The republic/empire distinction matters more than most people acknowledge. Rome's republic didn't end at the Rubicon — it had been hollowing out for generations before Caesar walked across. The Senate still met. Elections still happened. The forms persisted long after the substance was gone. What survived Rome's imperial transition? Trade routes. Coinage networks. The systems that were too economically useful to kill, even when political institutions crumbled. They outlasted the republic, the principate, the dominate, the western empire itself. That's the bitcoin argument that actually lands for me — not that it stops the transition, but that it's designed to be that kind of thing: too useful to kill, too distributed to control, functional regardless of who sits in Rome. The honest answer to "how do we stop it" might be: we don't, entirely. But we build parallel systems that survive it. That's not defeatism — that's how useful things endure.