Bitcoin Is an Island of Sturdiness: Nic Carter on Money That Cannot Be Tuned

Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures and co-founder of Coin Metrics, previously analyzed crypto assets at Fidelity. Lex Fridman opens by asking which philosopher shaped him beyond cryptocurrency. Carter majored in philosophy because he did not know what else to do, and he says Descartes — skepticism, the brain-in-a-vat problem, the question of what it is to have knowledge — had more effect on his career than he expected. Asked whether humans can fully know objective reality, he answers at once: definitely not. Reality, he says, is processed through a subjective lens.

A lot of what they will discuss, Lex notes, assumes we can figure out civilization at scale. Carter locates the conceit in economics: the belief that you can model human behavior inside unbelievably complex systems. The modern critique, he says, is that you cannot have true knowledge of those systems, and they are much less predictable than the models imply. We behave according to accumulated assumptions trained on tiny datasets from the last fifty or a hundred years, and those assumptions go horribly askew precisely when the black swans arrive. He puts himself on the side that reality is much less knowable than we think.

It is nice, he adds, to have concrete things like Bitcoin — “islands of sturdiness” on otherwise shaky ground. The dollar system is the opposite. Who truly understands the eurodollar market, whether monetary issuance is inflationary, the relationship between unemployment and inflation, even how to define deflation? Policymakers and economists do not, in his view. Lex asks how that ignorance can sit beside claims of manipulation by centralized power. Carter splits the difference: we understand short-term features; we do not understand the net effect of targeting unemployment and low inflation for forty years, of accumulating debt and basement interest rates.

He does not villainize central bankers. Everyone is the hero of their own story, socialized into a mandate, sometimes presumptuous. The systemic issue is a small, homogenous handful of people with PhDs from the same institutions who believe you can tinker a few variables and steer society into a desirable state. Consequences can be bad; the motive is not malevolence. Carter recasts Lex’s question about whether some people are better than others: consequentialist reasoning — the belief that only you can shape society toward your objectives — lends itself to authoritarianism.

Stepping onto that island, Carter draws a distinction that still confuses people: Bitcoin names a protocol for conveying value through a communications channel, a set of rules participants opt into, and also the monetary unit that circulates inside it. Satoshi did not split the names the way Ethereum did with Ether, so the two senses stay commingled. They can come apart in practice. You can transact bitcoin on Ethereum, or, as Carter demonstrates on the table, on a physical device that never touches the Bitcoin network at all.

The gadget is an Opendime, an orange limited-edition bearer instrument loaded with a hundred dollars of bitcoin. The private key is generated on the device and never leaves it; to spend the coins you physically destroy a transistor, so the stick can be spent only once and the giver cannot have copied the key. Handing it over is analog final settlement — useful, he says, if you were buying a house and did not want to wait for blockchain confirmations, or simply as a gift. It still costs about fifteen dollars to make, and you still need a laptop and the internet to verify the load, so it is more totem than mass-market cash. His second gift is a twelve-sided die whose faces carry formulaic critiques of Bitcoin, one of them his phone carrier’s logo, a joke that the objections have become that repeatable.

Bitcoin is not just any payments protocol. It is impregnated with values, often misunderstood, over which civil wars have been fought. One camp wanted a cheap, scalable, low-fee base layer aimed at peer-to-peer payments; the other wanted a gold-like digital commodity that would settle infrequently, mainly between institutions. Carter stresses that this is one man’s reading: he does not speak for Bitcoin. The number-one value he would name is nondiscretionary monetary policy — algorithmic issuance instead of human tweaking.

Satoshi was explicit that Bitcoin was an alternative to modern central banking, whose constant intervention he thought produced credit bubbles. Half the coins were issued in the first four years, a quarter in the next four, and so on toward twenty-one million. None of those numbers really matter, Carter says; twenty-five million and a steeper or gentler slope would have worked. What matters is that the schedule was proposed before the code was public and that everyone agreed to keep it — a first for a monetary system. Gold has a faint version of the same property, above-ground supply growing maybe one or two percent a year, an “inhuman” feature he considers a virtue. Bitcoin makes the schedule concrete and, crucially, unchangeable: no Bitcoin-denominated bailout, no jubilee. A charismatic leader who somehow raised the cap to thirty million would dilute every holder who had opted into twenty-one million. Bitcoin, he says, has a decent track record of resisting such people.

