When Politicians Hype Cards and Disparage Bitcoin: An Absurd Farce About the Nature of Money
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When Politicians Hype Cards and Disparage Bitcoin: An Absurd Farce About the Nature of Money
It’s not Pikachu’s fault—it’s that politicians don’t understand money.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Sylvain Saurel
Translated by Chopper, Foresight News
It’s truly astonishing. In a world currently grappling with persistent global inflation, ballooning sovereign debt, and profound transformations in the international financial architecture, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently published a jaw-dropping economic commentary in the Daily Mail. What is his central claim? That Pokémon trading cards are fundamentally sounder investments than Bitcoin.
This article did not appear in satirical outlets like The Onion; rather, it was a genuine opinion column authored by a man who, until recently, held the highest office in a G7 nation—and who holds fundamental misconceptions about money, fraud, and technology.
To prove that the world’s largest cryptocurrency is a “Ponzi scheme,” Johnson cites a heartbreaking—but entirely isolated—case. He recounts how an elderly villager handed £500 to a stranger at a local pub, who promised to magically double the sum. Over the next three and a half years, the scammer drained the man of £20,000 through successive “fees” and administrative costs. Simply because the con artist casually invoked the term “cryptocurrency,” Johnson confidently declares Bitcoin itself to be a fraud.
This level of economic analysis isn’t merely intellectually lazy—it’s dangerously misleading for a public urgently seeking safe havens for their wealth. We must rigorously refute this rhetoric—not only to defend a digital asset but also to expose the glaring cognitive blind spots within the political class.
Blame the Mugger or the ATM?
Let’s begin with the most glaring logical fallacy in Johnson’s argument: conflating a decentralized software protocol with malicious human behavior.
Bitcoin did not steal a single penny from the elderly man at the pub—the thief did. What Johnson angrily describes is one of the oldest tricks in the criminal playbook: advance-fee fraud. It’s identical in psychology and mechanics to notorious “Nigerian Prince” email scams, romance scams (“pig butchering”), and traditional call-center frauds—promising unrealistic returns, demanding upfront fees to “unlock” phantom funds, then vanishing entirely.
The criminal in Johnson’s village could just as easily have claimed the £500 was being invested in foreign exchange markets, rare gold coins, the Brooklyn Bridge—or even a mint-condition first-edition holographic Charizard Pokémon card. The vehicle used to facilitate fraud bears no relationship to the fraud’s operational mechanism. Fraud is deception—not the bait asset deployed to lure victims.
Declaring Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme solely because criminals invoked its name while defrauding an elderly man is as absurd as declaring the U.S. dollar or British pound fraudulent because someone was mugged beside a Barclays ATM.
A Ponzi scheme is a precisely defined financial fraud. It requires a central operator who uses funds from new investors to pay fictitious returns to earlier investors—sustaining the illusion via an ever-expanding pool of victims until inevitable collapse.
Bitcoin has no central operator. It has no CEO, no marketing department, no sales pitch, and no corporate headquarters. It pays no dividends and promises no returns. It is simply a decentralized software protocol—a neutral, open-source ledger of transactions, maintained collectively by thousands of independent nodes worldwide. Attributing theft to a neutral mathematical ledger is a profound category error.
The Hardest Money Humanity Has Ever Known
Johnson deliberately omits an objective, verifiable fact in his column: what Bitcoin actually is—and how it performs on the global stage. He dismisses Bitcoin as a fleeting illusion while ignoring abundant empirical evidence that paints a radically different picture of Bitcoin’s role in the modern economy.
Massive Scale and Liquidity
Bitcoin is no corner-pub scam. It is a mature asset class with a market capitalization of $1.42 trillion. To put that in perspective, its valuation rivals—or exceeds—that of some of the world’s largest, most established public companies. Moreover, Bitcoin’s daily trading volume averages around $6.2 billion. This deep, sustained, 24/7 liquidity is characteristic of major global currencies or commodities—not a regional Ponzi scheme poised for imminent collapse.
Unparalleled Transparency
The irony of the pub scam case is striking: had the elderly man genuinely bought and self-custodied Bitcoin, he would have engaged with the most transparent financial network in human history. Bitcoin operates on a public blockchain. Since the genesis block was mined in 2009, every transaction has been permanently recorded and globally verifiable; anyone with internet access can fully audit the entire system. Traditional banks operate in closed information silos, forcing people to blindly trust opaque institutions that often deliberately conceal risk. Bitcoin operates entirely in the open—secured by cryptographic truth, not corporate promises.
Unmatched Performance
If investment value is the subject—as Johnson attempts to illustrate via Pikachu comparisons—the raw data severely undermines his position. Since inception, Bitcoin has outperformed all fiat currencies, all stock indices, and all precious metals over any four-year period.
The four-year interval is not arbitrary—it aligns precisely with Bitcoin’s built-in “halving” cycle. Every four years, the newly issued supply allocated to miners automatically halves, enforcing absolute scarcity via code. While Bitcoin’s short-term price volatility is legendary, its long-term trajectory has been consistently upward—driven by steadily growing global adoption and a strictly capped total supply of 21 million coins.
