Bitcoin is a Lie

A confession and a moral charge

Photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash

Bitcoin will fail.

Because it is a lie. A tool claiming to be a truth. And the lie starts by asking you to imagine living in a world where nobody is your friend.

Bitcoin is for enemies. They say this. Seriously. Look it up.

Bitcoin is a lie. Because it claims truths that cannot be. That trust is defect. That property is virtue. That law, shared meaning should not supervene. That “fuck off and leave me alone” is the sacred right of the free person.

I used to see value. Now I see a void. An emptiness where meaning should be. A reason.

Human rights activists have used bitcoin for good. But I fear that this good is being propagandized for the cynical ends of those hostile to those causes. And even more damningly, I worry that those cynical people know it. And my worry is informed, because I know some of them personally. Used to call some of them my friends.

Have fun staying poor, they say. Seriously. Look it up.

They will insist it’s irony. I’m not so sure.

The same defense that all the other crypto-fascists hide behind. These are statements in wryness.

Why so serious?

Oh, but I am. Serious, that is.

Angry too. I’m pretty angry. Not in the sense that my emotions control me, here. But I do feel them, and let them show for you now.

This is how cruelty operates in the age of ironic detachment. Every vicious statement, every expression of contempt, every celebration of others’ suffering gets wrapped in layers of “it’s just a joke” and “why so serious?” and “you’re being too literal.”

But the cruelty is real. The contempt is real. The harm is real.

They just learned they could inflict it while maintaining plausible deniability. Could mock the poor while pretending it was just memes. Could celebrate human suffering while claiming it was ironic performance. Could build systems designed to extract and exclude while insisting it was all just disruption, just innovation, just the market working as intended.

The irony isn’t a shield from moral judgment. It’s a confession that they know what they’re doing is indefensible, so they hide behind the pretense of not meaning it.

Bitcoin is for enemies. This is Carl Schmitt. This is fascism—although they’ll insist it’s game theory.

Game theory. The mathematization of mistrust. The formalization of the assumption that every interaction is fundamentally adversarial, that cooperation is just delayed defection, that trust is weakness waiting to be exploited. They dress it in equations and Nash equilibria and prisoner’s dilemmas, as if mathematical notation makes antisocial premises scientific rather than ideological.

But here’s the trick: if you build systems premised on the assumption that everyone is your enemy, you create the very conditions where everyone becomes your enemy. The prophecy fulfills itself. Trust becomes impossible not because humans are inherently untrustworthy, but because you’ve built an architecture that punishes trust and rewards defection. And then you point to the wreckage and say, “See? I told you humans can’t cooperate. Good thing we have Bitcoin.”

This is Austrian economics. The fever dream that animated Mises and Rothbard, that Ron Paul spread like gospel, that the crypto faithful have absorbed as metaphysical truth. The claim that inflation is theft, that fiat currency is government tyranny, that “hard money” restores natural order, that the market—if just left alone—would produce spontaneous harmony.

But strip away the economic mysticism and here’s what “hard money” actually means: it systematically advantages existing wealth holders and disadvantages workers and debtors. It makes wealth accumulation easier and wage earning harder. It turns the economy into a game where those who already have capital watch it appreciate while those who work for wages watch their purchasing power erode.

This isn’t accidental. This is the point. “Hard money” is oligarchy with a white paper.

Bitcoin is for the war of all against all. The friend-enemy distinction. The Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Bitcoin is for fascists.

So here we are. It’s not surprising you threw in with these monsters in the White House, is it? You’ll insist it’s a lesser evil. The greater being that the other side would have regulated you. Constrained you. Pushed easement on your dominion. What tyranny that would have been. For you, anyway.

What do you care? You’re living in the Caribbean or Central America. You’ve got your apocalypse money.

The coming days will bring the shattering of many illusions. One of them will be that most people are not as selfish and paranoid as you imagine them.

And that’s why resistance is possible. That’s why the city still stands despite the barbarians inside the gate. That’s why the defenders fight street by street when your game theory says they should have defected, should have optimized their individual positions, should have accepted the inevitable consolidation of power.

But they don’t. Because humans aren’t the atomized, self-interested utility-maximizers your models assume. They’re capable of solidarity. Of courage. Of choosing meaning over optimization. Of bringing light even when the rational calculation says to save themselves.

You built Bitcoin for a world of enemies. But most people still choose to be friends.

So hold on for dear life?

Or sell all before it’s too late?

Which way, human?

Go live your answer and contribute your verse.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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