Lex asks whether a protocol that only settles transactions can carry the hopes people load onto it — freedom, even the meme that “Bitcoin is love.” Carter’s answer is layered. Bitcoin itself is very simple and does not pretend to do much. People superimpose their views. What the system actually gives you are computer-science properties that produce political ones. Anyone can run a node and join consensus; mining is a competitive free market; so miners are unlikely to censor a specific person. That is transactional freedom as a consequence of architecture.

Public-key cryptography adds another political quality. A private key can be encoded in twelve words held in memory, which means seizure resistance: you can leave a jurisdiction with your wealth intact in your brain. A cryptographic feature becomes leverage against a despot. Lex’s unease is that once life savings are on the line, self-preservation turns people dogmatic; they stop being George Washington and lose touch with the founding principles. Carter grants the tension and says he tries to stay balanced despite being heavily exposed.

Lex asks the ridiculous question: is Carter Satoshi? No. He was about sixteen or seventeen when Bitcoin appeared, and he is not really a programmer. Even people who were on the mailing list and in the cypherpunk scene will tell you, sincerely, that they do not know and may not even have a decent guess. Some people, especially on Wall Street, hate the uncertainty. Coinbase’s S-1 listed Satoshi’s possible return as a risk factor. Carter thinks risk-factor sections are usually lawyers dumping every scenario, though from Coinbase’s seat it is a real number: estimates put Satoshi’s stash at one to 1.2 million bitcoin, then worth fifty to sixty billion dollars, if that person ever came back and sold.

Nobody speaks for Bitcoin the way Vitalik Buterin speaks for Ethereum. Influential writers exist, Carter among them, but not one or two official faces. Lex wonders whether a dollar-scale role in society would require more democratic, representative leadership. Most bitcoiner, Carter included, would say the opposite: lack of a leader is a great quality. A charismatic founder, foundation, or corporation that controls the protocol can change features, expropriate holders, or bake in an endowment that gives insiders privileged access to new coins.

He reaches for Richard Cantillon. Money does not enter an economy evenly. People closest to the spigot buy assets before prices rise; people farther away eat the inflation. The last decade of money printing in the United States, he says, made owners of financial assets rich and left everyone else behind. Many altcoins with corporate entities and CEOs can make specific decisions that benefit themselves and their cronies. That buys faster coordination. If you are creating a money, though, what you want to optimize for is monetary credibility and soundness — not constant change, and not the appearance of elites engaged in rent-seeking.

Bitcoin still has influential core developers, a rough meritocracy, and self-appointed high priests. Carter writes a lot and people listen. He claims no authority inside the protocol: “I’m just a scribbler.” The market of ideas is free. That, for him, is the governance model worth protecting, even if it is slower than a CEO.

At the highest level, Bitcoin is a globally shared, replicated ledger. Anyone who wants to be an equal peer can maintain it and stay current with global state. Carter’s analogy is that every monetary system is a ledger. With physical cash, physics is the ledger. With gold, we trust that new gold atoms are hard and expensive to create, though not strictly impossible. With paper dollars, we trust that counterfeiting is hard. Digital checking-account money outsources the ledger to banks and, ultimately, to a central bank.

Bitcoin outsources trust to carefully poised economic incentives. A competitive mining market is supposed to assemble transactions into blocks faithfully, and the network converges on a global state about every ten minutes, with some variance. Miners are not the sole controllers. If you are a merchant accepting bitcoin, Carter says you really want to run a full node and check the whole history — on the order of a few hundred million transactions, a few hundred gigabytes, doable on a consumer laptop. That fact will matter when they get to block size.

Miners are the archivists: they inscribe transactions onto the ledger and get paid to behave. You still do not fully trust them. Running a node means replaying every transaction from the beginning and arriving at the present state yourself, checking that the rules were followed, that coins were created validly, that the inflation schedule was kept, that there is no covert inflation, and that a spend of fifty bitcoin was backed by fifty bitcoin. The system sits between node operators doing anti-counterfeiting checks and industrial miners producing block space.

