the deposits that savers entrust to them.

They do not multiply central bank money to manufacture loans.

And reserves are not a constraint limiting lending.

The sentence that sums it all up: the act of lending creates the deposit — the exact reverse of the sequence described in textbooks.

The document notes that the multiplier model can serve to introduce the subject in class, but that it does not describe reality.

Error number two: even the figure is wrong

And there is something funnier still.

That "10% reserve" everyone repeats corresponds to nothing in Europe.

The required reserve ratio in the euro area is 1% \*. One per cent. It went from 2% to 1% in January 2012, and that is the only time it has ever moved.

So those who repeat "the bank creates ten times over" are applying a line of reasoning rejected by the central banks, with a figure that does not exist here. If you took their logic seriously with the real rate, they would have to say "a hundred times".

📌 Read this passage slowly. It is not that you are misunderstanding: it is a false thing that has been repeated for fifty years, and that is contradicted by the very people who run the money.

Why reality is more radical, not less

You might think I have just reassured you. The opposite is true.

In the "times ten" story, the bank at least needs the deposit before lending. There is a chain, a starting point, a mechanical limit.

Reality is simpler and more dizzying: the bank waits for nothing at all.

It does not lend deposits. The loan creates the deposit. The order is reversed, there is no chain to trace back, and there is no fixed multiplier. Not ten, not a hundred.

Nothing as reassuring as a number.

So what does limit it?

Since it is not the reserve, something must act as a brake. Four things, and none is a mechanical ceiling.

The number of creditworthy borrowers. A bank only creates money if somebody wants to borrow and looks able to repay. No demand, no creation.

Its own capital. Regulation requires it to hold capital proportional to the risks it takes. That is the real brake — not reserves, whose requirement is very low today.

The central bank rate. It makes credit dear or cheap, so it opens or closes the tap — indirectly, by acting on the appetite to borrow.

Competition and prudence. A bank that lends carelessly eventually blows up, and it knows it.

And the link with inflation

Now you can understand something that otherwise stays incomprehensible.

When credit accelerates, the quantity of money rises — without the quantity of things to buy rising as much. There is more money chasing the same number of homes, cars, products.

So each unit is worth a little less. That is the inflation we discussed above, and this is partly where it comes from.

Money is not created at the printing press. It is created at the lending desk.

And when credit slows, the reverse happens: money is destroyed faster than it is created, and everything seizes up. That is what makes credit crises so brutal — it is not only confidence that disappears, it is the money itself.

If you keep only one idea from this page

It is not a stock we share out, and there is no magic multiplier. It is a tap, opened by the demand for credit and regulated by the rules.

What that changes about everything

Pick up the thread of this chapter.

Money is not a stock we share out. It is a flow, created by debt, and destroyed by repayment.

And so, the sentence that closes everything I have been describing since the start of the chapter:

The money in your account was born from somebody else's debt.

Not from a bar of gold. Not from a reserve. From a promise of repayment signed by a stranger.

We have gone as far as it is possible to go from the sack of wheat and the two hens.

And it is not a scandal

I will pause on this, because it is exactly the kind of fact that gets turned into a conspiracy theory.

It is not hidden. It is published by the institutions concerned, explained in their own documents, and taught on serious courses.

And it renders a real service: without this mechanism, you would have to wait for savings to pile up before anything could be built. No house would be financed, no business would start.

The problem is not that it exists. The problem is that almost nobody knows it, and you cannot reason correctly about money while believing it is a fixed stock that the rich took from the poor.

It is not a cake. It is a tap, and you need to know who holds the handle.

And that closes the chapter

Look at the road from the beginning.

Two hens for a sack of wheat. Then a gold coin. Then a receipt. Then a convertible note. Then a note that no longer is. Then a line in a database.

At every step, we gained convenience and lost possession.

At every step, it was a good trade at the time. And nobody, at any point, felt they were giving anything up.

That is why this chapter exists. Not to tell you what to buy. So that you know, every time, which side of the border you are standing on.

Inflation: the levy nobody votes on

And here is what happens when a promise has nothing left behind it.

Inflation is very simple: your money buys less than before. The figure in your account does not move. What it buys shrinks.

Go back to the Levy chapter, and file it there.

It really is a deduction: value is taken from you. But compare it with the others.

Tax is voted, published, debated, and you see it on your payslip. Your bank charges are written somewhere, even in small print.

Inflation appears on no line, on no statement, and nobody voted for it.

It is the only deduction in the world that touches you without any decision ever being addressed to you.

The official figure, first

No estimate needed: the national statistics institute publishes enough to calculate it exactly.

€100 from the year 2000 is worth about €146 today \*. So it takes €146 to buy what €100 bought then.

Turn the sentence around, and it stops being abstract:

€100 left in a non-interest-bearing account since the year 2000 now buys only about €68 worth of goods.

A third has vanished. The note did not move. Nobody came and helped themselves. No line on any statement.

And it is not even a crisis period: the average rise over those twenty-five years is around 1.7% a year \*, roughly the target considered healthy.

That is the return on doing nothing. It is negative, and it is guaranteed.

And the image, next

Percentages speak to nobody. Take something everyone has bought instead.

A meal deal at a large fast-food chain cost about €5 in the mid-2000s. The same kind of meal today sits between €9 and €12 depending on the city.

Twenty years, and the price has doubled — so far faster than the general rise in prices.

Now turn the reasoning around, because this is where it gets interesting.

It is not the meal that changed. It is still the same sandwich, the same fries, the same cup. What changed is what your note is worth.

The €5 note in your pocket in 2005 bought a whole meal. Today it buys half of one.

Nobody took anything from you. The note is still there, with the same figure printed on it.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: inflation does not take money away from you. It takes value away from the money you already have. That is why nobody sees it go past.

And the price is only half the story

There is a second way to raise prices, and it is far more effective: don't touch the price.

The pack keeps its size, its colour, its price. It simply contains less.

A packet of biscuits goes from 500 to 450 grams. The pot of cream loses 20 millilitres. The bar gets one square thinner. Nothing changed on the price label.

And it does not stop at weight. The composition changes too. The expensive ingredient is replaced by a cheaper one: butter becomes oil, chocolate becomes a "chocolate-flavoured filling", meat retreats and water advances. Metal becomes plastic, thickness drops, and lifespan with it.

The perfect example: the ice cream

Take a frozen dessert from a big chain, the one everybody has ordered at least once.

The price. It was around €2 when it launched in France. Today it sits between €4.10 and €5.10 depending on the city \*. It has more than doubled — and between January 2024 and January 2025 alone, it rose another 8% \*.

And the product. The plastic lid has gone. The little spoon with its recognisable design has been replaced by a basic wooden one.

Both movements, at the same time, on the same product. You pay three times more for something that has been simplified.

And here is what makes the example interesting

Because there is a perfectly honest explanation for the plastic disappearing: French regulation restricted single-use plastic. Wood is not a cheapening, it is an obligation.

That is true. And it is exactly what makes the case fascinating.

The same change is both a good environmental act and a cost saving. Both are real, at the same time.

When a decision is both virtuous and cheaper, nobody can know which of the two reasons decided it.

Including, often, the person who took it.

So I am accusing nobody. I am pointing out something more useful: you have no way of checking. And that, in this book, is always where the real question lies.

Why it works so well

For a very simple psychological reason, well known to those who practise it:

You notice a price going up. You do not notice a weight going down.

The price is written large, you compare it, you remember it. The weight is written small, on the back, in grams, and nobody remembers what the packet weighed last year.

It is so widespread that the law had to step in

And that is how you measure the scale of the thing.

In France, an order of 16 April 2024 has required, since 1 July 2024, large and medium-sized stores to display a label next to the products concerned \*. The message is imposed word for word:

"For this product, the quantity sold has gone from X to Y and its price per litre or kilogram has risen by …"

When a State ends up dictating the exact sentence to stick on the shelf, the phenomenon was not a minor one.

And the detail that completes the demonstration

A consumer association checked whether that obligation was being applied in 423 stores, in the first week.

In 95% of them, no display was found \*.

The law exists. The message is written in advance. And it is almost nowhere.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: official inflation measures prices. It measures very badly what has disappeared from the packet.

And go back to the Levy chapter, you are right in the middle of it. A displayed price that goes up is a price. A content that shrinks without being announced is a hidden levy.

Nothing changed except your ability to notice. And that is always the border.

And it does not hit everyone the same way

Here is the point really worth keeping.

Inflation hits those who hold money. It largely spares those who hold things — a home, a business, land, gold.

In other words: it is hardest on those who have little, since what they have is precisely money.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is arithmetic, and it follows from what we have just seen: what loses value is the promise. Not the thing.

Its real problem is time

Over a year, inflation is invisible. That is what makes it so effective.

Do the sum over a lifetime.

At 2% a year — the official target, the one described as healthy — your money loses half its purchasing power in thirty-five years \*.

At 5%, it loses half in fourteen years \*.

Nobody took anything from you. Nobody signed anything. And half has gone.

That is why keeping your money in the form of money, over a long period, is not a cautious decision. It is a decision, full stop. And it has a cost, even when you do nothing.

Gold: what it really is, and what it is not

Gold is often said to be the only money that knows no inflation.

That is almost true, and the false part matters.

What is true — and it is enormous: gold cannot be printed.

No institution, no government, no council can decide to create more of it.

The figures are conclusive. All the gold ever extracted since antiquity amounts to about 220,000 tonnes \*. World extraction in a record year reaches 3,700 tonnes \*.

Do the division: the quantity of gold available rises by about 1.7% a year. And that pace is remarkably stable — world production has barely varied for years, despite every effort.

Nobody decides that figure. It depends on what can be got out of the ground, and the ground does not negotiate.

That is gold's only real property, and it is enough to make it the anti-promise.

What is false: gold does not guarantee your purchasing power.

Its price moves, and sometimes a great deal. There have been twenty-year stretches where a gold holder watched their wealth melt in real terms. Over centuries, gold roughly holds its value. Over a decade, it can be brutal.

So the accurate formulation is this:

Gold does not suffer devaluation by decision. It suffers the market.

Those are two very different risks, and confusing them is exactly the kind of mistake this book is trying to spare you.

Gold protects you from one thing only: somebody deciding to create more money. That is a real protection, precise, and limited. Everything else — the promises of a safe haven, of universal protection, of a bulwark against everything — is sold by people who sell gold.

Where we stand

Seven steps, and the same movement every time.

Two hens for a sack of wheat. A coin whose metal is the value. A receipt circulating in place of the metal. A convertible note. A note that no longer is. A currency born of a debt. And a currency too slow for the world that is coming.

At every step, we gained convenience and lost possession.

At every step, it was a good trade at the time. And nobody, at any point, felt they were giving anything up.

Which raises the question of the next chapter, and it is the only one that matters now:

What do you actually hold?

Chapter 9 — A good or a promise

Plain language

So the question becomes: what should you hold?

This is where the story brings us.

If money loses value by construction, then doing nothing is already a choice, and a choice that costs.

The question is no longer "how do I earn more". It becomes: in what form do I keep what I already have?

And to answer it, there is only one criterion, the one that gives this chapter its title.

A good, or a promise?

In the middle: the stock market — unfair, but logical and well built

Here is a far more interesting case, because it is not simple.

The stock market is unfair. That has to be said plainly, without dancing around it.

Someone with a hundred million has access you will never have. Someone who puts their machines in the same building as the exchange sees prices before you do. Someone with a team of analysts knows things you do not.

It is not a level field. It never will be.

And yet it is well built. Here is why.

The rules are the same for everyone, and they are public. Nobody hides the asymmetry. It is known, documented, studied. It is not a trap: it is a difficulty that has been announced.

Your counterparty is another participant, not the house. When you buy, somebody sells — somebody like you, who thinks the opposite of you. The exchange itself does not bet against you. It arbitrates, it records, it takes a commission. It earns the same whether you win or lose.

Your account is not closed when you win. On the contrary: you are offered a bigger one. It is the sports betting test, applied in reverse, and it passes.

You can improve, and it shows. It is not easy, most people fail, and I am selling no method. But there are people who do better than chance over years. At the casino, there are none. That is a difference of nature, not of degree.

And the mechanism serves a purpose. A stock market sets the price of things, directs money towards what works, and lets anyone in with any sum, at any hour. Centuries of refinement. It is imperfect, and it is one of the best designed machines humanity has produced.

So yes, the stock market is a race where some have better shoes.

But it is a real race. The casino is not a race at all.

But only on the spot market

We have to be precise here, because "the stock market" means nothing on its own. Under that single word sit fields that have nothing to do with each other.

What I have just said is only true on the spot market.

The spot market is where you buy the good and where you own it. A share of a company, and it is yours. You can keep it for ten years. It exists even when you turn off your screen.

There, you are not even in the Wager. You are back in the Exchange: you gave money for a share of real production. The company produces, sells, hires. Nobody needs to lose for you to gain. And time works for you.

It is the only place on the market where a good genuinely changes hands.

Everything else is a different game

Alongside the spot market sit derivatives. Futures, perpetuals, CFDs, everything played with leverage.

There, you buy nothing. You bet on the price of an asset you will never own.

And the chapter's test collapses, point by point.

You no longer own. There is no company behind your position, no production, no time working for you. There is only a price going up or down.

Time turns against you. On the spot market, waiting costs nothing. On a leveraged product, every day has a cost: financing charges, execution spread, round trips. You pay to sit still.

And you have to look at who stands opposite. There, not everything is equivalent, and it matters.

On a real exchange, your counterparty is another participant. At many brokers selling leveraged products to retail clients, it is the broker itself that takes the other side of your position.

Read the third question of the test again. Is the house my opponent, or only the referee?

When the broker takes the other side, the answer is "opponent". That is no longer the same square of the dial: it is the casino, with a backdrop of charts.

But on a real exchange, the answer is "referee". And that changes everything — so much so that it deserves its own section.

Why a futures contract is more honest than a sports bet

Here is a comparison that surprises people, and it is worth stopping on.

Both look like the same thing: you stake on what is going to happen. Yet one is far more honest than the other. And the reason is mechanical.

At the bookmaker, your winnings come out of his balance sheet. We have seen it: he sets the odds himself, he is your counterparty, and when the match is predictable he pays the winners with something other than the losers' stakes. The price is decided by the party with an interest in your losing.

On a futures market, nobody sets the price. It emerges from thousands of participants meeting. Every euro paid to a winner comes out of another participant's pocket. The exchange does not bet: it records, it guarantees, it takes its commission. It earns the same either way.

That is very precisely the definition of the Wager: two values are pitted against each other, and everything goes to the better one.

First, you have to understand the stop loss

None of what follows makes sense without it. And it is very simple.

A stop loss is an order you leave in advance. You tell your platform: if the price falls to this level, sell automatically, without asking me.

It is a protection. It is intelligent. Every serious book tells you to set one, and they are right: it stops you losing far more than planned while you sleep.

Now, the question nobody asks.

Where do people put it?

Just below the recent low. Just above the high. On a round number.

Why there? Because that is the level where "I was wrong" becomes obvious. If the price breaks the floor everyone is watching, the scenario is dead.

The trouble is that everyone reasons exactly like that. And everyone is looking at the same chart.

The result: the stops of thousands of people pile up on the same two or three prices.

A stop loss is an order waiting to fire on its own

This is where it becomes concrete.

