When Politicians Promote Playing Cards and Dismiss Bitcoin: An Absurd Farce Concerning the Nature of Money

Written by: Sylvain Saurel

Translated 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 publication 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 procedural costs. Johnson, noting that the scammer casually mentioned “cryptocurrency” during the fraud, 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.

Is it the robber or 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 was the scammer. Johnson describes one of the oldest tricks in the book—advance fee fraud. This is identical to the infamous “Nigerian prince” email scams, romance scams, and traditional phone frauds that rely on psychological manipulation. The scammer promises unrealistic returns, demands prepayments to “unlock” fictitious funds, and then disappears.

The criminal in the village story could just as easily claim that the £500 was invested in the foreign exchange market, rare coins, Brooklyn Bridge souvenirs, 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 deception itself, not the assets used as bait.

Just because criminals have used Bitcoin as a guise to scam the elderly, it does not mean Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. It’s as absurd as saying 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 it 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 form of money in human history

Johnson deliberately avoids an objective, verifiable fact: what Bitcoin actually is, and how it performs 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.

Its 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 and most stable publicly traded companies worldwide. Additionally, Bitcoin’s daily trading volume is about $62 billion. This deep, sustained, 24/7 liquidity is characteristic of major global currencies or commodities, not a regional Ponzi scheme prone to collapse at any moment.

Unparalleled 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. Traditional banks operate within closed information silos, relying on blind trust in opaque institutions that often conceal risks. Bitcoin, by contrast, is fully open, relying on cryptographic truth rather than corporate promises.

Unmatched performance

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

Why four years? Because it aligns perfectly with Bitcoin’s built-in “halving” cycle. Every four years, the new supply of Bitcoin awarded to miners is automatically halved, enforced by code to ensure absolute scarcity. Despite its notorious short-term price volatility, Bitcoin’s long-term trend has been steadily appreciating, driven by increasing global adoption and a fixed supply capped at 21 million coins.

11% inflation analysis: how quantitative easing destroys the pound

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

Johnson believes that currency must bear “Caesar’s portrait” 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?

The government led by Boris Johnson was precisely the driver behind 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, especially 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 circulating money) surged dramatically.

Economic law is simple and brutal: if the money supply increases significantly while the supply of goods and services stagnates or shrinks—as during pandemic lockdowns and supply chain disruptions—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. Their bank balances—money bearing “Caesar’s portrait”—lost over one-tenth of their purchasing power in a year. Energy bills soared, food prices skyrocketed, and the cost of living crisis devastated workers and middle classes. This is not a local scam in a pub; it’s systemic wealth dilution orchestrated by government and central bank elites.

Moreover, massive debt also triggered a historic crisis in the gilt market. Sovereign bonds became extremely volatile, forcing the Bank of England to intervene urgently to buy bonds and prevent the collapse of the pension funds.

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—yet, as seen in Johnson’s era, they often lose control, allowing inflation to soar far above target levels.

A politician actively involved in this system, who personally caused the ongoing erosion of public savings, then criticizes a strictly scarce, decentralized asset as a “scam”—this is the height of irony. Fiat currency is a system of continuous dilution of public wealth to cover endless government debt. 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, let’s circle back 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 collectible market is indeed active. A first-edition holographic Charizard card, driven by nostalgia, condition, and physical rarity, can fetch a high price at auction. But a trading card, in essence, is not money.

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 intermediaries’ fees.

You cannot cryptographically verify the authenticity of a Pokémon card 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 enables the storage of wealth in a decentralized network for the first time, immune to abuse, 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 public interests. True financial literacy is the only defense against bar scams and the invisible plunder of inflation by central banks.

The elderly man in Johnson’s village was indeed harmed, but he was victimized by an ordinary thief, not an algorithm. Meanwhile, millions of hardworking Britons are daily subjected to the systemic theft 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 portrait to safeguard our wealth is rapidly ending. The age of decentralized, verifiable hard money has just begun.