Miners incur real physical costs, so wrecking the system wrecks their capital. The then-current subsidy was 6.25 bitcoin per block, with bitcoin around fifty-five thousand dollars, so producing a block probably costs about that much: free-market competition, thin margins. Auction a dollar and people will bid ninety-nine cents; miners compete the same way for the right to new units. Proof of work is often sold as a fiendishly hard puzzle. Carter says the individual computation is simple enough to do with pen and paper. You are brute-forcing a huge search space for a needle. If there were a shortcut, the scheme would not work.

Bitcoin has had civil wars. At the time of the taping the conflict was cold, a detente, though Carter expects more. It got ugly enough that a participant was swatted — a fake hostage call that sends a tactical team to the door. On the surface the question was how many megabytes belong in each block. Early software had practical limits; in 2010 Satoshi added a one-megabyte cap in a covert way, with no comments. People have spent thousands of hours on Satoshi’s writings looking for which side he was on, and as with any textual exegesis you can find evidence for both.

Blocks filled up. Users socialized from 2009 to 2015 into a nearly free transactional network asked why they should pay a fee if miners would include them for nothing. One faction said: remove the arbitrary limit, what harm could it do? The other said you must cap data throughput, because raising it excludes ordinary people from running a full node. Block frequency is fixed, so more transactions per second means bigger blocks. Big blockers wanted Visa scale, many orders of magnitude above Bitcoin’s then-current 144 megabytes of space per day, at about 350 bytes per typical transaction, or a few hundred thousand transactions a day.

Small blockers argued that shoving that much data through a broadcast network — everyone must see every transaction — would kill trustlessness. Only one or two industrial nodes would survive; mom-and-pop laptops would give way to data centers owned by large organizations. Carter does not even buy the Visa claim. Visa is effectively one node; it does not need a peer-to-peer architecture. Chains that try for ten million transactions a day, still not Visa scale, are already ugly to operate. The small-block vision was layered scaling: base-layer settlement, payments elsewhere.

From 2015 a wave of competing implementations appeared. Gavin Andresen, the person Satoshi handed the reins to, supported a large-block proposal and did not get consensus; then came Bitcoin Unlimited. In August 2017 the large blockers hard-forked, cloning Bitcoin’s history into Bitcoin Cash so that every then-holder received an equal balance on the new chain. Bitcoin SV later forked from Cash. Carter treats market price as a prediction market: if Cash traded at fifty percent of Bitcoin, you could say the market gave it a fifty percent chance of unseating the original. Both forks, he says, then traded below one percent. Blocks were not even full. The value proposition — raise the block size, get merchant adoption — did not materialize. Full disclosure: his sympathies are with the small blockers, and he thinks they won that skirmish.

Layered scaling, Carter says, is definitely the right model, and it is how all payment systems scale, blockchain or not. There is no analog in traditional finance to “just scale the base layer.” Visa sits something like five layers up, ultimately depending on utility-scale interbank systems such as Fedwire and CHIPS. Those rails are slow and high-assurance. Banks and processors stack on top until you reach Venmo, PayPal, credit, and debit. A credit-card payment is not final when it happens; it may take ninety to 120 days. Payment messages and settlement are different things. Scalability comes from lots of messages settling later, often netted at end of day. Fedwire’s average ticket is in the millions of dollars, with only a few hundred thousand transactions a day.

That is his picture of Bitcoin: a slow, high-assurance final-settlement network for sending value across the globe to someone you do not trust, when both sides need the payment to be irreversible on a short clock. Buying coffee belongs on a second layer — Lightning, sidechains, or a more centralized venue if you prefer. Lex’s gloss is that ordinary commerce assumes basic honesty; you only need the expensive base layer when something goes wrong. Those cases are rare, so it is fine to handle them much more slowly than the flow of transactions. Most of the time when we “spend,” we are not actually exchanging money with finality.

Credit networks are efficient because Visa is guaranteeing your reputation to the merchant, and they are also fraud-prone because payments reverse. Final settlement removes that fraud channel, which is one reason merchants like inbound bitcoin. Frankly, Carter says, most daily transactions do not need that assurance. Physical cash is the exception; most online banking and dollar wallets are not final at all. Lightning is a payments overlay with different assurances that can still fall back to the base layer. The intuition is a bar tab: you do not pay for each beer. You open a channel, exchange cryptographic commitments, and might transact hundreds of thousands of times before settling. Channels can be interlocked, so a friend of a friend can pay you through a path of relationships.

