The Trust Problem Was Never About Bitcoin
Why "Crypto" as a term is such an annoyance.
Editor’s note (Aug 12): I wrote this before BIP-110’s fork fully played out. The argument about mimetic desire and crypto conflation still holds. But the monolith framing — Bitcoin as structurally outside the sacrificial economy, with no center to capture — is under more pressure than it was when I wrote it. Pool concentration and capital-market dependence raise a real question about convergent institutional capture. I’m still working through what that means for the argument below. Read it as a snapshot, not a final word.
I still have to explain the difference between Bitcoin and crypto in professional conversations.
People I respect. People who read carefully. People who ask good questions about institutions and money and trust.
And I don’t always win.
That used to frustrate me. It doesn’t anymore. Because I’ve come to understand that the difficulty isn’t informational. The information is all there. The case has been made, many times, by people far more credentialed than me.
The problem is something else entirely.
A few months ago I wrote about René Girard and what he called mimetic desire — the idea that we don’t want things because of their intrinsic properties. We want them because someone else wants them.
Desire is not self-generated. It travels by imitation.
The child doesn’t reach for the toy until another child reaches for it first. The investor doesn’t chase the asset until he sees someone else getting rich. We think we are choosing. We are mostly copying.
Girard spent his career showing that this pattern doesn’t stay benign. When enough people imitate the same desire, they become rivals. They are all reaching for the same thing. The original object almost disappears — what remains is the rivalry itself.
And rivalrous crowds, Girard observed, have a predictable release valve.
They find a scapegoat.
Not through conspiracy. Not through deliberate cruelty. Through a kind of collective instinct. Someone — or something — is identified as the source of the disorder. The crowd unifies around their expulsion. Tension releases. Peace returns.
Until the next fracture.
I argued in that essay that this pattern runs through every system — markets, AI, institutions, online discourse. No technology escapes it. Because the pattern isn’t in the technology. It’s in us.
But I want to go somewhere more specific now.
Because nowhere in recent memory has this played out more visibly — or done more lasting damage — than in what happened to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin arrived with a price.
And the moment it had a price, it became a model for desire.
What the crowd copied wasn’t the fixed supply. Not the decentralized ledger. Not the proof of work. Not the 21 million. Not the decade of blocks produced without a CEO, without a foundation, without a marketing budget.
They copied the going up.
So you get a thousand coins imitating the surface signal — scarcity theater, whitepaper aesthetics, the vocabulary of revolution — without the substance underneath. Each one mimicking the desire Bitcoin generated, not Bitcoin itself.
This is Girard’s mimetic crisis in compressed form. As the imitators multiplied, distinctions collapsed. Everything started to look the same. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin — same asset class, same conversation, same carnival.
And when the crowd finally broke — as it always does — it needed a scapegoat.
2022 provided several. FTX. Celsius. Terra Luna. The crowd was satisfied. Justice was served. The guilty were named.
But here is what Girard also understood: the scapegoat mechanism only works if the crowd remains convinced the victim deserved it. The moment innocence is revealed — the moment the expelled party turns out to have been carrying something real — the whole structure is exposed.
Bitcoin kept producing blocks.
No CEO to prosecute. No foundation to discredit. No pre-mine to expose. It was never part of the sacrificial economy. The carnival burned and the monolith was still standing in the cold on the other side.
The people who should have seen this earliest were the most systematically alienated from it.
Journalists. Economists. Policy thinkers who already distrust institutions. People who had connected every dot about monetary debasement — the post-2008 era, two decades of suppressed rates, wars financed by borrowing and socialized through inflation.
People who could look at a chart showing homeownership costs climbing year after year and understand immediately that this is not a housing problem. It is a monetary reckoning. Every input repriced in a currency that spent twenty years lying about what things cost.
They connect all of it. The war that costs as much in two months as Afghanistan averaged per quarter over twenty years. The housing bill that grew faster than inflation on every single line item. The stock market that now runs on a single bet — AI infrastructure — because the political system will always find a way to protect the assets of the people who matter.
They see the pattern. They name the disease.
And then they still can’t separate Bitcoin from the carnival it arrived bundled with.
That is not a knowledge gap.
It is a trust problem layered on top of a mimetic problem.
The very confidence of the Bitcoin/crypto distinction reads as a red flag to people trained by experience to distrust certainty. They’ve watched too many people speak with equal conviction about their particular coin. Conviction itself became suspicious. The mimetic noise of a decade of charlatans did its work — not by defeating the argument, but by making the argument sound like every other argument.
So you’re never just making the case. You’re making it against the accumulated residue of everyone who argued badly before you.
That’s the conversation I’m still having. One professional at a time.
The image that keeps coming to me is a split frame.
On the left: fire, clowns, carnival. Figures in the crowd dancing around burning cash. The spectacle of mimetic desire at full volume — nobody wanting the thing itself, everyone wanting what everyone else wants.
On the right: a monolith. Stone. Cold. Alone. Indifferent to the fire. Not fleeing it, not watching it. Just there. Still producing blocks.
The monolith didn’t survive the carnival. It was never part of it.
I’m not making a theological claim about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not a savior.
Every monetary system in history has hidden its costs. Debasement happens slowly. Wars get financed in the dark. The bill arrives a decade later as rising prices, as a 39% increase in what it costs to own a house, as a generation that cannot afford to begin.
Bitcoin makes the ledger visible. It doesn’t transform desire. It doesn’t fix human nature. It doesn’t prevent the crowd from forming.
But it refuses to hide the cost.
In a world where every institution has learned to defer onto the next balance sheet, the next generation, the next rate cycle, the next supplemental, one honest ledger is not a small thing.
Further Reading
René Girard, The Scapegoat
Paul Weaver writes at paulweaver34.substack.com on Bitcoin, faith, institutional trust, and the spaces between worlds.