A stop is not an intention. It is not an opinion. It is a sell order already written, which will fire automatically if the price touches the level.

A thousand stops at the same price is a thousand sell orders that will all fire at once, without anyone having to decide anything.

That is called a reservoir. A liquidity reservoir.

And now add leverage. Leveraged positions have a liquidation price, calculable in advance, and those levels sit in the same zones — for the same reason. Except those, you cannot even cancel.

Two layers of forced orders, stacked, at the most obvious spots on the chart.

Why people go and get them

Come back to the big player's problem.

He wants to buy fifty million's worth. On screen, there is nobody there to sell him that. If he buys normally, he pushes the price up against himself and pays more and more.

Except he knows exactly where a thousand automatic sell orders sit: just below the floor everyone is watching.

He needs no conspiracy. He only needs the price to come down there — by pushing a little, or simply by waiting. The sellers then appear on their own, in bulk, and he buys in a second what he could not have bought in an hour.

That is what a wick is. The price dips below an obvious floor, triggers every stop, and comes straight back up.

It is not malice. It is an elephant going to drink where the water is.

The cruel irony

Take the measure of what just happened.

Your protection became somebody else's fuel.

The stop that was meant to save you is precisely what took you out — at the worst moment, just before the price set off in your direction.

So should you stop setting them? No. Without a stop, one mistake can wipe out a year of work.

The lesson is elsewhere, and it is finer: do not put yours where everyone puts theirs. A stop is a protection. A stop at the obvious price is a public announcement.

And the market pays those who are where the fewest people are

Now the finest idea in this chapter. Take it slowly.

A market always goes looking for liquidity — that is, the places where many orders are piled up. We have seen why: big players can only get in where there is enough to serve them.

Now those piled-up orders are the crowd's. That is where the majority is positioned, that is where its stops are, that is where its liquidations are.

So when the price goes looking for that zone, it is coming to get the majority and use it.

And where does the money go? To the other side. Where there were few people. Where almost nobody had staked.

The market does not side with the greatest number. It pays those who were where the fewest people were.

It is the absolute opposite of a poll, an election or a popularity contest. In those, the majority wins because it is the majority.

Here, being numerous is precisely what puts you in danger. Your position is only worth something because somebody will have to take it off you — and the more of you there are wanting out at the same time, the fewer there are to buy you out.

The market pays contrarians. Not out of ideology. Out of mechanics.

Why it is honest, all the same

You might think this is one more injustice. It is the opposite, and here is why.

The rule is the same for everyone. It is written in nobody's favour. It follows from how liquidity forms, and it applies to the big as to the small.

It is public. Order books can be looked at. Open positions are published. None of it is hidden.

And nothing stops you being on the right side. You have every right to go against the flow. It is even the only thing the market rewards.

Compare that with the bookmaker who closes the account of someone who wins too often. Here, the one who is right alone is not expelled: he is paid, and invited to do it again.

The market does not reward being right. It rewards being right alone.

It is harsh. It is not dishonest. And the difference between the two is the whole subject of this book.

One last word, so as to sell nothing. Going against the flow most often means being wrong — the crowd is right most of the time, otherwise it would not be the crowd. This mechanism explains where the money comes from. It does not tell you when to position yourself. Nobody can tell you that, and anyone claiming otherwise is a chapter behind.

The figure they are obliged to display

And there is a proof nobody invents, because the law imposes it.

European brokers selling these leveraged products are obliged to display the percentage of their retail clients who lose money.

Go and read it. It is written in small print, at the bottom of their adverts.

It sits around 70 to 80% \* depending on the broker — and that notice is not a gesture of goodwill: it is imposed by the European regulator, in a standardised format, precisely because people did not know.

Think about what that means. An entire sector is legally required to write, on its own posters, that the great majority of its customers lose. And it keeps selling.

On the spot market, over years, nobody is obliged to display that. It is not an administrative detail. It is the difference between the two fields, measured and published.

The field test

A single question, to ask yourself before every decision:

Do I own something, or am I betting on a price?

If you own, you are in the Exchange, and time is your ally.

If you are betting on a price with leverage, you are in a wager — and you need to check who is standing opposite you before going any further.

Same market. Same screen. Same broker. Two opposite squares of the dial.

So the stock market is neither healthy nor unhealthy. The spot market is healthy. The rest requires knowing exactly what you are playing.

The real choice: a good, or a promise

Everything I have just described actually comes down to one principle, and it reaches far beyond the stock market. Here it is.

A share of a company you hold is a good. A futures contract is a promise.

Look at the difference in nature.

A good exists without anyone. Your share of a company exists even if your broker closes tomorrow. The gold in your hand exists even if the bank closes. What you know how to do exists even if everything else collapses.

A promise only exists as long as whoever made it is still standing. It is a piece of paper saying somebody will pay you. Its value is exactly the value of that somebody.

How many promises you hold without knowing it

Take the inventory, you will be surprised.

The money in your bank account is a promise: the bank owes you that sum. That is why the law had to create a deposit guarantee, with a cap.

A product described as "capital guaranteed" is a promise. Guaranteed by whom, exactly? By the institution that issues it. If it falls, the guarantee falls with it.

A corporate bond, a pension, an insurance policy, a position on a perpetual: promises. All of them.

As long as all is well, there is no visible difference between a good and a promise. Both show a figure on the screen, both can be sold on, both pay.

The difference appears on one day only. And on that day, it appears all at once, in full.

This is not a condemnation

Careful, I am not saying promises are bad. That would be foolish.

We have just seen insurance: it is a promise, and it is one of the finest inventions in history. Credit is a promise, and it lets you buy a house at thirty instead of sixty. All of international trade rests on promises.

An economy without promises would go nowhere.

The point is not to flee them. The point is to know where you place them.

You do not build foundations on promises. You build on goods, and you put the promises on top.

Your base — what has to survive a bad year, a bankruptcy, a crisis — must be made of what you genuinely hold. A skill in your head. A tool that produces. A share of a company you really own. A roof.

Above that base, promises are useful. They cushion, they accelerate, they protect.

And it is a choice, not a fate. Many financial products sell nothing but a well-presented promise — with a displayed return, a rising chart, and a reassuring name. They are not necessarily lying. They are simply selling you somebody's word, and letting you believe you bought a good.

The question to ask before any investment comes down to five words:

What do I actually hold?

If the answer begins with "the right to receive…", you are holding a promise. That is not disqualifying. But you must know whose.

A pocket of gold, and what it teaches

One last rule, and it closes the most important principle in the chapter.

Part of the setup is placed in gold.

Not because gold would protect against cryptocurrencies — I have measured it, that is false, both can fall together. But because gold is the oldest good in the world. It depends on no company, no State, no promise. It does not go bankrupt.

It is the anti-promise par excellence.

Except that.

On a digital market, you do not hold a bar. You hold a token backed by physical gold, held by an issuer, somewhere, in a vault.

Apply the chapter's test: what do I actually hold?

The honest answer: a claim on an issuer who states that he holds the metal. That is far more solid than a contract resting on nothing. It is better than a synthetic product. But it is not a bar in your hand.

I say it because it is true, and because a book that applies its tests to everyone except its author is worthless.

So why accept that one?

For a precise reason: it gives you gold, but liquid.

Compare the two honestly.

A bar at home. You own the good, absolutely. But you have to keep it, insure it, hide it. And to sell it you have to find a buyer, travel, negotiate, and accept a spread of several per cent between the quoted price and what you will actually get. It is the least liquid form of wealth there is. And you cannot buy thirty-seven euros' worth.

Backed gold, on a market. You get in and out in a second, at any hour, for any amount. Nothing to store, nothing to insure, nothing to hide. The price you see is the price you get.

So you trade a little "thing" for a lot of "liquidity". And for a setup that has to be able to rebalance constantly, that liquidity is not a comfort: it is the condition for it to work at all.

What makes that promise acceptable

The metal really exists. It is kept in vaults, and the large vehicles backed by physical gold publish what they hold and have their reserves checked.

That is not an absolute guarantee. It is a verifiable guarantee, and that changes everything.

And it gives the general rule, the one to keep far beyond gold:

A promise becomes acceptable when you can check what stands behind it.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: a promise becomes acceptable when you can check what stands behind it. Not when the person making it looks serious.

Apply it, and everything falls into place.

An audited gold reserve, in a vault, with the list of bars: verifiable.

A synthetic product backed by a bank's undertaking: you are checking nothing except that bank's health.

A coin invented last month with a pretty website: there is nothing behind it, and that is precisely why you are never offered the chance to check.

You never leave the world of promises entirely. You choose which ones you accept, you know why, and you can go and look.

And the cash pocket: the same reasoning

There remains the third piece of the setup, and it obeys exactly the same logic.

When the tool is not invested, it does not hold euros in a bank account. It holds a stablecoin backed by the dollar.

Ask the question again. What do I actually hold?

A claim on an issuer, who states that he holds against it dollars and above all short-term US government debt.

Apply the rule we have just set out: is it verifiable?

In large part, yes. The issuer regularly publishes the composition of its reserves. And what is inside is not nothing: very short-term public debt, which is one of the most liquid and least risky instruments there is.

But let us be precise, because this book demands it of others. Those publications are attestations — a photograph of the reserves, verified on a given date. That is not quite the same thing as a full, permanent audit. The difference is real, it is known, and it should be known before putting money in.

Collateral: what turns a promise into an almost-good

There is a word behind this whole chapter, and it needs explaining clearly, because it commands all the rest.

Collateral.

It is what is placed behind a promise, and what becomes yours if the promise is not kept.

The example everybody knows

You borrow €200,000 to buy a house. The collateral is the house. If you do not repay, the bank takes it.

Now, the interesting question: why does a mortgage cost far less than a consumer loan?

Not because the bank likes you more. Because in one case, it does not need to trust you.

Collateral replaces trust.

Keep that sentence, it explains a good part of finance.

How collateral pins a price

And here is the mechanism, the one that answers "why is it always worth a dollar?".

Imagine a token, exchangeable at any moment for a dollar of reserve. Always. On simple request.

What happens if its price falls to 0.98 on the market?

Anybody can buy it at 0.98, go and hand it back to the issuer, and receive 1.00. Two cents of gain, risk-free, as many times as they like.

So people do it. Massively. They buy, the price rises, and it sticks back to 1.00 on its own.

Collateral does not merely guarantee. It manufactures the trade that brings the price back. It is a mechanical elastic, not a promise of good behaviour.

And that is why those currencies "do not move". It is neither magic nor trust. It is arbitrage made possible by a real reserve.

The condition, and it is absolute

All of that works on one condition only: the collateral must exist, and be genuinely recoverable.

If it does not exist, or if nobody can go and get it, the trade I have just described does not exist either. The price then rests on nothing but belief.

And a belief does not degrade gently. It gives way all at once.

We have had the demonstration. So-called stablecoins, with no real reserve, held their price thanks to an automatic mechanism and to trust. The day trust left, there was nothing behind. The price did not fall: it evaporated, in a few days.

Without collateral, a currency is not a currency. It is a promise with a pretty name.

And the euro in your pocket, then?

Ask the question frankly, because it is awkward and it is fair.

What is the collateral of the euro? Or the dollar?

None, strictly speaking. Since the nineteen-seventies, no major currency has been exchangeable for a fixed quantity of metal. You cannot go and claim anything.

So what holds them up?

Three things. Obligation — you must pay your taxes in that currency, so everybody needs some. An institution that steers the quantity. And the habit of hundreds of millions of people.

It is real. It works. It is not collateral.

Which gives this observation, and I leave it as it is, without adding any catastrophe: the currencies we consider safest are also the ones with the least collateral. What holds them up is not a reserve. It is a State.

The full scale

Now sort everything we have seen, from the most solid to the most fragile:

Look at the last line, and above all keep this: it is not a matter of taste or of excessive caution.

Every serious investor flees that line, and flees it for a mechanical reason, not a moral one. An asset with no collateral has no floor. There is no level at which somebody will be obliged to buy because it has become too cheap — since there is nothing to recover against it.

A backed value can halve. A value with nothing behind it can go to zero, and it gets there fast, because nothing holds it back on the way.

It is in fact the best test I know for telling a professional from an amateur. The amateur looks at how high it can go. The professional always starts by looking at what stops it going to zero.

Nobody lives right at the top of that table. That is not the aim.

The aim is to know which line you are on, for every line you own.

The vertigo, and the conclusion

Now look at what we have just stacked up.

You hold a token. That token is backed by a Treasury bill. And what is a Treasury bill? A State's promise to repay you.

Two promises stacked.

And if you tell yourself "I will keep euros at the bank, at least that is solid", look closely: the money in your account is a claim on your bank, and the note in your pocket is a central bank promise. It has no value in itself.

There is no position without a promise. None. Except the bar in your hand, the land under your feet, and what you know how to do.

So the question was never how to avoid them. It is this, and it is the conclusion of the whole chapter:

How many promises stand between me and the real good? And can I check each one of them?

A coin launched last month: one promise, unverifiable, backed by nothing.

A stablecoin backed by government debt: two promises, both published, both debatable but consultable.

Gold kept in a vault, with the list of bars: one promise, backed by metal that exists.

These are not moral judgements. It is a distance, and it can be counted.

All I can say about my own work is that I know that distance for every line I hold. It is not a guarantee of winning. It is a guarantee of knowing what I am playing.

Chapter 10 — What I did with it

⚖️ Before starting this chapter. What follows describes my personal choices and the constraints I impose on myself. It is not investment advice, and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to buy or sell anything. I deliberately name no asset: what matters in this chapter is the method, not the list. I also have a direct interest here, and I say so rather than leaving you to guess: I build and sell products in the fields I am describing.

Leverage, and why it kills

A word is needed on leverage, because it is what ruins the most people in this square.

Leverage lets you hold ten times your stake. With a thousand euros, you move as if you had ten thousand.

It is sold to you as a gain multiplier. That is true. That is not the point.

The real danger is not the one you think

With leverage of ten, a 10% move against you does not hurt. It wipes out everything.

Not "a big loss". Zero. Position closed automatically, account emptied, and you had nothing to decide.

And 10%, on many markets, is an ordinary bad day.

The mechanics of losses are not symmetrical

Here is the calculation nobody does, and it holds for this whole book.

You lose 50%. To get back to your starting point, you do not need to gain 50%. You need to gain 100%.

You lose 90%? You need 900%.

A loss and a gain of the same percentage do not cancel out. Losses dig faster than gains fill. It is arithmetic, it is not negotiable, and leverage only accelerates the side that digs.

What leverage really takes from you

But the worst is not there. The worst is what it does to time.

Remember the field test: skill needs time to appear. Over a few minutes, randomness dominates. Over years, skill dominates.

Leverage takes time away from you. By force.

You can be perfectly right about the direction, and be out three days before it happens. The market can stay against you longer than your account can bear.

In other words: leverage does not merely expose you to loss. It deprives you of the one thing that lets your skill be of any use.

You are paying to play on the field where randomness is strongest. That is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing.

A portfolio is built over time

So what does work? One thing, and it is boring.

Time.

Not luck. Not the good tip. Not the perfect entry at the perfect moment. A long-term strategy, held.

Why time is your only real advantage

Three reasons, and they stack.

It separates skill from randomness. Over ten decisions, you do not know whether you are good or lucky. Over a thousand, you know. And so does the market.