Deconstructing 11% Inflation: How Quantitative Easing Destroyed the Pound
The most revealing—and most hypocritical—part of Johnson’s column is his so-called philosophical defense of fiat currency. To explain why the pound or dollar holds value while Bitcoin allegedly does not, he invokes the Bible—specifically, Jesus’ reference to a Roman coin: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”
Johnson contends that money must bear “Caesar’s image” to possess intrinsic value. In his worldview, value derives not from scarcity, utility, or consensus—but from authority, decree, and the implicit threat of state coercion.
But what happens when Caesar recklessly debases the currency and mismanages it?
Boris Johnson’s own government engineered the monetary policy that ultimately triggered double-digit inflation. To grasp how absurd it is for a former prime minister to compare Bitcoin to a Ponzi scheme, we must examine how the Bank of England operates—particularly its quantitative easing (QE) mechanism.
During Johnson’s tenure—especially amid the pandemic—the UK government required massive funding for unprecedented furlough schemes and public health initiatives. With tax revenues unable to cover this historic deficit, the government turned to the Bank of England.
Through QE, the Bank of England effectively created hundreds of billions of pounds out of thin air. It used these newly minted digital reserves to purchase government bonds from private financial institutions. Between 2009 and 2021, the Bank’s bond-buying program surged to a staggering £895 billion—and accelerated sharply during Johnson’s time at 10 Downing Street.
This policy flooded the financial system with newly printed fiat currency. The UK’s M4 money supply—a measure of total circulating money in the economy—soared.
Economic law is simple and brutal: if money supply expands sharply while real goods and services stagnate—or, as occurred during pandemic lockdowns and subsequent supply-chain shocks, contract sharply—prices inevitably rise. More pounds chase fewer goods.
For anyone familiar with monetary history, the outcome was entirely predictable. By late 2022, UK consumer price inflation peaked at a shocking 11.1%.
Consider what that figure means for ordinary citizens. It signifies that the money in their bank accounts—the money bearing “Caesar’s image”—lost over one-tenth of its purchasing power in a single year. It meant skyrocketing energy bills, soaring food prices, and a cost-of-living crisis devastating wage earners and the middle class. This was not a localized pub scam—it was a systemic, nationwide dilution of wealth orchestrated at the highest levels of government and central banking.
Moreover, the massive debt burden triggered a historic gilt-market crisis. Sovereign bond markets became extremely volatile, forcing the Bank of England to intervene urgently with emergency bond purchases to prevent nationwide pension fund insolvency.
Zoom out further, and the fiat picture grows grimmer still. Since the Bank of England’s founding in 1694, the pound’s purchasing power has eroded by over 99%. Central banks explicitly target an annual 2% devaluation of public wealth—and, as witnessed during Johnson’s era, frequently lose control, allowing inflation to surge far beyond that target.
It is deeply ironic for a politician who actively participated in this very system—and personally oversaw the continuous erosion of public savings—to then denounce a strictly scarce, decentralized asset as a “scam.” The fiat system dilutes public purchasing power to fill governments’ endless debt holes. If we seek a system quietly siphoning wealth from the uninformed, we need look no further than the printing presses on Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England’s location).
It’s Not Pikachu’s Fault—It’s Politicians Who Don’t Understand Money
Now, finally, let’s return to Pikachu.
Johnson claims that a piece of paper featuring a cartoon mouse is a superior store of value than Bitcoin—an archetypal demonstration of financial illiteracy. Yes, the rare collectibles market is vibrant. A first-edition Charizard card can fetch substantial sums at auction due to nostalgia, condition, and physical scarcity. But a trading card is, by definition, not money.
You cannot divide a Pokémon card into 100 million interchangeable units to buy a cup of coffee or a loaf of bread.
You cannot send a Pokémon card to a relative in El Salvador in three seconds, settling instantly on an immutable ledger without intermediaries taking commissions.
You cannot cryptographically verify a Pokémon card’s authenticity without relying on centralized, subjective grading agencies (e.g., PSA)—which charge high fees and introduce human error.
Bitcoin represents a profound technological and economic revolution: humanity’s first achievement of absolute, verifiable digital scarcity. For the first time in history, it enables people to store wealth on a decentralized network—immune to manipulation, censorship, or arbitrary issuance by CEOs, boards, or prime ministers.
When politicians like Boris Johnson ridicule this innovation using tragic local anecdotes and absurd false analogies, they seriously harm the public interest. Real financial literacy is the sole defense ordinary people have against both pub scammers and the invisible looting of central-bank inflation.
The elderly villager in Johnson’s story was undoubtedly harmed—but the perpetrator was an ordinary thief, not an algorithm. Meanwhile, millions of hardworking Britons suffer daily under the fiat system’s systematic plunder, watching their purchasing power erode—while their former leader compares a multi-trillion-dollar global monetary network to a child’s toy.
We deserve a higher standard of economic discourse. The era of blindly trusting Caesar’s image to safeguard our wealth is rapidly ending. The age of decentralized, verifiable hard money has only just begun.
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