What are politicians afraid of when they mock Bitcoin?

Author: Sylvain Saurel

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

This is simply mind-boggling. In a world currently suffering from persistent inflation, soaring sovereign debt, and profound shifts in the international financial landscape, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently made a shocking financial statement in the Daily Mail. What is his core argument? Pokémon cards are fundamentally a more reliable investment than Bitcoin.

This article is not from a satirical outlet like The Onion but a genuine opinion piece written by someone who recently held the highest political office in a G7 country, yet fundamentally misunderstands the nature of currency, fraud, and technology.

To prove that the world’s largest market cap cryptocurrency is a “Ponzi scheme,” Johnson heavily cites a distressing but entirely isolated story. He recounts an incident involving an elderly man in his village: the man handed over £500 to a stranger in a local pub, who promised to magically double the money. Over the next three and a half years, the scammer drained the man of £20,000 under various pretenses of “fees” and administrative costs. Just because the scammer casually mentioned “cryptocurrency” during the fraud, Johnson confidently concludes that Bitcoin itself is a scam.

Such level of economic analysis is not only intellectually lazy but also severely misleading to the public desperately seeking safe havens for their wealth. We must rigorously refute these claims, not only to defend a digital asset’s legitimacy but also to expose the obvious cognitive blind spots of the political elite.

Blame the robber, or blame the ATM?

Let’s start with the most obvious logical fallacy in Johnson’s argument: equating decentralized software protocols with malicious human criminals.

Bitcoin did not steal a penny from the elderly man in the pub; the thief did. Johnson describes one of the oldest tricks in the book—prepayment scams. This is identical to notorious “Nigerian prince” email scams, romance scams, and traditional phone frauds that rely on psychological manipulation. The scammer promises unrealistic returns and repeatedly demands upfront fees to “unlock” fictitious funds, then disappears.

The criminal in the village Johnson mentions could just as easily claim that the £500 was invested in the foreign exchange market, rare coins, the Brooklyn Bridge, or even a pristine first-edition holographic Charizard card. The vehicle used for the scam has nothing to do with the mechanism of fraud. The core of deception is trickery, not the assets used as bait.

Just because a criminal scams an elderly person in Bitcoin’s name, it does not mean Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme—just as it would be absurd to claim that the US dollar or British pound is a scam because someone was robbed at an ATM.

A Ponzi scheme is a very specific type of financial fraud. It requires a central operator who uses new investors’ funds to pay fake returns to early investors, maintaining the illusion until the scheme inevitably collapses.

Bitcoin has no central operator. It has no CEO, no marketing department, no sales pitch, and no corporate headquarters. It does not pay dividends or promise any returns. It is simply a decentralized software protocol—a neutral, open-source ledger maintained by thousands of independent nodes worldwide. Blaming a neutral mathematical ledger for the existence of thieves is a serious conceptual error.

The most hardcore currency in human history

Johnson deliberately sidesteps an objective, verifiable fact: what Bitcoin actually is, and its real performance on the global stage. He dismisses Bitcoin as a fleeting illusion, ignoring extensive empirical data that depict Bitcoin’s role in the modern economy as entirely different.

Massive scale and liquidity

Bitcoin is not a small scam in a pub corner. It is a mature asset class with a market cap of $1.42 trillion. To put it plainly, its market value rivals or even surpasses some of the largest, most stable publicly traded companies worldwide. Additionally, Bitcoin’s daily trading volume is about $62 billion. This deep, continuous, 24/7 liquidity is characteristic of major global currencies or commodities, not a regional Ponzi scheme prone to collapse at any moment.

Extreme transparency

The irony of the pub scam story is that if the elderly man had actually bought and held Bitcoin himself, he would have been interacting with one of the most transparent financial networks in human history. Bitcoin operates on a public blockchain. Since the first block was mined in 2009, every transaction has been permanently recorded and can be verified by anyone with internet access. Unlike traditional banks that operate in closed information silos, relying on blind trust in opaque institutions that often conceal risks, Bitcoin is fully open and relies on cryptographic truth rather than corporate promises.

Unparalleled performance

If we talk about investment value—precisely what Johnson tries to compare to Pikachu—actual data works strongly against his view. Since its inception, Bitcoin has outperformed all fiat currencies, stock indices, and precious metals in any four-year cycle.

That four-year period is not arbitrary; it aligns perfectly with Bitcoin’s built-in “halving” cycle. Every four years, the new supply of Bitcoin awarded to miners is halved, enforced by code to ensure absolute scarcity. Despite its notorious short-term price volatility, Bitcoin’s long-term trend has been steadily upward, driven by increasing global adoption and a strict cap of 21 million coins.