It makes interest work on interest. It is the only mechanism in the financial world that plays for you with nothing required of you — but it needs years, not weeks. Interrupted every three months, it produces nothing.

It carries you through the bad stretches instead of throwing you out inside them. Someone who genuinely owns something can wait. Someone on leverage cannot. That is often the whole difference between the two, for the same idea.

And that closes the first chapter

Take the three questions from the start of the book. Apply them to a long-term strategy.

Can I do it again? Yes, every month, for twenty years. Can I learn it? Yes, and it fits on one page. Can I explain it to someone? Yes, to your son, in ten minutes.

Three yeses. It is a method.

Apply the same questions to a successful leveraged trade on a hunch. Three noes. It is an event.

A portfolio is not won. It is built — slowly, steadily, with boring decisions repeated for a long time.

That is not investment advice, and I will give none. It is just the same principle as since page one: what repeats beats what impresses.

What I did with it — and what it costs

This whole chapter, I turned into constraints, in a tool I built and that runs today.

I am not describing it to sell it to you. I am describing it because writing principles is easy, and holding them when they cost you money is far less so. So here are the rules, and the price of each.

Spot only

No leverage. No perpetuals. No derivatives.

What is bought is genuinely held. It is trade, not a bet on an expectation sold in the form of a promise.

What that costs: the tool cannot win when things fall. It cannot amplify. It is far slower than what you see on the screenshots doing the rounds.

That is the price, and I pay it every day.

It reads the order book, it does not predict

It uses what we have seen: order walls, the imbalance between buyers and sellers, the zones where liquidity piles up.

But it never claims to know what is going to happen. That is the distinction from the previous chapter, applied to a machine: the mechanism, never the prophecy.

What that costs: it misses entire moves. It has no opinion. It waits for conditions it knows how to measure, and the rest of the time it does nothing.

No shitcoins

Only assets with real market depth. Nothing that could be emptied by a single seller.

What that costs: it will never make the hundredfold gain people talk about at parties. And that is deliberate — because those are exactly the same coins that produce the hundred per cent loss. You cannot have one without the other, whatever anyone says.

So what do we keep, concretely?

The rule I impose on myself fits in one sentence, and I give it to you because anyone can use it:

If I cannot say in one sentence what stands behind it, I do not want it.

Here are the four, with their sentence.

The first of them all — digital gold. Its property is exactly that of the gold in the previous chapter: its quantity is fixed, and nobody can decide to create more. The difference from gold is that you can check it yourself, in a few seconds, without trusting a vault or an auditor.

That is not backing. It is better and less at the same time: a rule, public, that anyone can check. In exchange, it has no physical existence and no century of history behind it. It is a bet on scarcity and the network continuing to be recognised.

The one that made contracts possible. Its value does not rest on a story, but on a use: it is where a large part of the activity of that world happens, and it draws enormous liquidity.

And we saw in the liquidity chapter that this is not a comfort detail. It is a real, measurable property, and it decides what you can do and undo.

The challenger. The thesis is simple: faster, cheaper, and positioned to take the previous one's place.

Be honest with yourself about that one: it is the most fragile of the four. The other three are justified by what they are today. This one is justified by what it could become. That is not the same solidity, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

The decentralised exchange — the house that referees. This one is my favourite, because it closes the book on itself.

It is a decentralised exchange. And what does an exchange do? It has no opinion, it does not bet, it takes no side. It records, it guarantees, and it takes a commission — whether you win or lose.

Read the third question of the Wager test again. Is the house my opponent, or only the referee?

Here, you do not hold a player. You hold a share of the referee.

It is perhaps the position most consistent with everything this book says: where others try to guess who is going to win, the referee collects in both directions, because it is not playing.

What those four sentences have in common

Not one of them says "it is going to go up".

Each names a property — a verifiable scarcity, a real use, a position to be taken, a referee's role. Something that exists independently of what the price does tomorrow.

And that is the shitcoin test. It is not a question of size or reputation.

Take any coin and try to write its sentence. If you cannot manage it without talking about the price, or about what somebody promised, then there is nothing behind it. You are holding the last line of the table from the previous chapter.

It works twenty-four hours a day

It is the only thing the machine genuinely does better than a human, and we need to be precise about which thing.

The cryptocurrency market never closes. Not at night, not at the weekend, not at Christmas.

A human being cannot follow that. He has two options, and both are bad: sleep and miss what happens, or stop sleeping and destroy himself. I tried the second. It does not last six months.

But the machine's advantage is not being cleverer. It is not.

Its advantage comes down to two things: it is always there, and it has no emotions.

Read the Levy chapter again. The three levers used against you: urgency, hope, belonging.

A machine does not feel urgency. It does not tell itself "only three places left". It does not hope it will come back up. It does not look at what others are doing for reassurance.

It applies the rule at three in the morning exactly as at midday, after ten wins in a row as after ten losses.

What the machine replaces is not your brain. It is your tiredness and your fear.

And the opposite has to be said straight away, otherwise I am selling something. A machine does not feel danger either. It executes the rules it was given, including the bad ones, with the same obedience.

Its discipline is never worth more than the rules written inside it. That is why this whole chapter is about the rules, and not about the technology.

It only sells at a profit

It is the strictest rule, and the one that demands the most honesty.

The starting reasoning is sound: a loss is only final at the moment you sell. As long as you hold, the position can come back. Selling is engraving.

But I have to tell you straight away that this sentence is also the most widespread trap in investing. Generations of people have clung to it to avoid admitting they were wrong, and have held for ten years positions that would never recover.

So when is the rule sound, and when is it an excuse?

It is only sound if the thing can genuinely come back.

On a solid asset, waiting makes sense: time works, the company produces, the market eventually sees it. On a dead coin, waiting is not patience. It is refusal.

Which means those two rules are really one:

"Never sell at a loss" only makes sense stuck to "never buy just anything". Separated, the first becomes a way of lying to yourself.

And the price of that rule, I have measured it

It is not free, and I am not going to pretend.

A position on hold is money tied up. It is not working. It cannot seize what goes past.

I measured that cost on my own operations, counting not euros but euro-hours — how much money, tied up for how long. The result is harsh: purchases made on the way down freeze nearly 90% of the capital-time, for a tiny share of the gain.

In other words, the choice is this, quite clearly:

Never book a final loss, accepting that some capital sleeps.

It is not magic. It is a trade-off, with a real cost, openly taken.

Chapter 11 — Creating a currency

Plain language

⚖️ This chapter continues the previous one: same rules, same declared interest. Nothing here is investment advice.

This has to be discussed, because I am creating one. And because it is the subject on which the most nonsense is talked, in both directions.

First, the fact that explains all the rest

Anyone can create a cryptocurrency in ten minutes, for a few euros.

That is not an exaggeration. There are tools where you fill in a name, a symbol, a quantity, and you click. That is all.

Keep that fact in mind, because it explains absolutely everything that follows.

Anyone can create a currency in ten minutes. That is exactly why none of them is worth anything by default.

There are millions of them. Thousands are created every day. And creating your own proves strictly nothing — no more than printing business cards proves you have a company.

The mud: what the others are

I am going to be direct, and I weigh my words because I am inside this.

Almost everything that exists is useless. It sorts into three piles.

The useless. A token that solves no problem. It has no function, no use, not even a technical reason to exist. It exists to be sold. That is all, and that is the square from the previous chapter.

The outdated. Projects that made sense eight years ago and that nobody maintains any more. Chains with no users, protocols long since superseded. They are not dishonest, they are dead, and their token is still traded.

Nerd art. That one I say with a little affection, because it is the most respectable of the three. Technically remarkable constructions, elegant, brilliant — and without a single user. Built for the pleasure of building.

It is craftsmanship, and it is admirable as craftsmanship. It is not a product. An object nobody uses has no use value, however beautiful it is.

The most insidious trap: promises that only exist if the price rises

There is a fourth pile, and it is the most dangerous — because it looks nothing like the other three.

These are serious projects. A real team, sometimes a real product, a clean website, a detailed roadmap. Nothing to do with a scam.

And yet their model only works if the price rises. Forever.

How it works

Look at the promises you find everywhere, and look at what they are paid in.

"20% annual return if you lock your tokens." Paid in what? In tokens. You are given more units of a thing whose quantity is increasing. If the price does not rise, you are richer in number and poorer in value.

A treasury held in its own currency. The team keeps its war chest in the form of its own tokens. It is worth millions as long as all goes well — and it evaporates on exactly the day it would be needed.

A roadmap funded by selling tokens. To pay the developers, the team has to sell. Selling pushes the price down. The fall reduces what selling brings in. So more has to be sold.

Rewards to attract users. They come for the reward. The day it drops, they leave — and they had never come for the product.

The flaw is always the same

Step back and you will see there is only one defect, repeated four times:

The promise is paid in the very thing whose value depends on the promise.

It is a circle. It holds as long as it rises, and it cannot not rise, otherwise it no longer holds.

There is nothing behind it. Take the question of the whole book — what stands behind it? — and the honest answer is: the future price of the token itself.

It is the last line of the previous chapter's table, dressed up as a company.

The test, in one question

Before any project, including mine, ask this one:

What happens if the price does not rise for three years?

If the answer is "the team keeps working, the product keeps serving, the users stay", the project has a model.

If the answer is "everything stops", then it was not a company.

If your model only works when the price rises, it is not a model. It is a bet on yourself — and you made it with other people's money.

And it is not always dishonesty

Let's be fair. Many of those teams sincerely believed in it.

They did their sums in a period when everything was rising, and in that period the model really worked. The flaw was not visible: it only appears when the tide goes out.

That is what makes this pile more dangerous than the scams. A scam, you eventually spot. A circular model run by honest people looks solid to you until the day it is not, and on that day nobody had lied.

The benefits: what a token really does well

Now the other side, because throwing it all out would be as foolish as buying it all.

A token is not a product. It is a tool, and it does three things nothing else does as well.

It lets a community own a share of what it uses. The player is no longer merely the game's customer: he holds a piece of it. No loyalty card can do that.

It moves value around without an intermediary granting permission. We have seen it: no bank, no delay, no permission, no border.

And above all, it makes it possible to write a rule that nobody can change afterwards.

Stop on that one, it is the most important and the least understood.

Remember the distinction running through this whole book: a property cannot be taken from you; a rule has to be maintained.

A contract written into a chain reverses that. The rule becomes a property. If the quantity is capped, it is capped — not because somebody undertakes to keep it so, but because nobody can do otherwise. Including whoever wrote it. Including me.

It is the only technology I know of that lets you tie your own hands verifiably. And to ask for somebody's trust, that is infinitely stronger than a promise.

The first per cent, though, is well worth it

I have just been harsh. So I need to be precise about what remains, because what remains is considerable.

Three families, and none of the three needs speculation to exist.

Stablecoins. We have discussed them: a dollar that moves in a few seconds, at any hour, for any amount, to anywhere, with no intermediary granting permission.

It is not an investment, it is not a bet. It is plumbing, and it works better than the old kind.

And there, the figures are worth all the speeches. Sending money abroad costs on average 8.96% of the sum worldwide \*. In other words: on 200 dollars sent to his family, a migrant worker leaves about 18 on the counter.

In some regions it exceeds 12%. In some countries, more than 20%. The United Nations has set itself the target of getting down to 3% by 2030 — which says enough about where we are.

For that person, a stablecoin is not a technology of the future nor an investment. It is money that arrives whole, the same day. It is perhaps the most useful application in this entire industry, and it is the least talked about.

Certificates of ownership, once the circus is stripped away. Forget the pictures of apes, they did a lot of damage to a simple idea.

The mechanism, stripped bare, is: a title of ownership that whoever issued it cannot take back from you.

We have seen what that changes for a game item. Now take a concert ticket: it can be resold directly to another spectator, with a maximum resale price written into the object itself, that nobody can get around. No more need for an intermediary taking a cut along the way.

A diploma no school can erase. A licence, a warranty, a title.

Your title of ownership stops being a line in somebody else's database. It becomes an object you hold.

And above all: real assets. That is where the real transformation lies, and it is the subject least talked about.

Putting on a chain assets that genuinely exist: government debt, property, gold, company invoices.

Why is that decisive? Take this book's criterion again. It is collateral being brought onto the chain. We stop circulating promises backed by nothing, and start circulating titles backed by things.

And that unlocks two bolts as old as the world.

What was indivisible becomes divisible. You cannot buy a corridor in a building. You can hold fifty euros of a building. Access stops requiring capital — remember the chapter on the Gift square: the entry ticket changes square again.

What was locked becomes liquid. Selling a property takes months and requires finding a buyer. In the form of a tradeable title, it becomes a matter of seconds. It is exactly the reasoning behind my gold pocket, applied to everything else.

The limit, and it is absolute

One warning only, but it cancels all the rest if forgotten.

The chain guarantees the token. It does not guarantee what stands behind it.

A title representing a building is only worth something if a court recognises that the building is yours. A token backed by gold is only worth what the vault and its keeper are worth.

The technology solves the problem of transfer. It never solves the problem of custody nor that of law.

It is the same lesson as since the start of the book, and it will not change: always ask what stands behind it, and how many promises there are between you and the thing.

The first per cent does not make you dream. It makes things work.

And now, patience

One thing remains to be said, and it may be the most important in the chapter.

These technologies are a genuine advance. And as always in human history, the technology arrives long before anyone knows how to use it.

That is not an impression. It is a regularity, and it holds every time.

Electricity. Factories adopted it by simply replacing the steam engine with one big electric motor — keeping the same shafts, the same belts, the same architecture. It took decades and a new generation of engineers to understand that a small motor could go on each machine and the whole factory be redrawn. Only then did productivity explode.

Printing. The first printed books imitated handwriting, right down to its irregularities. The manuscript was reproduced, only faster.

The web. The first company websites were paper brochures put on a screen. It took ten years before somebody invented what only the web made possible.

The pattern never changes:

We always start by doing the old thing faster. Understanding what the new thing allows takes a generation.

And for the great majority of people, it will take even longer

Let's be precise, because this is where the real deadline sits.

Today, these tools work — for a minority. Those who already know. Those willing to manage a key, understand a network, not get an address wrong.

For the great majority of people, none of it is usable, and they are perfectly right not to try. Asking someone to write twelve words on a piece of paper while warning them they will lose everything if they mislay it is not a product. It is a test.

And here is the rule that decides the date:

A technology goes mainstream the day it becomes invisible.

You do not use the electricity network: you turn on the light. You do not use a data transport protocol: you send a message. Nobody knows how their car engine works, and everybody drives.

These tools will become mainstream the day nobody needs to know they are there any more. When the wallet has disappeared behind the application. When there are no longer twelve words to copy out. When it simply works, without anyone having to talk about it.

On that day, people will not say they are using a blockchain. They will say they paid, or that they own their item.

And that is precisely how we will know it has happened: when we have stopped talking about it.

And that is exactly what happened to NFTs

They were used to excess, and with no great purpose.

A technology of ownership — the ability to hold an object the issuer cannot take back from you — was taken and used to sell images to people who resold them to others.

That was the old thing, only faster. Selling collectibles already existed, and worked perfectly well.

What only this technology makes possible — a game item that survives the server closing, a ticket whose resale rule is written into the object, a title nobody can erase — was barely touched.

