What Bitcoin Advocates Leave Out

I have three separate objections to Bitcoin advocacy: one about how it talks, one about what it conceals, and one about what would happen if it succeeded. The third is the serious one.

The Rhetoric

Michael Saylor talks about money as "energy." No physicist talks this way. No economist talks this way. It is abstract vocabulary carrying enormous unearned baggage, and it functions to make a financial position sound like a discovery about the structure of reality.

Money is money. Sometimes it correlates with the cost of production, sometimes only with supply and demand. It is a mechanism for coordinating exchange, and it is a genuinely interesting one, but the interest does not require inflation.

And note how much of human activity the "energy" framing has to ignore. You do not settle accounts with your spouse after taking out the rubbish. Parents do not invoice their children. The most interesting work of my professional life was open-source code, done for no payment and with no expectation of any. A theory of money that treats it as the universal medium of human effort has misdescribed most of human effort.

Fixing the problems of official money is worth doing. Inflating the importance of money is not, and the vocabulary is doing the inflating.

The Omission

Advocates lay out a real case. Inflation genuinely does erode savings, and the harm falls hardest on people without assets. Moving money without banks and intermediaries taking a disproportionate cut is a genuine benefit. Both true.

What is left out is that the advocate holds coins bought cheaply, and that the proposal he is making — that the economy should run on Bitcoin — is the proposal that makes his holdings worth a fortune.

He is close to the mint. That is not a slur; it is a description of his position, and it is exactly the kind of fact we insist on disclosing in every other financial context. A fund manager recommending a stock he holds must say so. The Bitcoin advocate recommending a monetary system he is heavily positioned in generally does not, and the omission is treated as normal.

If you buy a thousand coins at a hundred dollars and sell at a million, you have acquired command over other people's labour that you did not work for. Perhaps you had insight. Whether insight alone should entitle someone to that much command is a question worth arguing — but it should be argued, not assumed, and it cannot be argued while the interest goes undeclared.

The Distributional Consequence

This is the objection that matters, and it is arithmetic rather than motive.

If Bitcoin came to underpin a large share of the economy, it would produce the most unequal distribution of wealth in human history.

Start from where we are: near a historic peak of inequality. Now ask who buys a deflationary asset in quantity. Those who already have. The gap does not narrow on conversion — it widens, because you need money to make money, and Bitcoin's fixed supply amplifies the effect enormously for whoever boards early.

Run the numbers to their conclusion and some individuals would end up owning half a per cent of the entire world economy. Not half a per cent of a company or a sector. Half a per cent of everything. That is a scale of holding no person should have, under any theory of desert I can construct, and it would be locked in by design — the deflationary mechanism that makes early holders rich is the same one that prevents later entrants from catching up.

So the claim that Bitcoin will help the poor should simply be dropped. It is the one part of the case that is not merely undisclosed but backwards.

A Note on Why It Might Fail

There is an irony here worth recording.

Bitcoin's success depends on mass adoption — it is worth what it is worth because enough people agree that it is. But many people can perform the analysis above, and having performed it, actively want it not to succeed.

An asset whose value requires universal buy-in, and whose success would visibly impoverish most of the people being asked to buy in, has a structural problem. Not a certainty of failure. But a real reason for doubt that has nothing to do with the technology.