I just reread the history of Bretton Woods and I am surprised at how relevant it remains today. In 1944, the system that basically dominated the entire 20th century was created: the dollar as the global reserve currency, backed by gold at $35 an ounce. It sounds stable, right? But there was a problem that almost no one saw coming.

A Belgian economist named Robert Triffin saw it clearly. While teaching at Yale and advising the IMF, he noticed something that seemed like a mathematical contradiction: for the world to have enough dollars to trade, the United States needed to run constant deficits, sending money abroad. But the more dollars circulated globally, the less credible it was that all those dollars could be converted into gold. In other words, the success of the system contained the seeds of its own collapse.

This is what is known as the Triffin dilemma. A national currency simply cannot be a global reserve currency and maintain credibility in the long term at the same time. It’s a structural trap.

During the 1960s, France and Germany began to notice that the numbers didn’t add up. They started converting dollars into gold, draining U.S. reserves. What Triffin had described as a theoretical problem became a real trust crisis. In 1971, Nixon closed the gold window. End of Bretton Woods. The dollar became purely fiat, with no physical backing.

What’s interesting is that the Triffin dilemma never disappeared. It only changed form. Now the world still depends on the dollar, the U.S. continues generating huge deficits to provide global liquidity, and without gold to limit issuance, the system is basically sustained by inertia and geopolitical power. Building tensions, growing debt, imbalances that no one can resolve.

And here is where everything connects with what we see today. Bitcoin, central bank digital currencies, bilateral agreements without dollars—all are attempts to solve the same problem Triffin identified over 60 years ago. The Triffin dilemma is not a historical anecdote; it’s the fundamental question behind why the global monetary architecture is transforming again.

The difference now is that there are alternatives. And that changes the game.