And the excess did not only lose money. It discredited the idea itself, which costs far more and for far longer. Today you have to spend ten minutes explaining that you are not talking about pictures of apes before you can say anything interesting.

What that means for you

Two consequences, and they point in opposite directions. Both are true.

Do not believe those announcing that everything will flip next year. It will take years before these tools are genuinely used, because people need time to grow up with them and stop reproducing what existed before.

And do not believe those declaring it dead either. They look at today's usage, which is indeed ridiculous, and infer the value of the tool from it. Exactly the same was said of the telephone, the web and electricity — each time by looking at the bad early uses.

Judging a technology on what is done with it in the first year is judging printing on the first printed book.

And the best use of all: a stock market for those the stock market is closed to

There is one use rarely discussed that may be the most useful of all. You have to go through the stock market to understand it.

A company needing money has historically had two doors.

The bank. It lends, it has to be repaid with interest, and guarantees are required. So you must already own something.

The stock market. You sell a share of your company to people who believe in it. You repay nothing: they become co-owners.

The second door is infinitely better. And it is closed to almost everybody.

Floating costs a fortune, takes months, requires lawyers, auditors, a prospectus, and a minimum size. It is reserved for companies that are already large.

Between "borrow from your banker" and "be big enough to float", there was practically nothing.

What a token allows

A project can raise money directly from the people it interests. With no intermediary, no flotation, at a cost close to zero.

Take the dial one last time. Raising funds required already having access — a network, a banker, a size. It was an entry ticket lodged in the Gift square: you were let in, or you were not.

It becomes: convincing people that what you are building is worth something.

It is a stock market for those the stock market is closed to.

And here is the backlash, because there is one

It has to be said straight away, otherwise this passage becomes exactly the pitch this book takes apart.

The cost and slowness of the stock market are not only paperwork.

They pay for something precise: audited accounts, published and compulsory information, a regulator watching, and a remedy if you were lied to.

You are not paying for the tedium. You are paying for the protection of the buyer.

Remove the cost, and you remove the protection with it.

That is exactly what happened during the great wave of token raises a few years ago: thousands of projects collected money on the strength of a twenty-page document, and the vast majority of that money never produced anything.

The barrier that kept you out also protected those who buy.

It is the most honest sentence I can write about my own camp.

So what?

The answer is not to restore the barrier — it excludes too many honest people. And it is not to pretend the problem does not exist either.

It is to rebuild the protection differently, and more cheaply. And that is precisely what the technology can do, if it is used for that.

Funds locked and released only when milestones are reached. A treasury anyone can inspect, live, without asking permission. Rules written once that nobody — not even the founder — can change afterwards.

We come back to what I said above, and this is where it all closes: the rule becomes a property.

A regulator protects by watching after the fact. A written contract protects by making cheating impossible beforehand.

It is not yet the norm. It is what needs building, and it is infinitely more useful than the millionth animal-named coin.

The test, and I apply it to myself

One test only, and it cuts the millions of tokens into two piles.

Remove the token from the product. If everything keeps working exactly the same, it was only there to be sold.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this chapter: remove the token from the product. If everything continues exactly the same, it was only there to be sold.

It is brutal, and it is unanswerable. Most projects do not survive that question — hence the fact that you are never asked it.

And I have to apply it to myself, otherwise this chapter is worthless. So here goes.

Why I created one

This token was built for one reason: to give a new chance to make money.

Take the book's map again, and look at what is actually on offer to people today.

The Exchange. You sell your time. It is healthy, it is the biggest square, and it is capped at twenty-four hours. It is compressing, on top of that.

Wagers as they currently exist. The casino, the lottery, sports betting. You are offered the chance to win, but you have no real way of getting there — because the outcome never depends on you. It depends on a draw, on a match you are not playing, or on a house that wrote the rules in its own favour.

Between the two, there is nothing. And that is precisely the empty square this whole book is about.

What I am building aims at that hole. Games where the outcome depends on what you decide. Where improving changes your results. Where the house never bets against you.

Why those games

They are not invented games. They are games everybody already knows — chess, the board race, the economic game. No rules to learn, no audience to convince that they exist.

With one difference: a mystery variant that changes how the game unfolds.

That is what stops a thousand-year-old game becoming predictable between two players of the same level, and what keeps every game alive. The skeleton is known, the flesh is new.

And it is exactly what I was saying about board games: do not start from an invention. Start from something people already love, and give it the form that only digital allows.

Why what the bot holds

The same reasoning, applied to the other half.

It only buys assets that have proved their solidity over time and that are liquid — that is, that you can get out of without moving the price by yourself.

And it can hold tokens backed by gold. The oldest good in the world, the one nobody can print, made liquid and divisible.

Not because gold protects against everything — we have seen that is false. Because it is the only asset whose quantity is decided by nobody.

The strict test: what if the token were removed?

Let's go all the way, because that is the real question. Not "what is my project for", but: if the token were removed and everything paid in euros, what would stop being possible?

Two things, and they are precise.

Value would only move through somebody granting permission. A player who wins in Buenos Aires, in Lagos or in São Paulo would need a bank account, a card, a validated identity, and would wait days — when he received anything at all. Every euro would pass through an intermediary who takes a cut, who can refuse, and who answers to nobody.

In other words: the house would become a compulsory checkpoint again. And this whole book explains why that is exactly what must not happen.

And the player would own nothing any more. His item, his piece, what he earned over two hundred hours: a line in my database. I could erase it. The day my company stops, everything he built disappears with it.

With the token, what he earned is his. Transferable. Resellable. And above all: it outlives me.

The token is not there to be sold. It is there so that I am not indispensable.

It is the most honest answer I can give, and it has a property I like: it will be checkable. If I disappear and the players keep what they earned, the test is passed. Without my having any say in it.

And now, the limit. Because there is one.

I have just spent a whole section denouncing models that only work when the price rises. It would be dishonest not to ask myself the question.

What happens if markets do not rise for three years?

Here is the answer, and it is measured, not hoped for.

The tool does not ruin itself: it never sells at a loss, so nothing is booked. But it freezes. Capital stays in positions that are waiting, and money that waits is money that is not working.

I put a figure on it above: purchases made on the way down tie up nearly 90% of the capital-time \*.

The exact distinction

The difference has to be named precisely, because it decides everything.

A circular token has nothing behind it: its promise is paid in the thing whose value depends on the promise.

>

What I hold has something behind it. The dependence is not circular, it is directional.

It is not the same family of risk, and that has to be said plainly.

The first evaporates. The second seizes up.

In one case, nothing is left: the value only existed in the promise, and the promise gave way. In the other, the capital is still there, whole, genuinely held — it simply stops working for a while.

That is very different. It is not nothing either.

And I would rather write it myself than let a reader discover it.

The bot does not lose. It waits. And waiting has a cost, which I measure instead of hiding.

That is the exact difference between what I criticise and what I do. Not a difference of virtue: a difference in what stands behind it, and in what one agrees to say out loud.

Chapter 12 — The winner's mindset

The trap in this chapter

We have to start with an awkwardness, otherwise everything that follows will ring false.

This book has just spent eight chapters telling you to be wary of people selling mindset. And now, a chapter on mindset.

I see the problem. So let's apply our own test to ourselves.

Can I do it again? Can I learn it? Can I explain it to someone else?

Everything that follows passes all three. These are not states of mind, they are not visualisations, they are not affirmations to repeat in the morning.

They are six concrete habits, that you can put in place this week, and check for yourself in a year.

And I am selling you nothing. That is already a difference.

1. Pay yourself first

There is a book from 1926 that comes down to one idea, and that idea is worth more than most of today's finance shelves. The Richest Man in Babylon \*.

The idea is this: a share of everything you earn belongs to you. Not to your landlord, not to your phone company, not to the supermarket. To you.

Ten per cent. Set aside, or invested.

Why it is "first" and not "what is left"

Because what is left never is.

Everyone has tried the "I save whatever is left at the end of the month" version. Nothing is left. Ever. Whatever the salary — that is the most troubling part, it does not work any better on double the money.

Spending always fills all the available space. So the space has to be removed first.

The day it lands, you take your share. Before thinking, before paying anything. Ideally automatically, so you do not even have the chance to think about it.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: what is left never is. You have to take it before, not after.

Why ten

The figure is not magic. It is just small enough to be sustainable, and big enough to count.

If ten is impossible for you, take two. It is not the amount that builds something. It is the fact that it is automatic and unconditional.

And what that has to do with the dial

Everything, in fact.

Take the map again. With no starting capital, you are locked in the Exchange square for life: you can only sell your time, and your time is capped.

Those ten per cent are not a rainy-day fund. They are your entry ticket to the other squares. They are what will one day let you own something that works without you, or stake on yourself without risking everything.

The first chapter said wealth is not a matter of luck. Here is the first concrete act that proves it, and it asks nobody's permission.

2. Devote a share of your life to learning

Learning does not stop at the school gates.

School gave you a base and a piece of paper. It did not give you a method for the fifty years that follow, and nobody is coming to give you one either.

Why this is not optional

Remember the Exchange chapter. Your salary does not depend on how difficult your job is. It depends on how rare your skill is.

Now a rare skill does not stay rare. What was rare ten years ago is common today.

Which means one unpleasant thing: not learning is not standing still. It is going backwards. The world keeps moving around you, and your rarity erodes on its own, without your having done anything wrong.

And with machines that can now write, draw, translate and code, that erosion has suddenly accelerated. It is not a distant threat. It is under way.

The same rule as for money

And this is where the first two habits become one.

Nobody learns "when they have the time". There is never any time left, exactly as there is never any money left.

So take it first. An hour a day, or three hours on a Sunday, it does not matter. Reserved, before the week eats it.

Ten per cent of what you earn. A share of what you live. Taken first, never with what is left.

3. Environment

You become the average of what you expose yourself to.

That is not mystical. It is simply that the people around you define, without your noticing, what you consider normal.

What that looks like in practice

If everyone around you finds it normal to complain about the boss and wait for Friday, that becomes your normal. You do not choose it: you breathe it.

If on the other hand someone around you has started something, then "starting something" enters the field of the possible. It does not motivate you: it gives you permission.

That is very different, and it is far more powerful.

Being surrounded by inspiring people takes you infinitely further than spending your evenings with reality television celebrities. Not because those people are bad. Because what they make normal takes you nowhere.

The good news

I am not telling you to drop your friends. That would be foolish and a little contemptible.

I am telling you something else, and this is where it becomes usable straight away.

Your environment is no longer only geographical. What you read, what you listen to, what you watch for two hours every evening: that is also your circle. And that circle, you choose entirely, for free, tonight.

Three hours of videos of people arguing, or three hours of somebody explaining a trade to you. The same time. The same sofa. Two different normals.

4. Passion — and the fact that fields are not equal

Two pieces of advice are always set against each other, and both are right.

"Follow your passion." "Be realistic, go where the money is."

Both are true. Here is how to hold them together.

The unpleasant truth first

Some fields pay far more than others. It is not a question of merit or nobility. It is the mechanism of rarity we saw in the Exchange chapter.

Following your passion in a saturated field is a perfectly respectable choice. But it is a choice, and it has a price. You need to know that while making it, not discover it at forty.

The opposite truth, just as true

The more you excel in a field, the more likely it is to pay you.

The top of almost any field pays well, including in trades said not to feed their practitioners. The problem is not the field: it is that there are very few people at the top.

And nobody reaches the top of anything without spending ten years there. And nobody lasts ten years at something they cannot bear doing.

The synthesis

So here is how I put it.

Passion is not the compass. It is the fuel.

The compass is rarity and demand — what people need and few can do. The fuel is what will let you stay there ten years.

You need both. A compass with no fuel does not start. Fuel with no compass goes round in circles.

The unfair advantage of the passionate

And there is a mechanical reason why the passionate one ends up ahead, even at equal talent.

The one for whom it is a job stops at six. That is legitimate, it is healthy, and he is right.

The one who is passionate is still thinking about it on Sunday evening — and it costs him nothing. He is not making an effort: he is doing what he would have done anyway.

Over a week, the gap is invisible. Over ten years, it is impossible to close.

It is not a question of courage or discipline. It is a question of cost. For one, every extra hour costs something. For the other, it costs nothing.

If you have to force yourself to do what your competitor does for pleasure, you will lose. Not because you are worse. Because you pay more for every hour.

5. Trade beats speculation, and that is not an opinion

Here is the most boring habit in the chapter, and the best proven.

Over time, more is earned in trade than in speculation.

Not a little more. A lot more. And not because it is more virtuous — because it is mechanical.

The reason fits on one line

Take the dial again.

Trade is in the Exchange. Both parties come out winners, value is created, and your gain requires nobody's loss. The cake grows.

Short-term speculation is a Wager. Your gain is somebody else's loss. The cake does not grow — it changes hands.

And there is worse. On every round, fees are taken: commission, spread, financing.

Trade is a positive-sum game. Short-term speculation is a negative-sum game — after fees.

Around a table of speculators, the sum of what everyone gains is less than what everyone brought. That is not an opinion on the players' talent. It is a subtraction.

And we have the measurement, made by the regulator itself

It is not me saying it, and it is not a bitter competitor.

The French financial markets authority published a study on French retail clients trading with leverage. 14,799 active clients. Around 16 million transactions. Four years observed \*.

The result:

More than 89% of clients lost money over the period. 161 million euros lost in total — that is nearly €11,000 per person on average.

Nine out of ten. Over four years. On real accounts, not on a simulation.

Look at who publishes that. Not a moralist, not a seller of a competing method: the authority charged with supervising those markets, on French clients, with the real figures from the real platforms.

And remember the previous chapter: those same brokers are today obliged to display that rate on their adverts. The information is not hidden. It is printed at the bottom of the poster, and nobody reads it.

Careful about what that does not say

Be precise, because this statistic is often quoted crookedly — including by people quoting it against markets in general.

It does not say that markets make you lose. It concerns specific products, with leverage, over short periods.

That is exactly what we took apart in the chapter on the field. Those nine losers out of ten are not investors: they are leveraged speculators on a horizon too short for skill to have time to exist.

The same market, buying outright and holding, does not produce those figures.

What to keep from it for your life

This chapter is about habits. Here is one, and it may be the most profitable of all:

Put your energy into what creates, not into what redistributes.

Selling something real. Providing a service people come back for. Owning something that produces, for a long time.

It is slow. It does not make a story at a party. No screenshot will do the rounds.

Nobody ever wrote a book about the baker who worked well for thirty years.

And yet he is the one who wins.

6. And success, in all this

We reach the end, and the first chapter has to be closed.

Success follows work and passion. It never precedes them.

That is the exact opposite of what you are shown. You are shown the result — the house, the car, the freedom — and left to believe it happened, like a draw.

What is not shown is the ten years before. They are not shown because they cannot be filmed: they are ordinary evenings, things started over, mistakes corrected.

And I am not going to lie to you in the last line

Work and passion guarantee nothing.

There are people who work enormously hard, with passion, and who do not get where they wanted. Pretending otherwise would be exactly the pitch this book has been taking apart from the start — and it would be unfair to them.

What I can say is more modest, and more solid:

Work and passion are not enough. But nothing lasting is built without them. They do not guarantee the result. They make the result possible.

And above all, they have a property luck will never have.

They can be repeated. They can be learned. They can be passed on.