11% inflation analysis: how quantitative easing destroys the pound

The most revealing and hypocritical part of Johnson’s column is his so-called philosophical defense of fiat currencies. To explain why the pound or dollar have value, while Bitcoin supposedly does not, he invokes the Bible. Specifically, he quotes the story of Jesus pointing to a Roman coin: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”

Johnson believes that currency must bear “Caesar’s image” to have intrinsic value. In his worldview, value does not come from scarcity, utility, or consensus, but from authority, decree, and the implicit threat of state enforcement.

But what happens when Caesar overissues currency and mismanages it?

The government led by Boris Johnson was precisely the driver of the monetary policies that caused double-digit inflation. To understand how absurd it is for a former prime minister to compare Bitcoin to a Ponzi scheme, we must look at how the Bank of England operates, especially its quantitative easing (QE) mechanism.

During Johnson’s tenure, particularly amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government needed enormous funds for large-scale furlough schemes and public health initiatives. Since taxes couldn’t cover this historic deficit, the government turned to the Bank of England.

Through QE, the Bank of England essentially created hundreds of billions of pounds out of thin air. It used these newly created digital reserves to buy government bonds from private financial institutions. From 2009 to 2021, the Bank’s bond-buying program skyrocketed to an astonishing £895 billion, with a significant acceleration during Johnson’s time in office.

This policy flooded the financial system with newly printed fiat currency. The UK’s M4 money supply (a broad measure of the total money circulating in the economy) surged dramatically.

Economic laws are simple and brutal: if the money supply increases significantly while the supply of goods and services stagnates or shrinks—as during pandemic lockdowns and subsequent supply chain shocks—prices will inevitably rise. More pounds chasing fewer goods.

Anyone familiar with monetary history can predict the outcome: by the end of 2022, UK consumer inflation hit an astonishing 11.1%.

Think about what this means for ordinary people. It means that the money in their bank accounts—money bearing “Caesar’s image”—lost over 10% of its purchasing power in a year. It means energy bills soared, food prices skyrocketed, and the cost of living crisis devastated the working and middle classes. This is not a pub scam; it’s systemic wealth dilution orchestrated by government and central bank elites.

Furthermore, massive debt also triggered a historic crisis in the UK’s gilt market. Sovereign bond markets became extremely volatile, forcing the Bank of England to intervene urgently to buy bonds and prevent nationwide pension fund collapses.

Looking further back, the picture of fiat currency is even bleaker. Since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, the pound’s purchasing power has depreciated by over 99%. Central banks worldwide aim for about 2% annual depreciation of citizens’ wealth, but as seen during Johnson’s era, they often lose control, allowing inflation to soar far above target levels.

A politician actively involved in this system, directly causing the ongoing erosion of citizens’ savings, then turning around to call a strictly scarce, decentralized asset a “scam” is the height of irony. The fiat system is built on continuous dilution of public purchasing power to fill the endless debt of nations. If we seek a system that quietly siphons wealth from the uninformed, we only need to look at the printing presses in Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England’s location).

It’s not Pikachu’s fault; it’s politicians who don’t understand money

Now, finally, we can return to Pikachu.

Johnson claims that a piece of paper with a cartoon mouse on it is a better store of value than Bitcoin—an obvious example of financial illiteracy. Yes, the collectibles market is indeed very active. A first-edition holographic Charizard card, driven by sentimentality, condition, and physical rarity, can fetch a high price at auction. But a trading card is not money in essence.

You cannot break a Pokémon card into 100 million interchangeable small units to buy a coffee or a loaf of bread.

You cannot instantly send a Pokémon card to a relative in El Salvador in three seconds, settle on an immutable ledger, and avoid middleman fees.

You cannot verify the authenticity of a Pokémon card cryptographically without relying on centralized subjective grading agencies like PSA, which charge high fees and can introduce human errors.

Bitcoin represents a profound technological and economic revolution: humanity’s first achievement of absolute, verifiable digital scarcity. It allows us to store wealth in a decentralized network without the risk of mismanagement, manipulation, or censorship by any CEO, board, or prime minister.

When politicians like Boris Johnson use tragic local anecdotes and absurd false analogies to mock this innovation, they are severely damaging the public interest. True financial literacy is the only defense against pub scammers and the invisible theft of inflation by central banks.

The elderly man in Johnson’s village was undoubtedly harmed, but he was victimized by an ordinary thief, not an algorithm. Meanwhile, millions of hardworking Britons are daily subjected to the systemic plundering of fiat currency, with their purchasing power eroding continuously, while their former leaders compare a global $10 trillion monetary network to a children’s toy.

We deserve a higher standard of economic discussion. The era of blindly trusting Caesar’s image to safeguard our wealth is rapidly coming to an end. The age of decentralized, verifiable hard assets has just begun.