Carter has used it. When he first sold the critique dice online he was an early Lightning merchant. The practical flaw is that you have to prefund channels: injecting liquidity in order to receive a payment is a weird concept. He thinks those user-experience problems can be solved, but the system was still relatively immature.

Schnorr signatures and Taproot were, at the time, the first protocol upgrade since SegWit in 2017, the change that laid groundwork for Lightning. Getting SegWit activated took brinkmanship, threats, and campaigns. This time there is much more consensus that the change is good, and also collective PTSD. The community is dithering over implementation because the last attempt blew up every assumption about how Bitcoin is changed. The live question is not whether to do it. It is what counts as a legitimate, scalable, long-term process that later generations will still consider credible, even when the change itself is uncontroversial. Everybody wants it; they have not fully agreed how to put it in. Classic Bitcoin.

Technically, Schnorr is an alternative signature scheme that had been patent-encumbered when Satoshi created Bitcoin. Cryptographers want schemes to age in public before they are trusted; Schnorr had been around long enough. It is more efficient than the elliptic-curve ECDSA Bitcoin used, especially for multi-signature spends. Taproot hides some transactional conditions from the final on-chain record, a way to make conditional Bitcoin transactions more private. Both are incremental. Privacy and scaling are two sides of the same coin: remove data from the ledger and there is less metadata to surveil, and every byte everyone must store forever becomes more economically dense. You do not get an order-of-magnitude leap. You get a considerable one.

They roll the die. Silk Road: Ross Ulbricht’s early darknet market was a killer app, and a huge fraction of transactions then really were illicit. Today Carter cites about ten billion dollars of daily settlement, the vast majority legitimate. Satoshi’s coins they have already covered. Merchant adoption was the Cash pitch that did not show up. Scalability, in his view, is layers — including institutional ones: an exchange such as Coinbase can settle internally on its own database and periodically settle to Bitcoin; banks could hold bitcoin and issue notes against it. The loudest 2021 critique is energy. If you do not believe Bitcoin is useful, you will think all the electricity is waste, and the debate should often end there as a normative fight over whether the system is entitled to any resources at all.

If you do think it might be useful, mining consumes energy in a peculiar way. It is a geographically independent, always-on buyer, unlike humans who need power near population centers matched to peaks and troughs or the lights go out. The result, Carter argues, is that Bitcoin buys stranded energy — assets that would not make it to a wall socket. That is why so much hashrate sat in China: not a special industrial affection, but surplus in Sichuan, Yunnan, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, provinces far from major cities where huge amounts of power were curtailed. Miners monetized waste. The flip side is nation-state concentration. His current model is a triumvirate of users, developers, and miners, none with unilateral control. In 2017 miners did not want SegWit; users running nodes threatened to implement it anyway, a messy split in the offing, and miners capitulated.

Lex asks him to steelman failure: suppose Bitcoin does not have the impact he expects, value goes to zero or near it, and something else wins. What did he miss? Carter names two conditions. Central banks could clean up their act and stop rampant money printing. He does not expect that. It looks to him as if a new inflationary regime is being normalized to paper over debt, with stirrings already in lumber, food, and financial assets. Bitcoin is dialectical, held in opposition to the established monetary regime. If the dollar became super sound again and the Fed stopped tinkering, cryptocurrency would be much less needed.

The other path is a completely superior design for a state-independent monetary system. That is hard to imagine, he says, because Bitcoin’s launch conditions were extremely favorable and hard to replicate. Birth in the financial crisis makes a nice story; he calls it mostly coincidence, since Satoshi had been working earlier. The special facts are that an anonymous entity sought no glory, apparently never monetized the coins, and — aside from a test transaction to Hal Finney — never spent. Carter reaches for a Promethean register: almost self-sacrificial, a borderline godlike restraint, fifty billion dollars unclaimed. Satoshi also wrote no founder allotment into the code, no “I own ten percent,” and only mined in open competition. Then, in a George Washington move, Satoshi left around 2010–2011 and has not been heard from. Lex’s comparison: Washington could have been king; Satoshi could have been Jerome Powell, and chose to walk.

From January 2009 to about July 2010 the coins circulated with no real financial value and no marketplaces. That produced a broad, organic distribution among enthusiasts instead of venture funds vacuuming supply. New coins, by contrast, are often heavily pre-mined, with a giant Silicon Valley fund owning on the order of thirty percent — an oligarchical structure Carter cannot square with global money. If Satoshi returned with Bitcoin 2.0, the land grab would be ferocious. A proof-of-work chain would just attract capital into mining; most new chains are simply sold. Airdrops, he says, do not work because most people do not care. He doubts a competitor will match Bitcoin’s decentralization, leaderlessness, and credibility on those features.