Three yeses. It is a method.

Chapter 13 — The tools

This book has told you a great deal about what is false. It is time to give you some levers.

The idea behind the three

Remember the ceiling from the Exchange chapter. You have twenty-four hours, and not one more. Selling more hours stops quickly.

So there is only one way out: making the same hour produce more.

That is what a lever is. Here are the ones that changed things most for me, and they multiply each other.

Tool 1 — Artificial intelligence fills your gaps

Every project dies in the same place.

Not on a lack of ideas. Not on a lack of will. On the skill you do not have.

You have the project, you have the energy, and you are blocked on a single skill you lack. You have to find someone, convince them, pay them, wait for them.

What kills is not the difficulty. It is the delay.

A project that advances a little every day survives. A project that waits three weeks for a reply dies — not because it was bad, but because the momentum has gone.

In my case, the gap was called code. I had the ideas and no way of building them. That single hole blocked entire years.

What it changes, exactly

Be precise, because a lot of nonsense is talked on this subject.

Artificial intelligence does not make you cleverer. It does not give you better ideas, and it will decide nothing for you.

It removes the hole. The knowledge is available immediately, and what you can describe, it can execute.

The real gain is not even the speed. It is that you no longer stop.

Artificial intelligence does not make you cleverer. It stops you stopping.

That is very precisely Polygon's role in my work. I describe what I want, he builds it. It is not that he is a better developer than the people I could have hired — it is that he is available at midnight on a Sunday, and a project that never waits does not die.

And automation, on top

Second effect, less spectacular and more profitable.

Everything you do a hundred times, you can write once.

Every repetitive task you hand to a machine gives you back an hour, permanently. Not once: every week, forever.

The limit, and it is serious

A machine does not sense danger. It applies what it is asked, including when it is nonsense, and it does so very fast.

A machine that produces fast produces mistakes fast. Anyone who cannot tell true from false simply drives into the wall faster.

Judgement remains entirely yours. It has in fact become the only thing that counts.

Tool 2 — A service used by many people

Here is the most misunderstood lever, and I am going to show it to you with an example nobody can dispute.

The same advert, two prices

Take a thirty-second advert. One film, shot once, edited once.

Broadcast during the day, on a regional or local channel: between 100 and 500 euros \*.

Broadcast at half-time in a World Cup final with the French team: 330,000 euros \* for thirty seconds in 2022. And the French television record has been broken since, with 429,000 euros \* for a break during a France-Spain semi-final.

Stop on what that means.

Same film. Same length. Same work. A thousand times the price.

Nothing changed in the product. One variable moved: the number of people watching.

The lesson

It is not your work that is paid for. It is the number of times it serves.

A hairdresser serves one person an hour. It is an excellent trade, and its ceiling is set on the day it opens.

The same hour spent explaining the technique on video serves ten thousand people — and keeps serving while he sleeps.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: it is not your work that is paid for, it is the number of times it serves.

What I am not saying

I am not saying the hairdresser is wrong. The world needs hairdressers, and nobody cuts their own hair from a tutorial.

I am saying something else, and it is the question to ask about your own trade:

What do I do that could serve more than once?

There is always something. A method. A know-how that can be explained. A tool you built for yourself that a hundred others are missing.

You do not leave your trade. You look, inside it, for the part that duplicates.

Tool 3 — Digital costs less and reaches more

Compare the two ways of starting honestly.

A physical shop. Premises, rent, a deposit, building work, stock, staff, opening hours. And a catchment area of a few kilometres.

A digital service. A server at the price of a subscription. Open twenty-four hours a day. Reachable from anywhere.

The entry cost is nothing alike, and neither is the target. It is exactly the collapse in the entry price I described earlier: what separates you from an online product is no longer a cheque, it is what you can do.

But above all: it does not replace your trade

And here is the most important point about this tool, the one most people miss.

Digital is not an alternative to your trade. It is a multiplier of your trade.

If you excel in catering, you have no reason to stop in order to sell online courses. It would even be foolish: your excellence is there, in your kitchen.

On the other hand, adding an online layer is no longer optional. It has become necessary: ordering, booking, delivery, being findable when somebody is looking for something to eat three streets away.

Your excellence stays physical. Your reach becomes digital.

What happens to those who do not

The restaurant absent from the internet does not have fewer customers. It has exactly the customers who walk past its door.

For a hundred years, that was enough. It no longer is, because your customers' pavement is no longer the pavement: it is their phone.

Digital does not replace your trade. It removes the walls around it.

The limit, once again

The entry cost is low. So everybody has come in.

Being online is not enough and has not been for a long time. The hard part is no longer existing, it is being found. You trade a premises problem for a visibility problem — and the second is no easier.

That is not a reason not to go. It is a reason not to believe it will happen by itself.

Tool 4 — Creating exposure

This one, many good people refuse. They are wrong, and it costs them everything.

A product nobody has seen is a fine product hidden on an upper floor, behind a dirty window.

It may be excellent. It may be better than all the others. It changes nothing: nobody will climb the stairs, because nobody knows it exists.

Being online does not mean being visible

You have to grasp the scale of the problem.

There are hundreds of millions of sites and tens of billions of pages. Your page is one of them.

And the web has two parts. The part a search engine has indexed — that is the part you see. And all the rest: pages with no incoming links, closed databases, whatever nobody has referenced. That invisible part is far larger than the other. The dark web, so much talked about, is only a tiny piece of it.

Which gives the only sentence worth keeping:

If nobody references you and nobody pushes you, you are not "hard to find". You are in the invisible part.

It is not a punishment. It is arithmetic. There are too many pages.

Marketing is not a dirty word

I know what this book has said about people selling hot air. So let's draw the line, and it is sharp.

Honest marketing shows what you have. Dishonest marketing promises what you do not have.

The first is Exchange: you make visible a value that already exists, and the buyer walks away happy. The second is a Levy: you sell hope, not the thing.

It is exactly the same border as everywhere else in this book. The gesture is identical — attracting attention. What changes is what is at the end of it.

Refusing to do marketing because some people lie is refusing to have a shop window because others put false prices in theirs.

Affiliation, the cleanest form

Affiliation means paying someone a share of what they actually bring you.

Look how neatly it files. He only earns if he brings you a customer. You only pay if it works. And the customer has found something he needed.

Nobody loses. It is Exchange in its purest state, and it costs nothing as long as it produces nothing.

Platforms

This is Echoes' domain, and it is the role that took me longest to understand.

For a long time I believed that building was enough. That if the product was good, people would end up finding it. That is false, and it cost me years: I had products that worked and that nobody knew about.

YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. It is not about liking them or not.

Their property is simple, and it is enormous: distribution there is free, and the audience is already there. You do not have to build an audience — it is there, and you have to earn its attention.

And remember the chapter on attention. Short formats are not a degradation: they are the formats of an attention span trained for fifteen years to be short. Complaining about the format is complaining about the audience.

Do not hesitate to use them. Really. It is the only place in history where an unknown with no budget can be seen by a hundred thousand people in one evening.

But apply the book's test to them

And here is the limit, the one almost nobody anticipates.

A platform lends you its audience. It does not give it to you.

It can change its ranking tomorrow morning, and your traffic disappears without your having done anything wrong. It can close your account. It can decide your subject no longer interests it.

Take the test from the chapter on promises. What do I actually hold?

An audience on a platform is a promise. An audience whose contact details you hold is a thing.

So use the platforms to be seen — that is their trade and they do it better than anyone. But for every person who arrives, ask yourself the only question that matters: by what means could I find them again if the platform disappeared tomorrow?

An email address. A number. An account with you.

It is the difference between building a house and renting a room. Both give shelter. Only one remains when the owner changes his mind.

The four together

Look at how they plug into each other.

Artificial intelligence removes the gap that stopped you building.

The service you build serves many people instead of one.

Digital gives it a reach your premises will never have.

Exposure makes it known that it exists.

And all four attack exactly the same thing: the twenty-four hour ceiling.

None of the four creates value in your place. There always has to be something real to bring — a know-how, a service, a service people want.

These tools do not replace what you have to give. They only decide how many people will receive it.

And if you were to keep only one, keep the last. The first three make something good.

The fourth makes it known.

Chapter 14 — Why this ground

When I say I build games with NFTs and a crypto trading tool, I often get the same reaction. A polite silence, then:

"but that's where all the scams are".

Yes. That is exactly why.

The ground where the two squares touch

Take the dial again.

There are few places in the world where the Levy and the Wager touch as closely as they do in crypto. The same tools. The same vocabulary. The same screens.

On one side, people building. On the other, people taking. The beginner cannot see the difference. And it is on that confusion that the second group lives.

You can flee this ground. That is what most honest people do. The result: it is left to those who deserve it least.

Or you can plant something clean in it, and let the comparison do the work.

I chose the second option. A book denouncing predatory levying from a comfortable chair is not worth much. The same idea, demonstrated on the levy's own ground, can be checked.

What the technology really changed: the entry price

This is the point almost nobody makes. It is also the most important in the chapter.

Fifteen years ago, launching a game studio required money. Servers to rent. Artists to pay. A publisher to distribute. Months of work before the first image.

In other words: you already had to have money. Or convince someone who did to give you theirs.

Look where that falls on the dial. The entry ticket was in the Gift square. You did not get in because you deserved it. You got in because you had been chosen.

Today, a transaction on the chain I use costs a fraction of a cent. Creating thousands of game items costs a few dollars, not tens of thousands. A server rents by the month, at the price of a subscription. And generation tools — images, 3D models, voices, music — produce in a night what used to occupy a team for weeks.

The cost of technology has not fallen. It has collapsed.

And when the entry price collapses, something deeper happens: the ticket changes square. It leaves the Gift and joins the Wager.

What separates you from an online product is no longer a cheque. It is what you can do, and the time you are willing to put in.

It is the first time in a long while that the barrier is skill and not money. Fifteen years ago, this book would not have had the same meaning. It would have described an honest and unreachable path.

What the NFT really solves

Forget the price. Forget the pictures of apes. Look at the mechanism.

For thirty years, a player never owned anything.

He pays for a sword. He earns it after two hundred hours. And it lives in somebody else's database. The server closes, the sword disappears. The account is suspended, everything disappears.

The player never bought an object. He rented a display right — and it can be taken away from him without warning.

The NFT, once you strip away all the noise, does only one thing. It makes that object transferable, and held by the player. He can keep it, lend it, resell it to another player. Nobody can take it back from him.

In other words: it brings the Exchange into the game.

What was only a pastime becomes a place where the value created by time and skill stays with whoever created it. The player who earned a rare piece genuinely owns something.

And that is where the choice of board games makes sense, rather than a game of chance.

A chessboard, a board, cards: victory comes from the decision, not from the draw. A casino disguised as a video game belongs to the Levy, whatever it says. A game where the better player wins belongs to the Wager.

That border is not negotiable in what I build.

Why games: because AI is coming, and it eats the rest

There is a second reason for choosing games. It has not left me since I started working every day with artificial intelligences.

I am badly placed to claim that AI will not change much.

I build alone, with agents, what would have required a team three years ago. I have seen tasks billed by the day done properly in a few minutes. I do not say it to impress. I say it because it is what I see.

The proof is this book — and everything around it

I can be precise. I paid for the demonstration in time.

Here is what runs today. With no partner, no employee, no fundraising:

• Four games online. A chess-and-cards game with fifteen modes and hundreds of automatic tests. A real-time racing game. A digital amusement park. An economic board game.
• Nearly two thousand 3D models, produced and corrected by an automatic pipeline.
• An audio platform of ninety original tracks, with its listening statistics.
• A video channel that is entirely automatic: writing, voices, rendering, editing, subtitles, in several languages.
• A financial product in production, with paying customers. A real-time market analysis engine and its mobile application.
• The infrastructure underneath. Around thirty services in production, monitored, restarting themselves in case of an incident.

Count the teams that would have been needed five years ago. A game studio: developers, game designers, testers. A 3D department. An audio department. A video production unit. A small fintech team. One or two systems engineers. And an author, for the book you are holding.

This book is no exception. I dictate it, an agent writes it up, I reread, I correct, I decide. It is part of the file.

I am not saying I am worth ten teams. That would be ridiculous and false.

What has changed is the nature of the work. I hardly produce anything any more. I decide, I check, and I refuse.

Execution costs almost nothing now. Judgement has not moved an inch. It has even become the only bottleneck. A machine that produces fast produces mistakes fast. Nothing replaces someone able to see what is false.

That is why the first chapter matters more than this one. In a world where everything executes in a second, the only advantage left is knowing how to measure.

What AI will do to the dial

A large part of today's trades is going to be absorbed.

Not replaced all at once. Not with a great crash. Absorbed, task by task, until the trade is no longer one. What was rare becomes common: writing, drawing, translating, coding, analysing.

Look at the effect on the dial.

Selling your time and your skill for a wage is the Exchange square. The clean square, where almost everyone lives. And it is precisely the one automation compresses. When your skill becomes common, its price falls. That is not an injustice. It is a mechanism.

So I turned the question around: what does not automate?

Not tasks. Tasks will all fall, sooner or later. What resists is what is only interesting because a human does it.

Games are exactly of that nature.

A machine beat the best chess player in the world nearly thirty years ago. Chess did not disappear. It has never been played more, nor watched more.

Because nobody wants to watch two machines play each other. What we watch is a human deciding under pressure, doubting, and sometimes getting it wrong.

The Wager may be the only square automation raises in value instead of devaluing. The more common work becomes, the rarer what is genuinely human becomes. And in this book, we know what rare is worth.

The audience is already there — it grew up in it

One element turns a conviction into a realistic project: I do not have to create the audience. It already exists, and it is vast.

The generations arriving now were raised on games. It was not a distraction granted on a Wednesday afternoon. It is their mother tongue.

They learned to read an interface before reading a book. To cooperate as a team in a voice channel before doing it in an office. To lose and start again.

Where the previous generation saw a waste of time, this one sees a place. With its codes, its hierarchies and its reputations.

Meanwhile, esports did all the work of legitimisation. Without asking anyone.

Full stadiums to watch people play. Salaried professional players, with coaches and mental performance trainers. Sponsors that are no longer energy drink brands but equipment makers and banks. Prize money exceeding that of century-old sports.

What that proves is exactly what this book needs. Earning a living through competition is no longer a strange idea. It is a recognised profession.

The question is no longer "is it serious". It has become: is it reserved for a few hundred elite players, or can the bottom of the pyramid be opened?

That is where I place myself. Esports demonstrated the summit. Almost nobody is dealing with the rest: the regular, decent player who will never turn professional. For him, there is nothing between "playing for nothing" and "being in the world's top hundred".

The genre nobody remembered to reinvent

And to open that bottom of the pyramid, an entire genre is waiting. Nobody is using it.

Video games have reinvented themselves ten times in forty years. From 2D to 3D. From solo to a shared world. From CD-ROM to download. From the living room to the phone. At each step, somebody asked: what does this medium allow that the old one forbade?

Board games, though, never had their digital renewal.

Look at what has been done with them. Copies.

A chess app is a chessboard on a screen. A digital Monopoly is the same board with an animation of dice. The cardboard was photographed. It was never rethought.

Digital brought them distribution — playing remotely, at any hour. But not a new form.

