Bitcoin Is a Delusion That Could Conquer the World

A bar of gold. A disk of iron. A chain of beads. A card of plastic. A slip of cotton-linen paper. These things are worthless. One cannot eat them, or drink them, or use them as a blanket. But they are valuable, too. Their value comes from the simplest thing. People believe they are money, and so they are.

If every currency is a consensual delusion, then bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency that changes hands over the internet, feels more like a consensual hallucination on psychedelic drugs. The concept of bitcoin was born in a detailed white paper published in late 2008 by a pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto.” By 2013, one bitcoin was worth $12. As of this writing, it’s worth more than $10,000. Its value has doubled in the last two months alone. For any currency’s value to increase by 100 percent in eight weeks is, to use a technical term, bonkers. If the French franc, Japanese yen, or American dollar did the same, their economies would plunge into an infernal deflationary spiral.

Throughout history, currency has taken one of : physical assets, like gold or beads, and fiat currency, like government-backed paper and coins. Bitcoin and its brethren introduce acurrencies. If all money is the sharing of an illusion, bitcoin wants to build a better way to share it.