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Sapiens is a terrible book.
“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” - Satoshi Nakamotopic.twitter.com/EsB4PBdQ0D
— Marty Bent (@MartyBent) May 10, 2024
One of Davos' favorite front men, Yuval Noah Harari, joined the BIS Innovation Summit earlier this week to spread some laughable anti-bitcoin propaganda. During his chat, Harari opined that "as a historian" he does not like bitcoin because it is a "currency based on distrust". Here's exactly what he said:
When I look at bitcoin as a historian I don't like it because this is a money built on distrust. The central idea of bitcoin is basically electronic gold, that we don't trust the banks, the governments so we don't want to give them the ability to create as much money as they like. So we create this bitcoin. It's a currency of distrust.
I do think that the future belongs to electronic money, but what we've seen over the last centuries is that it is actually a good idea to give banks and governments the ability to create more and more money in order to build more trust within society. So, I'm not sure what money would look like in 20 years or 30 years, but I hope that it would be a currency of greater trust and not a currency of distrust. -Yuval Noah Harari, famed Malthusian Nihilist and mediocre author
Wow. This is what we in the psy-op world like to call "gaslighting". It's a tactic used to make someone believe something that is totally false and most likely never happened is actually true. When it comes to Harari's specific comments on the history of humanity he is attempting to gaslight people into believing that giving governments and central banks the ability to "create more and more money in order to build trust within society" has actually happened. Nothing could be further from the truth and one only needs the ability to pick their head up from their phone, look around at the state of the world and recall four years of history to refute this objectively insane point of view.
Do you all remember when a majority of the world's governments banded together to shut down the global economy while flooding the global economy with TRILLIONS of dollars of liquidity? I think we can all agree that this was most likely the most extreme example of central planning on the political and monetary fronts that the world has ever seen. If we are to follow Harari's logic that this level of coordination and central control over the monetary system, one would have to be able to look out at the world right now and confidently say that collective trust in governments and banking institutions by the people is at an all time high.
Clearly, this is not the case. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Trust in political and financial institutions is as low as it has ever been. The Common Man is suffering under the weight of price inflation and is beginning to question the validity of government spending programs. Particularly here in the US. The geopolitical landscape is shifting toward a multi-polar world as large governments are finding it impossible to trust each other. This increasing distrust is being driven by the fact that some governments used their "trusted" control over the international monetary system to freeze the assets of a sovereign nation. We don't even have to mention the bail out of the banks during the Great Financial Crisis, the forever wars in the Middle East, or the silencing of the whistleblowers who tried to make people aware that their governments cannot be trusted. Harari is either completely disconnected from reality or being completely disingenuous. I have a feeling it's most likely the latter.
This particular line of thinking shouldn't be surprising coming from Harari and the fact that he said this at a digital summit thrown by the Bank for International Settlements should be even less surprising. The BIS is the top borg bank that would like to cattle herd the world into a digital panopticon that runs on a CBDC that can be granularly controlled by "trusted banks and governments". Bitcoin is, quite literally, the biggest threat to their existence because it enables individuals to opt-out of a system dependent on trusting central planners.
Trying to tap into people's emotions by framing the discussion of "electronic money" myopically and attempting to reduce the decision making process to a knee jerk reaction based on the connotation of the juxtaposition of "distrust v. trust" is truly some lowest denominator argumentation. One would have to truly believe that most people are not only dumb, but extremely dumb.
"Distrust in government bad. Trust in government good. Therefore, government controlling money good." Caveman shit.
Luckily for us, no one is buying Harari's BS and Satoshi Nakamoto designed bitcoin in a way that allows us to break free from the madness of trusting governments and central banks. As he pointed out in February of 2009, the history of currencies is littered with breaches of trust by governments and central banks. Trusting these entities with the power to issue currency has proven to be catastrophic for whole societies. Trust needs to be completely removed from the process by leveraging a system that cannot be controlled by any individual, group, company or government and that is what bitcoin brings to the world. Individuals shouldn't have to trust anyone but themselves to know what's going on with their money. "Don't trust, verify" is the ethos that bitcoin embodies and empowers individuals with. It's a beautiful thing and it scares the ever living shit out of the Harari's of the world.
The Davos class is desperate and scared, as is evidenced by the nonsensical assertion put forth by Harari earlier this week. This should encourage you. Lean in. They know they're losing the narrative battle.
We're going to win.
Final thought...
Felt good to get four Bents on the board this week. Writing inspiration comes in waves and a beautiful set is rolling in.