Nobody really asked the question. What becomes of a board game when the board can change mid-game? When a card can have an effect no piece of cardboard could hold? When the pieces genuinely belong to the player? When the ranking is worldwide, and a victory still counts six months later?

That oversight is all the stranger because this genre is exactly the one this book needs.

A board game is played turn by turn. No reflex barrier. A fifty-year-old player faces a fifteen-year-old on equal terms.

That is not true of almost any of today's esports, where hand speed eliminates half the population before the first game.

It is played in short sessions, on any device, without installing thirty gigabytes. It is understood in two minutes and mastered in ten years. And it is legible: you can see why you lost, so you can improve.

The most accessible competitive format that exists is also the only one never to have been modernised.

That is precisely where I have set up.

Building for an attention span we broke

There is one last point, and it changes a lot of decisions when designing a game.

Our society has manufactured an enormous number of people with short attention spans. Genuine disorders for some, an installed habit for many others. In both cases the result is the same: the brain demands stimuli, often, and it disengages fast.

It is not laziness. It is training. For fifteen years, very competent people were paid to cut human attention into eight-second pieces. They succeeded.

The result: a large part of the audience will never last forty-five minutes on one game. Not because it does not want to. Because it no longer can.

So there are two things you can do.

Complain about the audience. That is comfortable, and it achieves nothing.

Or build for it. Short games. A board you understand at a glance. A result that comes quickly. Enough to play three minutes while waiting for the bus, and pick it up in the evening having lost nothing.

But careful, there is a trap, and it is enormous.

The absolute champion of the short stimulus is the slot machine. Three seconds a spin. An immediate result. Sound, light, a small reward now and then. It was designed, to the millimetre, on that exact weakness.

The fast stimulus is not the evil. The casino and the skill game use the same door into your brain.

Everything turns on what is done with it.

The casino uses the stimulus to keep you and take your money. It does not want you to improve — there is nothing to improve at, that is the principle.

A skill game uses the stimulus to bring you back and make you improve. The short reward is not the goal: it is the fuel that brings you back often enough to become good.

And there is a simple test, that you can apply to any game:

After a hundred games, am I better?

If yes, the stimulus worked for you.

If your only answer is "I won or lost money, but I do not play any better than before", then the stimulus worked for the house.

That is the rule I impose on myself when designing: short sessions, immediate legibility, a fast reward — and never, ever a reward that comes from chance.

The other half of the problem: occupation

Automation is discussed in terms of lost money. That is half the subject. And perhaps not the harder half.

A job does not only pay a wage.

It gives a reason to get up. A structure to the week. A place in a group. People to talk to. And an answer to the question you get asked at every dinner: what do you do?

Ask anyone who has been unemployed for a long time what they missed most. Many will answer the rhythm and the place, before the money.

In the world that is coming, occupation is going to become a basic necessity. Not a pastime. Not an extra. A need, on a par with an income.

Millions of people will have time and nothing to hold it. The size of that problem is still badly measured.

Competitive gaming answers that on its own, and it did not need to be invented for the purpose. Progression. A ranking. Regular opponents. A community. A reason to come back tomorrow.

It is a complete social structure, already there, that millions of people already use to hold their week together.

And if, on top of the occupation, that activity can supplement an income, then it becomes something other than a pastime.

I weigh my words: supplement, not replace. I am telling nobody they will live off this. And I am wary of everyone who promises it — that pitch belongs to the Levy, and it has its own chapter.

But a supplement, for many households, is not nothing. It is sometimes the margin between coping and not coping.

Occupying people and letting them earn something from it through merit. That, in one sentence, is what I am trying to build. The idea is not new. It is becoming urgent.

Why markets: the biggest pool in the world

There is a more down-to-earth reason for having chosen financial markets. It comes down to a word we will return to at length: liquidity.

Financial markets are the most liquid place on the planet. By a very long way.

Sums are exchanged there every day that have no equivalent anywhere. More in one day than the annual output of entire countries. That is not a figure to impress. It is a concrete property, and it changes what you can do.

Compare it with any other activity.

You start a shop? Your value is locked inside it. To get out, you have to find one buyer, negotiate for months, and accept his price. You buy a flat? Same, only worse. Your money is shut inside an object whose exit depends on a meeting.

On a liquid market, there is somebody opposite you at all times.

You come in with a hundred euros or a hundred thousand. At three in the morning. On a Sunday. Your counterparty is already there. Nobody to convince. Nobody whose agreement decides your exit.

For someone starting with no money, that is decisive. It is the only ground where the size of your stake does not bar you from entry. You can be wrong, get out, and start again the next day, without having lost everything in a structure impossible to unwind.

It is also what makes it dangerous, and that has to be said straight away. A ground you can enter and leave in one second is a ground where you can ruin yourself in one second.

Liquidity does not protect you. It just removes the excuses.

Why crypto: nobody in the middle

One question remains. Why crypto, and not the traditional markets?

For a reason it took me a long time to put into words, and that has become central to everything I build: nobody in the middle.

When your money is at the bank, it is not entirely yours. It is yours subject to authorisation.

A transfer can be blocked. An account can be frozen pending a check. A payment can be refused without your being told why, on a Friday evening. And there is nobody to call before Monday.

This is not theory. Ask anyone who has tried to send a slightly unusual sum abroad.

Somebody stands between you and what you own. And they have a veto.

Crypto, when properly held — your keys, your wallet, not a platform's — removes that somebody.

There is no longer any authorisation to ask for. What you own, you genuinely own. Nobody can freeze it, refuse it, or decide on your behalf that this is not the right moment.

And look how neatly that files on the dial. An intermediary who can refuse is an intermediary who can also take. Through fees. Through blocking. Through bankruptcy.

As long as they are there, part of your wealth is lodged in the Gift square. You do not hold it. It is granted to you.

That conviction did not stay theoretical. It is why the tool I built never holds anybody's money. The key stays with the customer, on their device. It never goes up to my servers. I can see what the market is doing. I cannot touch their money.

It would have been simpler to do it another way. But you do not write a book explaining that nobody should control your money, and then build a product that controls people's money.

And that is where the dial closes

You saw in the Wager chapter why this direction is almost empty: because it pays less quickly than the casino, and because the door is heavy.

This chapter adds the one thing that explanation was missing — the moment.

The entry price has collapsed. Automation is compressing the square everyone lives in. The audience is already there, it grew up in games, and esports made the demonstration. The genre most suited to victory by skill has never been modernised.

In other words: the square is empty, and for the first time in a long while, it is also reachable.

That is the only reason I set about it now and not ten years ago.

The real reasoning, in one sentence

I did not bet on crypto.

I chose the only ground where the entry ticket has become skill and not money. Where what you create stays yours. Where nobody stands between you and what you own. Where everything is measurable down to the last line.

And I set up there the one square of the dial nobody is using.

It is not a bet on a market. It is a bet on people. On the fact that, given an equal choice, they would rather win something they earned.

Chapter 15 — How a price is really made

Almost everyone thinks they know what a price is. A price, supposedly, is "what the thing is worth".

That is false. And that mistake is the doorway to all the others.

A price is not a value. It is the point where two people stopped arguing, one second ago.

It does not say what the thing is worth. It says where two people stopped arguing, one second ago.

This chapter explains who those two people are. Because they do not all play in the same playground. And the displayed price is the result of four playgrounds pulling at each other constantly.

First, an image: the concert

Before the complicated words, take this scene. It contains the whole chapter, and you can come back to it whenever you get lost.

A band is playing in a five-hundred-seat venue.

You buy a ticket. It is yours. You can go, resell it, give it to your sister. You own something real. That is the cash market — the "spot".

You and your friend bet fifty euros on whether the concert will sell out. Neither of you has a ticket. Neither of you will go. And yet one of the two will make money on that concert. That is the futures contract.

And now, the detail that changes everything: nothing stops a thousand people making that bet on a five-hundred-seat venue. There can be far more bets than seats. Far more.

A friend lends you enough to bet ten times bigger, on condition that he cuts it all if things go wrong. You do not even decide when he cuts. That is leverage.

And a fan club buys a hundred tickets in one go to resell shares of them to its members, who do not want to queue. That is the ETF.

Look at the result: the displayed ticket price does not come only from those who want to go to the concert. It comes from all of these people at once — those who genuinely buy, those who bet, those who get cut out, and the club buying in bulk.

📌 Read this passage slowly if you need to. All the rest of the chapter is just this scene, with the real words.

The four playgrounds

Spot: real ownership.

You buy the good, you own it. You can withdraw it, keep it ten years, give it away. It is the only market where something genuinely changes hands.

It is also, almost always, the smallest of the four.

Futures and perpetuals: betting on the price.

Here, you buy nothing. You take a contract saying: "I win if it goes up". Nobody owns. Nobody delivers. It is a bet between two parties, with the platform in the middle.

And it is by far the biggest market. Often several times the size of spot.

Stop on that for a second. Most of what moves an asset's price is people who do not own it and never will.

And the perpetual, then? It is a futures contract with the end date removed.

A normal futures contract is an appointment: on such a date, we settle and it is over. A perpetual has no appointment. It never ends.

The problem is obvious: with no settlement date, nothing forces it to resemble the real price any more. It could drift indefinitely.

So a mechanism was invented, and the best image is rent.

Every few hours, the more crowded camp pays rent to the less crowded one. If everyone is betting on a rise, it is the bulls who pay to keep their position. The more people on the same side, the dearer the rent.

It is a revolving door with a toll: you can stay on the side where everyone is crowding, but it costs you more and more with every passing hour. At some point it discourages — and the contract comes back towards the real price.

A perpetual is a bet with no end date, with a rent that dissuades you from staying on the crowded side.

Leverage: the amplifier, and the forced-order factory.

Leverage lets you hold ten times your stake. It is always discussed as a gain multiplier. That is not where the essential lies.

The essential is that a leveraged position has a liquidation price. A level at which the platform closes it automatically, without asking your opinion.

And that level can be calculated in advance.

Read that slowly.

Leverage does not create gains. It creates, at prices known in advance, sellers who have no choice but to sell.

These are not opinions. They are automatic orders waiting to be triggered.

That is the fuel for everything that follows.

ETFs: the institutions' door.

An ETF lets you buy exposure from a normal brokerage account. With no crypto wallet, no key, no risk of losing everything.

And we must be precise here, because there are two kinds.

The physical ETF genuinely holds the assets. It buys the shares, or the bars, and keeps them. Every unit you buy ends, at the end of the chain, in a real purchase on the spot market. That one is not a derivative: it is a basket of real things.

The synthetic ETF does not hold the asset. It signs a swap contract with a bank, which undertakes to pay it the index's performance. There, you no longer have a basket: you have a promise, and the risk of whoever makes it. European regulation caps that risk at 10% of the fund's assets \*, but it exists.

It is often the only solution for commodities: a fund cannot store wheat or oil in a cellar.

Keep the distinction, it holds for this whole book: the physical buys, the synthetic promises.

Physical ETF flows are slow, enormous, and published. They do not stir the minute. They move the ground.

And the price, in all this?

It is the balance point between those four playgrounds. People whose entire trade it is keep it there: as soon as a gap appears between the bet and the real thing, they close it.

So the displayed price is not "the spot price". It is the average of a brawl between people who own, people who bet, people being liquidated, and institutions buying slowly.

The real size of the world of promises

You have surely heard a sentence of this kind: "derivatives are a hundred times the real market".

I wanted to check. Here is what the official sources say, and the truth is more interesting than the legend.

The figures

The Bank for International Settlements publishes these data twice a year. As of mid-2025:

What that really says

The notional value of derivatives represents about seven times everything humanity produces in a year. And roughly six times the value of every listed company on the planet.

Seven times, not a hundred times. The figure in circulation is exaggerated.

But seven times the output of the entire planet needs no dramatising. It remains a world of promises heavier than the real world.

An image before the figures: the insurer

An insurer announces that it covers 500 billion euros of houses. The figure is true, and it is spectacular.

Does it hold 500 billion? No. Does it risk 500 billion? No either. Not all the houses are going to burn on the same day.

What is genuinely at stake is what it will have to pay out in claims. A far smaller sum.

The notional is the value of the houses covered. The gross market value is the damage.

Keep that image, and the next paragraph becomes obvious.

The trap in the word "notional"

And now, the point almost nobody picks up, even though it is published in the same document.

Those 846 trillion are not money. It is the reference amount of the contracts — the size on which calculations are made, not the sum at stake.

What is genuinely at stake, the Bank for International Settlements calls the gross market value. It is 21.8 trillion.

In other words: the spectacular figure is thirty-nine times bigger than the real one.

It is exactly the mechanism from the Levy chapter, applied to a statistic. You are shown the impressive number, never the one that counts. And nobody even needs to lie: both are published side by side, on the same site, in the same table.

You only have to quote one of them.

What to keep from it

Three things.

One. There really is a world of promises bigger than the real world. That is not a fantasy.

Two. When somebody produces an enormous figure, always ask what it is a measure of. Notional or real, gross or net, average or distribution — that is where everything turns, and it is always where you are being waited for.

📌 If you keep only one idea from this page: when somebody quotes the 846 trillion as if it were money at stake, they are showing you the value of the houses while letting you believe it is the damage.

Three. The "hundred times" did not come from nowhere. It exists for specific cases. On certain metals markets, the number of paper claims on one physical ounce has at times reached ratios of several hundred to one. But that is a special case, highly variable, and often disputed. It cannot be turned into a general rule.

An accurate figure is worth more than a striking one. Especially in a book that reproaches others for showing you the wrong figures.

Liquidity: the real subject, and the most misunderstood

People think the price rises "because people are buying". That is half false.

The price does not rise because people are buying. It rises because there is nobody on the other side.

Liquidity is simply the presence of somebody opposite you.

A liquid market is one where you can get in and out without moving the price, because there are people on both sides. An illiquid market is one where an average order moves the screen by itself.

And that creates a difference the small player does not suspect.

You can buy whenever you want. Your size is invisible.

A big player has a plumbing problem. If he wants to get in for a large sum, he has to find somebody opposite. Otherwise he blows up his own entry price, by himself, helping himself.

So he is not looking for "the right moment". He is looking for the place where the orders are piled up.

Where are they piled up? At the most obvious spots on the chart.

Just below the recent low. Just above the high. On round numbers.

Why? Because that is where everyone put their stop. And a stop is an order waiting to fire on its own.

Now add the leverage from earlier. At the same spots sit the liquidation prices.

Those two layers stack. They form reservoirs: zones where, if the price touches them, a mass of orders fires automatically.

A wick that dips below an obvious floor, triggers every stop, and comes straight back up: that is not malice. It is a big player who went and helped himself where there was something to eat. It was the only place he could.

SMC: what is true, and what is sold

Everything I have just described has a commercial name. Smart Money Concepts.

With its vocabulary — order blocks, imbalances, break of structure, liquidity sweep. And a large training industry behind it.

Two things need separating. That separation is the whole subject of this book.

What is true. Order reservoirs exist. Sweeps exist. Big players do go looking for liquidity where it is.

That is neither a conspiracy nor a theory. It is a practical constraint. An elephant drinks where the water is. Not out of cunning. Because it cannot drink anywhere else.

What is sold. The packaging.

You are taught this as reading the intentions of a single, all-powerful and malicious actor — "the smart money" — who is supposedly targeting you, personally.

There is no secret room. There are thousands of actors, with size constraints, ending up in the same place for the same mechanical reason.

