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

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

Article by: Sylvain Saurel

Translation: 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 inherently a more reliable investment than Bitcoin.

This article is not from satirical outlets like The Onion but a genuine column written by someone who recently held the highest political office in a G7 country, yet fundamentally misunderstands the nature of money, 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. Because the scammer casually mentioned “cryptocurrency” during the fraud, Johnson confidently concludes: 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 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 statement: equating decentralized software protocols with malicious human criminals.

Bitcoin didn’t steal a penny from the elderly man in the pub; the thief did. Johnson describes one of the oldest tricks in the book—advance fee 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, demands prepayments to “unlock” fictitious funds, and then disappears.

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

Just because criminals use Bitcoin as a pretext to scam the elderly, it doesn’t 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 it inevitably collapses.

Bitcoin has no central operator. It has no CEO, no marketing department, no sales pitch, and no corporate headquarters. It doesn’t 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 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 vastly different role in the modern economy.

Massive scale and liquidity

Bitcoin is not a small scam in a pub corner. It is a mature asset class with a market capitalization of $1.42 trillion. To put it plainly, its market cap 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.

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, the Genesis block in 2009, every transaction is permanently recorded and verifiable by anyone online. Anyone with internet access can audit the entire ledger. Traditional banks operate in closed information silos, relying on blind trust in opaque institutions that often conceal risks. Bitcoin 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—hard 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.

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 halved, enforced by code, creating absolute scarcity. Despite short-term price volatility, the 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 hypocritical part of Johnson’s column is his so-called philosophical defense of fiat currencies. To explain why the pound or dollar has value, and 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 doesn’t 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 the ultimate 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, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government needed massive funds for 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 soared 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) skyrocketed.

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 10% of their purchasing power in a year. Energy bills soared, food prices skyrocketed, and the cost-of-living crisis devastated working and middle classes. This isn’t a pub scam; it’s systemic wealth dilution orchestrated by government and central bank elites.

Moreover, massive debt levels triggered a historic crisis in the gilt bond 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 in Johnson’s era, they often lose control, allowing inflation to soar far above target levels.

A politician who actively contributed to this system—causing citizens’ savings to erode—daringly criticizes a strictly scarce, decentralized asset as a “scam.” The fiat system is built on continuous dilution of public purchasing power to fill endless government debt. If we seek a system that quietly siphons wealth from the uninformed, we only need to look at the printing presses of Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England).

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

Now, we can finally 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, collectible cards are indeed very active markets. An original holographic Charizard card, due to nostalgia, 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 send a Pokémon card instantly to a relative in El Salvador in three seconds, settle on an immutable ledger, and do so without intermediaries taking a cut.

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 abuse, manipulation, or censorship by any CEO, board, or prime minister.

When politicians like Boris Johnson use tragic local cases and absurd 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 systemic theft through fiat currency devaluation, eroding their savings, while their former leaders compare a global $10+ trillion monetary network to children’s toys.

We deserve a higher level of economic discourse. 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.