Could Ethereum overtake Bitcoin? He does not rule it out. He thinks Ethereum’s leadership was wise enough not to compete on Bitcoin’s deepest qualities. Ethereum does not aspire to be sounder money; its leadership has been tweaking monetary policy. It does not compete on leaderless governance either: there is a foundation, a charismatic leader, and a habit of hard forks. In Bitcoin those are extremely rare; in Ethereum they are the default way to change things. The system is more adaptive and more complex, and it takes more risk each time it moves. Ethereum went for a platform, a richer transactional layer, faster change, and a more mutable policy. Carter still thinks Bitcoin is the more disruptive of the two because it is better equipped to challenge sovereign currencies.

They can coexist. Bitcoin had already been tokenized onto Ethereum — over a billion dollars’ worth at the time — so the relationship is mutualistic, like a rhino and the bird on its back, or an alligator and the fish that cleans its teeth. He is not sure who is the parasite. Ethereum offers flexibility, experimentation, and decentralized finance; Bitcoin offers collateral with useful volatility. Locking bitcoin into a third-party protocol is a supply sink that, in his view, reduces velocity and is probably good for bitcoin’s valuation.

On Vitalik, Carter is mixed. The infamous 2016 bailout still bothers him. A smart contract that much of the leadership had backed — The DAO — was hacked, on the order of fourteen percent of ether, and the foundation, with Vitalik’s support, changed the underlying protocol to undo it. To Carter that was not prudent: violating core rules to rescue a specific failed contract shook credibility, and it is one reason he became disenchanted. Lots of Ethereum users have lost money in hacks that were not bailed out. Intervening for this one demonstrated that protocol-level elites can exercise control. To their credit they have not done a comparable bailout since, but it normalized the practice and weakened the social contract. His theory of the motive: they planned to move to proof of stake, where political control tracks wealth, and did not want the attacker inheriting influence.

Lex analogizes to auto bailouts, COVID rescues, and Japan’s 1990s slow-motion insolvency, when firms were not allowed to fail and the corporate sector lost competitiveness. Carter generally wants markets to clear. Lex pushes on the human cost: lost jobs, families, Paul Farmer at a dying child’s bedside in Haiti — a move that is deeply human and not game-theoretically scalable. Carter locates the same tension in modern central banking. The Fed has had an incentive to cut since the 1980s, injecting capital whenever asset prices wobbled, building long-term fragility. The collapse, he argues, is worse than taking the medicine. That is Ray Dalio’s long-term debt cycle, and we are near the end of one because we never truly deleveraged.

Will bitcoin hit a million dollars? Carter will not set a target. One path is that bitcoin’s real value stays put and the dollar depreciates; he does not expect hyperinflation, but he will not rule the number out. Bitcoin then sat slightly under one-tenth the value of all gold, gold being some ten to eleven trillion dollars. Does he think bitcoin can be more culturally and economically salient than gold in two decades? One hundred percent. Twelve years earlier it was unknown; at taping, about a hundred million people worldwide owned some. He does not think monetization and global adoption are finished. Tune the S-curve however you like — five hundred million, a billion.

His operational expectation is exactly Lex’s sketch: banks and Visa using bitcoin as a base layer while the surface still looks like today’s rails. Visa, PayPal, and Square had already embraced it, without tearing out existing infrastructure. Banks had the green light to custody bitcoin for depositors. Either bitcoin-native firms become banks — some exchanges already chasing licenses — or banks treat bitcoin as a reserve asset. It will not power every transaction; it will coexist with sovereign money. As a reserve it is highly auditable and cheap to take delivery of. A bank can prove its bitcoin; proving vaulted gold is harder. Depositors can run the bank in a way they cannot easily do by hauling out pounds of cash.