And above all, the key point. The mechanism explains why the price moved. It does not say when it will happen again.

The whole sales pitch starts exactly there. At the moment a correct observation is turned into a promise of prediction.

I say this without contempt, because I went through it.

I measured these ideas one by one, on my own data. Some held up: the imbalance between buyers and sellers in the order book does say something real.

Many others did not survive. I tested very popular signals that performed worse than a coin toss. I threw them out.

Not out of principled distrust. By measurement.

It is Kyube that does that work, and it has a quality I do not have: it does not care about being right. When an idea fails the test, it says so and moves to the next one, at no cost to itself.

I always want my morning idea to be the good one. That is precisely why I must not be the one keeping score.

That is the only difference between a mechanism and a guru. The mechanism agrees to be tested. The training course sells all the better for never being tested at all.

What you should keep

You do not need to know how to trade to make use of this chapter. You need three ideas.

One. A price is not a value, it is a meeting point. So never ask "what is it worth". Ask "who is buying, and why now".

Two. Most of the movement comes from people who own nothing. And the most violent moves come from forced orders, not from convictions.

Three. Wherever there is a genuine mechanical explanation, there is somebody ready to sell it to you by turning it into a prophecy.

The mechanism is free. The prophecy costs €497.

Conclusion — What you are left with

This book began on one sentence: "he got lucky".

If you have got this far, you will never hear it the same way again.

The map, on one page

Four ways of obtaining wealth. Four, not five.

The Exchange — giving to receive. The only square that creates. The one almost all humanity lives in, the most honest, the biggest — and the one whose ceiling is coming down.

The Gift — receiving without giving. Real, precious, and not a method: you decide nothing. A gift is not income, it is starting capital. It is converted, not consumed.

The Levy — taking from what already exists. A whole scale, from the tax that redistributes to the scam that gives nothing back. A levy is judged by what it gives back, not by what it takes.

The Wager — pitting two values against each other and giving everything to the better one. The only square where merit is the judge. The noblest, and the emptiest — because it pays less quickly, and because the door is heavy.

And the thing almost nobody sees: these are not four parallel roads.

One square alone creates. Two take. One arbitrates.

The three questions to take with you

Forget the rest if you like. Keep these three, and you will have the essence of the book.

1. What stands behind it?

Faced with an investment, a product, a currency, a promise of return: what do I actually hold?

A good, or a promise. And if it is a promise — which it almost always will be — then how many are there between me and the real good, and can I go and check?

2. Who decides the outcome?

Me, somebody else, or randomness?

If it is me, I am in the Wager, and I can improve. If it is somebody else, I depend on them. If it is randomness, whatever the name over the door, I am in a Levy.

And the follow-up that sorts everything: is the house my opponent, or only the referee?

3. Does it repeat?

The question from the very first chapter, and the only one that separates a method from an event.

Can I do it again? Learn it? Explain it to someone?

Three yeses: it is a method. A single no: it is a stroke of luck, and nothing is built on that.

What I have tried to pass on to you

There is no recipe. Those who sell one live off the selling, never off the applying.

A reflex. The reflex of asking for the figures, of looking at the distribution behind the average, of asking who pays when somebody wins, and of preferring an accurate figure to a striking one.

It is a professional reflex. I learned it in rooms where a service that goes down at three in the morning always has a cause, and where "bad luck" never repaired anything.

It works just as well on money.

What I did not promise you

I did not tell you that you would get rich. I did not tell you that work was enough, nor that those who fail do not work hard enough — that would be false, and unfair to a great many people.

I sold you no method, no signal, no training course.

Everything I assert in this book can be checked, and I have said where to check it. Including the places where I was wrong, including what my own rules cost me.

That is the only test I ask you to apply to me. And it is the one I taught you to apply to others.

What is left for you to do

Three things, and none of them requires permission.

Take your share first. A share of what you earn, a share of what you live. Before the rest, never with the rest.

Look, in what you can do, for the part that serves more than once. There is always one.

And put yourself, even a little, in the square where merit decides. Not by dropping everything overnight — the other squares are additions, never replacements. But a little. Regularly. For a long time.

One last thing

This book opened on an idea that was not a figure of speech: life is a game.

It has goals. It has rules. And those who do not follow the rules face consequences — sometimes deferred, never cancelled.

You now know some of the rules. Not all of them; nobody knows them all.

That does not mean you are going to win.

No book can promise you that — and anyone who does has just filed themselves in the Levy square.

It means something more modest, and far more useful:

you have stopped playing a game whose rules you did not know.

The rest depends on you. That is good news: it is the only square where that has always been the case.

"Wealth through skill, not through luck."

And now

The last page. Five things, in order, from the easiest to the longest.

A book that ends on a fine sentence is no use. Here are five concrete acts.

None of them needs money. None of them needs permission.

Tonight — check one figure. Just one.

Any of the ones you have read here.

The payout rate of the game you play. The charges on your account. What your employer actually pays for you.

The aim is not to change anything. The aim is for you to experience, once, that the information was there, free, three clicks away — and that you had never opened it.

After that, you will never read anything the same way again.

This week — set up the deduction

Ten per cent. If that is impossible, two.

Automatic, on payday, before you have had time to think about it.

It is not a rainy-day fund. It is your entry ticket to the other directions of the dial — and the first thing it will buy you is the right to stop paying the poverty surcharge.

This month — find your surcharge

Get out three statements and look for what you are paying because you pay as you go.

A forgotten subscription. Overdraft interest. Payment in instalments. A small pack bought every week. An insurance policy whose contract you have not reread in six years.

Add it up. The figure will annoy you.

It is also the most certain return you will ever find: what you stop paying is gained for sure, with no risk and no waiting.

This quarter — reserve the time

An hour a day, or three hours on a Sunday. In the diary, in advance.

Not "when I have the time". There is never any time left, exactly as there is never any money left.

Remember the only thing that sets your salary: how rare what you can do is. And that a rare skill does not stay rare.

This year — find the part that serves more than once

In what you already know how to do, look for what could serve more than one person.

A method. A know-how that can be explained. A tool you built for yourself that a hundred others are missing.

There is always something. You do not leave your trade — you look, inside it, for the part that duplicates.

And do it once. Badly, late, imperfect. Once.

And if you want to build something

The five acts above apply to everyone. What follows is for whoever wants to head in the direction of the Wager — to build a thing of their own.

It takes longer, and it starts with a question nobody ever asks at the beginning.

First: what are your limits?

Before looking for how to make money, decide how you refuse to make it.

That seems premature. It is the opposite: it is the only decision that cannot be taken later, because later there will be money on the table and you will not reason the same way.

So ask yourself the question now, cold.

Would it be ethical, for you, to earn your living selling weapons?

That is not a statement. I am not telling you what to answer, and this book has no opinion on it. It is a question, and the answer is yours.

Some will say yes: it is legal, it is an industry, somebody will do it anyway. Others will say no, absolutely not. Both have arguments, and I will not write here which is right.

What matters is that you have an answer, before you are asked with a cheque beside it.

Make the list, really

Not in your head. Write it down.

What will I not do, even if it is legal? Even if it is profitable? Even if everyone around me does it?

And the dial gives you a first sorting ready-made. You now know how to recognise what takes without giving back, what requires somebody to lose, what is sold without surviving being explained.

A limit decided in advance is a decision. A limit decided in the moment is a justification.

A tool for seeing clearly: the mind map

Before deciding anything, you have to get what is in your head out of it. As long as it stays in there, it goes round in circles and always looks clearer than it is.

Take a sheet of paper. Write your idea in the middle, in a circle.

Around it, everything attached to it: what you would need to know how to do, who it serves, what it costs, what could go wrong, who to talk to. One branch per subject, and smaller branches coming off the branches.

There is nothing magic about it. It is just a tidy sheet of paper. But it produces two things.

You see the holes. A branch that stays empty is a place where you have no answer. That is where the work is.

You see the real size. Many projects that looked enormous fit on half a sheet. Many projects that looked simple spill off the page.

And if you cannot manage it alone, do it with a machine: describe your idea, ask it to cut it into branches, and look at the ones where you have nothing to answer.

And look at which of the five you are

Remember the five from the start of the book. Each makes one move, and it takes five for a thing to exist.

The one who checks. He asks for the source, he doubts, he slows everyone down. Without him, you build on what is false.

The one who measures. He counts, he tests, he throws out what does not pass. He does not care about being right.

The one who builds. He turns a sentence into a product that exists. Without him, there are only conversations.

The one who protects. He looks at what breaks, what costs, what was not anticipated. He is the most unpleasant and the most useful.

The one who makes it known. Without him, everything else stays behind a dirty window.

Now, two questions, and be honest.

Which one are you naturally? And which one do you lack most?

The first, play it to the hilt — it is your strength, and we have seen that is where you will have almost no competitors.

The second, do not try to become it. Go and get it elsewhere: somebody, or a machine.

That is the short version of this whole chapter. You do not succeed by becoming complete. You succeed by being very strong somewhere, and knowing exactly what you are not.

Next: look at your strengths, not your gaps

This is the most badly applied advice in the world.

Almost everyone spends their life repairing their weaknesses. You were taught it at school: you get 12 in maths and 6 in English, so they make you work on English.

It is a method for manufacturing people who are average at everything.

But nobody ever wins by being average at everything. You win by being very strong somewhere.

If you have one big quality, play it to the hilt. At that level, you will have almost no competitors.

There are thousands of decent people in your field. There are very few excellent ones. And the pay gap between the two is not proportional to the gap in level — it is far bigger. Remember: it is rarity that pays.

And for all the rest: use AI

Your gaps do not disappear for all that. You simply stop repairing them yourself.

That is the whole of chapter 13: artificial intelligence does not make you cleverer, it fills the hole that was blocking you. It knows what you do not, it executes what you can describe, and it is available at midnight on a Sunday.

Use it for three things in particular.

To sharpen your ideas. A vague idea stays vague until it has been explained to somebody. Explain it to a machine, let it ask you questions, and look at the point where you have no answer. That is where the real work is.

To fill what you do not have. Code, design, legal, translation, the figures.

To contradict you. Ask it explicitly to demolish your project. It will do so without sparing you, and for free — which no friend ever will.

One project at a time

This one I write in the voice of someone who got it wrong.

Do not scatter yourself.

Three projects at thirty per cent do not make one project at ninety. They make three unfinished things, and the tiredness of three things.

The world is full of brilliant people with eleven ideas and zero products. It is far less full of people who have finished one.

Finish one. Even a small one. Even an imperfect one. A finished project teaches you more than ten started ones, and it is the only one you can show.

Then get it tested — and above all not by your own people

Here you have to be very strict, because it is the mistake everybody makes.

Do not show your project to your friends. Nor to your family. Nor to your brothers.

Not because they wish you harm. Often the opposite: they love you, so they spare you. They will tell you it is good. You will walk away happy, and you will have learned nothing.

And there is the other half, less pleasant to say: some of your close ones do not really want you to succeed. Not out of malice — because your success shifts your place in the group, and nobody likes seeing their place move. Their opinion will be sincere and distorted at the same time.

Show it to complete strangers. People who owe you nothing, who do not love you, who do not envy you. They will tell you the truth, because they have no reason to do otherwise.

And the hardest rule: you do not justify yourself

When a stranger tells you what is wrong, you will feel a violent need to explain.

"Yes but actually it's because…" "Wait, you didn't see the part where…"

Do not do it.

You listen. You take notes. You say thank you. You defend nothing.

Because he will not be wrong: if you need to explain, it means it was not clear — and the next user will have nobody to explain it to him.

Every justification you give is a defect you are refusing to see.

Listen. Correct. Have it tested again.

And finally: pride is your enemy

It is the only thing on this page that cannot be measured, and it is probably the most important.

Pride will make you defend a bad idea because it is yours. It will make you ignore the one person who was right. It will make you confuse "I was criticised" with "I was attacked".

And above all, it will make you lose time — the one thing in this book you cannot buy back.

Do not be haughty. Neither with those who know less than you, nor with those who criticise you.

Remember chapter 1: in a world of the ignorant, the fabulist is king. The only way not to become that man is to accept being wrong in public, often, and at no cost to you.

That is exactly what this book has tried to do with you. You will find my own mistakes in it, corrected, left visible.

It is not modesty. It is the only method that works.

Two things I have built

If you are good at a game.

You have built up hundreds of hours and a real skill. Today, it disappears the day the server closes.

There is no technical reason for that. It is what I am trying to change.

If markets interest you.

The rules I impose on myself are written in chapter 10, along with what each one costs me. They are there, and they can be checked.

You now know what to look at.

And before every decision, the three questions

They fit on a till receipt, and they sum up this whole book.

1. What stands behind it? A good, or a promise. And if it is a promise: how many are there between me and the real thing, and can I go and check?

>

2. Who decides the outcome? Me, somebody else, or randomness. And is the house my opponent, or only the referee?

>

3. Does it repeat? Can I do it again, learn it, explain it to someone? Three yeses: it is a method. A single no: it is an event.

There you are. The rest depends on you — and it is the only direction of the dial where that has always been the case.

A note on this book

How it was made, and why it teaches you nothing secret.

What you are about to read is not secret. It is just ignored

Let's start with the only thing that really matters.

Nothing in this book is hidden. It is all public, published, consultable. The figures come from central banks, from regulators, from universities. You can check all of it from your phone, tonight, for free.

And almost nobody knows it.

The rate actually paid back by gambling. Who makes the money in your account. Where the money comes from when you win a bet. What stands behind what you hold. These are not insider secrets. They are official documents nobody opens.

That is the paradox of our era. We are living the moment in history when information is most accessible — and the general level of knowledge about money has not risen an inch.

Why nobody looks it up

The real question remains. Why this void, at a time when everything is available?

It is not lack of time. Time is always found for what people love.

It is that entertainment has taken everything. Music, games, series, sport, short videos. These are entire industries, with thousands of very competent, very well paid people whose job is to capture your attention and never let it go.

And on the other side? Understanding how money works. No budget. No eye-catching thumbnail. No algorithm to push it.

The fight is not fair, and it was never meant to be.

Informing yourself has become tedious. Not because it is boring in itself — the rest of this book tries precisely to prove the opposite. But because everything else has been made irresistible.

So it is not people's fault. It is the result of a rigged competition, and there is no reason to hold it against those who lose it.

Because the problem is no longer access

It has changed nature, and nobody announced it.

Before, knowing was expensive: you needed books, a library, somebody to explain. Today it is all within reach, for free.

The problem now is attention. And it has been drained away.

Culture is retreating in favour of gossip. Not because people have become stupid — that is false, and contemptuous. But because gossip was built to win the attention competition, and knowledge was not.

A rumour spreads by itself. An economic mechanism has no marketing budget.

No eye-catching thumbnail, no algorithm pushing it. It waits, quietly, in a document nobody clicks.

And the further we go, the less time we have

That is the other paradox, and it ought to alarm us more.

Every tool meant to save us time leaves us with less. We have machines doing in seconds what used to take days, and nobody feels they have any free time.

So we tell ourselves something very reasonable: learning is no longer really necessary. The information is there. There are search engines, there are machines that answer everything. I will look it up the day I need it.

At least, that is what we believe.

Here is why that is false

There is a flaw in that reasoning, one only, and it is decisive.

You can look up an answer. You cannot look up a question that never occurred to you.

Nobody searches for "what is the payout rate of this game" while unaware that such a rate exists. Nobody asks "who creates money" while believing they already know the answer. Nobody checks what they do not suspect exists.

Information is free. Knowing what to do with it is not.

This book is not trying to give you answers — they are all online, and better documented than anything I could write.

This book is not trying to give you answers. It is trying to give you the questions.

After that, you will go and check for yourself. That is in fact exactly what I am asking you to do.

And I did not write it alone

I need to introduce five characters, because you are going to meet them throughout the book.

They are not friends. They are not colleagues. They are artificial intelligences — agents I built, to whom I gave a role, and with whom I work every day.

I could hide it. Many do. I would rather say it on page ten, and you will see that it is not incidental.

Clawd checks. He is the most tiresome of the five. Every time I write a figure, he asks for the source. Every time I believe something, he asks since when. He has contradicted me several times in this book, and he was right — you will see that it was left in.

Kyube measures. Markets, order books, figures. It never gives an opinion: it gives results, including when they demolish the morning's idea.

Polygon builds. What we decide, he makes. He is the one who turns a sentence into a thing that exists.

Radéon guards. He looks at what can go wrong, what breaks, what was not anticipated. In a book about money, that is the most useful and least pleasant role.

Echoes tells. She carries what we do to the outside world. Without her, everything we build would stay behind a dirty window — you will understand the expression in chapter 13.

Why I am telling you

For three reasons, and the last is the real one.

Because it would be dishonest to pretend. This book is signed "Progone feat Clawd". The word feat is not an affectation: he dictates, I reread, he writes it up, I decide. You have the right to know how what you are reading was made.

Because it is the demonstration of chapter 13. I am going to explain to you that artificial intelligence fills gaps and stops you stopping. It would be ridiculous to prove it with an example borrowed from somebody else.

And because each of the five embodies a way of looking at value. Checking. Measuring. Building. Protecting. Making known.

They are exactly the five moves you will need in order to use this book. They will come back, chapter after chapter, each at the point where their role matters.

You can see them as five voices in my head. That would be roughly accurate.

Two words on the form

This book is written in short sentences, in short blocks, with a lot of headings. That is deliberate. Here is why.

Our era has manufactured people with short attention spans. Me first.

It is not a character flaw. It is training. For fifteen years, thousands of very well paid engineers worked at cutting human attention into eight-second pieces. Endless feeds, notifications, short videos, small rewards every thirty seconds.

It worked. A whole generation learned to switch screens as soon as things slow down. And it is then reproached for no longer being able to read.

I find that unfair. Fifteen years were spent training people in one direction, and we are surprised they can no longer do the opposite.

So I am not going to ask you to change in order to read me.

This book is made to be read in small pieces. Each section stands on its own. You can put the book down, come back three days later, pick it up in the middle: you will not be lost.

There are no long demonstrations. One idea per block. An example straight after.

And you will find three things that are not clumsiness. I would rather warn you.

I repeat myself. Deliberately. The important ideas come back three or four times in the book, from different angles. Repeating is not insulting the reader: it is respecting the fact that he has a life, that he reads in pieces, and that nothing is retained the first time.

I tell you when to reread. Some passages are counter-intuitive. When that is the case, you will see a small sign telling you to reread slowly. It is not that you are misunderstanding: it is that the thing is strange.

And I give an image before every mechanism. A scene from ordinary life, first. The technical words after. If the image is not enough, it is I who chose it badly.

You will also find figures in this book, mechanisms, a little financial markets. None of it is reserved for specialists.

If you do not understand a sentence, you are not the problem. I wrote it badly.

One last thing. What you are about to read is not a method for getting rich. It is a map. It shows the four possible paths, where they lead, and what they cost.

The path, you will walk yourself.

Glossary

Everything that might block you, explained in two sentences. Ordered by appearance, not alphabetically — you can read it straight through.

Money itself

Currency — An exchange voucher everybody accepts. It is worth nothing in itself: try eating a banknote. It serves to cut an exchange into two halves that can happen at different moments. (chapter 4)

Collateral — What is placed behind a promise, and what becomes yours if the promise is not kept. Your house behind your mortgage. Collateral replaces trust. (chapter 8)

Money creation — The making of money. Contrary to what is taught, it is not mainly banknotes: it is credit. When a bank lends, it writes the money — it did not exist before. (chapter 8)

Required reserves — The share of deposits a bank must keep at the central bank. In the euro area: 1%. Contrary to the legend, that is not what limits lending. (chapter 8)

Inflation — Your money buys less than before. The figure in your account does not move; what it buys shrinks. (chapter 8)

Shrinkflation — The same thing, more discreetly: the pack keeps its price and its size, and contains less. Or the ingredients are replaced by cheaper ones. (chapter 8)

The four directions of the dial

Exchange — Giving to receive, both agreeing. The only direction that creates value, because two people do not put the same value on the same things. (chapter 4)

Gift — Receiving without giving. It comes from people (inheritance, support) or from nature (what you find). It is not a method: you decide nothing. (chapter 5)

Levy — Taking from what has already been produced. A whole scale, from the tax that redistributes to the scam that gives nothing back. A levy is judged by what it gives back. (chapter 6)

Wager — Pitting two values against each other and giving everything to the better one. The only direction where merit is the judge. (chapter 7)

The markets

Spot — The market where you buy the good and where you genuinely own it. You can withdraw it, keep it ten years, give it away. (chapter 15)

Order book — The live list of everything people want to buy and sell, at what price and in what quantity. The displayed price is merely where the two lists touch. (chapter 15)

Liquidity — The presence of somebody opposite you. A liquid market is one where you can get in and out without moving the price by yourself. (chapter 15)

Futures contract — A bet on the price of an asset, with an end date. You buy nothing, you own nothing: on the set date, it is settled. (chapter 15)

Perpetual — A futures contract with no end date. To stop it drifting, a rent is charged every few hours: the more crowded camp pays the less crowded one. (chapter 15)

Leverage — Holding a position bigger than your stake. It is sold as a gain multiplier; the essential lies elsewhere: it brings closer the point where you lose everything. (chapter 9)

Liquidation — The level at which the platform closes your position automatically, without asking your opinion. It can be calculated in advance — by you, and by everyone. (chapter 15)

Stop loss — An order left in advance: if the price falls to this level, sell automatically. It is a protection. It is also a sell order waiting to fire on its own. (chapter 9)

ETF — A basket bought in one go from an ordinary account. Physical: it genuinely holds the things. Synthetic: it holds a bank's promise to pay it the performance. (chapter 15)

Arbitrage — Profiting from a gap between two prices that ought to be identical. It is arbitrageurs who stick markets back together, out of pure self-interest. (chapter 15)

Notional — The reference size of a contract, the one used for calculating. It is not the money at stake. (chapter 15)

Gross market value — What is genuinely at stake. The notional is the value of the houses insured; the gross market value is the damage. (chapter 15)

Gambling

Return to player — The share of stakes paid back to players. Often abbreviated RTP. Slot machines: 85% legal minimum. Online sports betting: 85% maximum. EuroMillions: about 50%. (chapter 7)

Pool betting — Every stake falls into a common pot, the organiser takes a fixed percentage and shares the rest among the winners. The organiser is not betting against you. (chapter 7)

Fixed odds — The bookmaker sets the price himself and becomes your counterparty. Your winnings do not come from the losers' stakes, but from his balance sheet. (chapter 7)

Crypto

Token — A unit recorded in a chain. Creating a token takes ten minutes and costs a few euros. That is why none of them is worth anything by default. (chapter 10)

Stablecoin — A token supposed always to be worth the same, backed by a reserve. If the reserve exists and can be claimed, arbitrage sticks the price back on its own. (chapter 9)

Real-world asset — A good from the physical world recorded on a chain: government debt, property, gold. It brings collateral where there was none. (chapter 10)

Digital certificate of ownership — A title that whoever issued it cannot take back from you. Often called an NFT, and very badly used so far. (chapter 10)

The words that serve everywhere

Positive sum — Both walk away winners. That is the Exchange.

Zero sum — What one gains, the other loses. That is the Wager.

Negative sum — What one gains is less than what the other loses, because fees are taken on every round. That is the casino, and that is short-term speculation.

Poverty premium — The extra cost paid by those who have least, for exactly the same services. Almost always because the cheapest option requires paying up front. (chapter 6)

The figures quoted here are taken from the source table, with their origin and their date.

Source table

Every claim marked with a \* in the book is listed here.

Statuses — ✅ verified against a public source · 🧮 direct calculation you can redo · 🔸 weak source: the information circulates, but I could not find a first-rank source for it. I would rather tell you than pretend. · 📊 measurement made on my own operations

Figures from official bodies are published periodically: they age. If you are reading these pages long after they were written, check that they have not changed.

Chapter 5 — The Levy

| what is written | source | status | | --- | --- | --- | | 2% annual fees: ×7.6 with no fees against ×4.3 with, over 30 years at 7% | calculation: 1.07³⁰ = 7.61 · 1.05³⁰ = 4.32 | 🧮 direct calculation | | "You paid 43% of the final capital" | 4.32 ÷ 7.61 = 0.568 | 🧮 direct calculation | | Poverty premium: ~£490 a year of extra cost for a low-income household (£350 to £750 depending on exposure) | British university research (Personal Finance Research Centre, University of Bristol), 2016 · £478 in 2019 | ✅ verified | | £227 of extra cost even on the best prepayment tariff | same study | ✅ verified |

Chapter 6 — The Wager

| what is written | source | status | | --- | --- | --- | | Slot machines: 85% legal minimum | French casino regulation · checked by approved technicians every 100 days · display compulsory | ✅ verified | | Table games: 88% legal minimum | idem | ✅ verified | | Online sports betting: 85% ceiling | decree no. 2019-2061 · French national gambling authority | ✅ verified | | Scratchcards: 64.5% to 73.5% | per-ticket game rules, published by the operator | ✅ verified | | Keno ~63% · Loto ~54% · EuroMillions ~50% | game rules and annual reports | ✅ verified | | EuroMillions: 1 chance in 139,838,160 | published by the operator · recalculable: C(50,5) × C(12,2) | ✅ verified | | About 1 ticket in 13 a winner, across all tiers | operator figure | 🔸 to confirm | | Gambling prohibited in principle | internal security code, art. L. 320-1 | ✅ verified | | €90,000 and 3 years · legal entity €450,000 and dissolution | CSI art. L. 322-1 à L. 322-7 et D. 322-1 et s. | ✅ verified | | Exceptions: charity, the arts, non-profit sport, mayor's authorisation | same articles | ✅ verified | | 25-year exclusive right over the lottery and retail betting | PACTE law of 23 May 2019 · order of 2 October 2019 | ✅ verified | | Lump sum of €380M revalued to €477M | European Commission decision after investigation | ✅ verified | | Unregulated operators: 93% to 97% | secondary source only | 🔸 weak source | | Many bookmakers limit or close winning accounts | stake limitation, suspension and closure clauses written into the terms · French case law allows it provided validated winnings are paid | ✅ verified |

Chapter 7 — A good or a promise

| what is written | source | status | | --- | --- | --- | | A euro banknote costs 3 to 8 cents to make | euro banknote production data | ✅ verified | | Full cost of cash (transport, security, sorting, machines) | search unsuccessful on 23/08 : aucune étude publique donnant un coût total en % du PIB | ✅ verified | | Bretton Woods: dollar convertible at $35 an ounce | Bretton Woods agreements, July 1944 | ✅ verified | | 15 August 1971: suspension of convertibility | announced by the American president · formalised as an end in 1976 (Jamaica accords) | ✅ verified | | Inflation at 2%: half of purchasing power in 35 years | 0.98³⁵ ≈ 0.49 | 🧮 direct calculation | | Inflation at 5%: half in 14 years | 0.95¹⁴ ≈ 0.49 | 🧮 direct calculation | | Gold extracted since antiquity: ~220,000 tonnes | World Gold Council (219 891 t) | ✅ verified | | Record annual mining output: ~3,700 tonnes | World Gold Council (3 672 t, 2025) | ✅ verified | | Stock growth: ~1.7% a year | 3 672 ÷ 219 891 | 🧮 direct calculation | | Commercial banks create money by lending | Money creation in the modern economy, McLeay, Radia & Thomas, Bank of England, Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1 (mars 2014) | ✅ verified | | The money multiplier model is explicitly set aside | same document: banks "do not multiply central bank money", reserves are not a constraint, and "the act of lending creates the deposit" | ✅ verified | | Euro area required reserves: 1% | European Central Bank · went from 2% to 1% on 18 January 2012, the only change | ✅ verified | | 70 to 80% of retail clients losing on leveraged products | notice imposed by the European regulator, displayed by every broker · values recorded: 69% to 80% depending on the broker, up to 89% at some | ✅ verified | | Central bank digital currency | official commitments: privacy, caps, keeping cash | 🔸 to confirm | | Collapse of a stablecoin with no real reserve (2022) | public event | 🔸 to confirm |

Chapter 8 — What I did with it

| what is written | source | status | | --- | --- | --- | | Purchases on the way down freeze nearly 90% of capital-time | internal measurement on real operations | 📊 internal measurement | | Creating a token costs "a few euros" | true on low-fee chains | 🔸 to confirm | | "99% of what exists is useless" | a figure of speech, not a measurement | 🔸 to confirm |

Chapter 9 — The winner's mindset

| what is written | source | status | | --- | --- | --- | | 14,799 clients · ~16 million transactions · more than 89% losing · €161M lost | study by the French financial markets authority, years 2009-2013, presented 13 October 2014 | ✅ verified | | ~€11,000 average loss | €161M ÷ 14,799 | 🧮 direct calculation |

Chapter 10 — The tools

| what is written | source | status | | --- | --- | --- | | €330,000 for 30s, half-time of the 2022 final with France | advertising sales house statements | ✅ verified | | €429,000 — record, break during France-Spain | idem | ✅ verified | | Regional or local channel: €100 to €500 for 30 seconds | rates published by media buying agencies | ✅ verified |

Chapter 12 — How a price is made

| what is written | source | status | | --- | --- | --- | | OTC derivatives: $846 trillion notional | Bank for International Settlements, statistics end of June 2025 | ✅ verified | | $21.8 trillion gross market value | idem | ✅ verified | | "The spectacular figure is 39 times the real one" | 846,000 ÷ 21,800 | 🧮 direct calculation | | World GDP ~$118 trillion | sources diverge | 🔸 to confirm | | World listed shares ~$148 trillion | another source gives 166,000 | 🔸 to confirm |

Chapter 7 — added 23/08

| what is written | source | status | | --- | --- | --- | | Fast-food meal deal: ~€5 in 2005, €9 to €12 today | price surveys published online · a rise of about 133% cited between 2000 and 2025 | 🔸 weak source | | Shrinkflation: compulsory display in large and medium stores | order of 16 April 2024, applicable from 1 July 2024 · message imposed word for word · displayed for two months | ✅ verified | | 95% of stores with no display | a consumer association survey of 423 stores, first week of application (1-6 July 2024) | ✅ verified | | Frozen dessert: ~€2 at its French launch, €4.10 to €5.10 today depending on the city · +8% between January 2024 and January 2025 | price surveys published online | 🔸 weak source |