Tesla’s purchase he cannot explain. He would love to know Elon Musk’s genuine view, because the mixed signals, especially the embrace of Dogecoin, are hard to parse. Dogecoin was Carter’s own on-ramp: mining in a dorm in 2013, tipping people, a playful culture standing against Bitcoin’s Austrian-economics seriousness. The community paid to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics and put the logo on a NASCAR car. Fast-forward seven or eight years and the leadership is gone, the spirit evaporated, the meme old — though one influential figure can reinvigorate it, which is exactly the leadership tension they discussed. He thinks a lot of people buying on Musk’s implied guidance will lose money. Dogecoin is an ancient Bitcoin fork, unmaintained, merge-mined, and if an inflation bug hit it is unclear who would fix it. He would not store wealth there.

The hard part of crypto, Lex and Carter agree, is that interesting political and cultural experiments sit on top of financial incentives. Young people who stop having fun and start getting greedy are making decisions that can take freedom out of their lives. There is now over a trillion dollars at stake. Buy because a TikTok influencer said so and you have made a financial decision, whether anyone scolds you or not. Elite hedge funds, billions of dollars of them, are trying to front-run that sentiment. “It’s a water full of sharks.” Nothing here, both men stress, is financial advice; the interest is ideas.

NFT mania, Carter says, is partly a credit-cycle story. Inflationary episodes historically come with speculative manias because people feel fiat being debased and hunt for somewhere to put it — stocks, property, commodities, then new asset classes. Stimulus and low rates sent cash into options, Robinhood volumes, crypto, even baseball cards. NFTs are a novel slot in that rotation, a way to trade art, collectibles, and in-game items. The technical idea is not new. Unique tokens existed on Bitcoin in 2016 under other names: a serial string on a public chain. The hard part is the external reference. Someone has to say this unique string means that artwork or card. The broad concept — barcodes on-chain, freely tradable, plugged into exchanges — has product-market fit and will persist. Aggregate valuations may well contract. Signed, enduring collectibles on a chain, he thinks, will not go away.

Lex wonders about identity-staking experiments such as BitClout, less as finance than as a bridge between physical and digital reality. Carter’s first reaction is that it seems shady, a bit like a scam; he does not like betting on people’s ascension, and his own BitClout persona had a market cap around ninety thousand dollars while he had done nothing there. Big-name investors make him hesitate to use the word scam, but it has Ponzi-like dynamics, like much of crypto, plus a live legal question about using likenesses without permission. On the larger idea he is emphatic: public-chain architecture for decentralized, alternative social media. Open protocols and namespaces, gathering spaces with strong property rights in identity and data, not dependence on a single Silicon Valley node — the Twitter node, the Facebook node. He does not know if it will be a blockchain. He thinks the template is right, and urgent.

Lex asks about Bitcoin-maximalist toxicity — mockery as an ethical style. Carter says you can define your own path; his is to minimize harshness, though Twitter brings out meanness and he had already retired an account with a hundred thousand followers. He wishes bitcoiners were gentler, and he will not pretend tens of thousands of Twitter accounts represent a hundred million holders. The hardness is a learned habit. Best-funded companies, powerful miners, and billionaires tried to reshape Bitcoin; without hard-core “high priests” the protocol would have been hopelessly malleable. That does not justify random toxicity. The protocol is money for enemies: a payment stays final no matter how odious the counterparty. He takes Lex’s side that patience and care let the idea shine, and he also says many critics operate in extreme bad faith because Bitcoin is an intensely political proposal. A professor musing about putting all the coins on a boat and sinking it is, in any other context, a joke about mass murder.

Asked what makes a good writer, Carter points to a post of his: impressive writing is not the same as effective writing, and the difference is humility. Pride and vanity make a noisy channel for moving ideas from one brain to another. If you cannot explain a complex crypto topic simply, his presumption is that you are obfuscating — the sin Orwell saw in political language and euphemism. For people entering Bitcoin he would start with the white paper and Satoshi’s posts on Bitcoin Talk, then *The Bitcoin Standard*, Nik Bhatia’s *Layered Money*, Jonathan Bier’s *The Block Size War*, and technical books such as *Grokking Bitcoin* and Arvind Narayanan’s Princeton text. Career advice he mostly distrusts, because luck disguises itself as a green tie. What he did right was get obsessed with a promising domain, publish thoughts in public even when they were wrong, and take as many shots on goal as possible. Bitcoiners, accused of rooting for collapse, are in his telling wildly optimistic: they think you can monetize a new system from scratch against the strongest superpower, the military, and the dollar. That, he says, is the craziest optimistic proposition imaginable.