Bitcoin and the Seduction of Inevitability
You’re going to be a lot better off owning productive assets over the next 50 years than you will be owning pieces of paper or bitcoin — Warren Buffet 2014.
The Thing I Could Not Quite Name
There has always been something about Bitcoin, and the cryptocurrency culture around it, that bothered me.
I do not own any cryptocurrency. I have no interest in buying any. That is not because I have failed to hear the argument. Quite the opposite. My brother, Fred Krueger, is a passionate Bitcoin enthusiast and has even written a book called Bitcoin One Million: The Final Chapter of Fiat. My skepticism has nothing to do with sibling rivalry, although, like most brothers, we have certainly had plenty of that.
For a long time, I could not quite put my finger on what disturbed me about Bitcoin. It was not the technology itself. I understand the elegance of a decentralized ledger. I understand the appeal of money that cannot be printed at will by governments. I understand why, after decades of inflation, bailouts, debt expansion, and financial manipulation, people would want an escape hatch.
What bothers me is something more psychological and historical.
Bitcoin has become too compelling a narrative. It projects too far into the future with too much certainty. It does not merely say, “Here is an interesting technology.” It says, “Here is the inevitable end of history.”
And that is where I get nervous, because I have seen this kind of story before.
Growing Up Around Historical Inevitability
I grew up in France in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when communist and Marxist historical narratives were still intellectually powerful. I lived in Sèvres, a town with a strong communist presence, and the French Communist Party was still a major force in national politics.
This was not some fringe student movement. Communism had newspapers, unions, intellectuals, municipal governments, international allies, and an entire theory of history behind it. The French Communist Party represented 20% of the electorate. More importantly, it had the Soviet Union — a nuclear superpower that, at the height of the Cold War, possessed roughly half the world’s strategic weapons and stood as the military embodiment of the communist alternative.
To understand the magnitude of that influence, consider how a committed ideological minority can shape a national conversation far beyond its raw numbers. In the United States today, evangelical Christians represent only a portion of the electorate (23% to be exact), yet they exercise enormous influence on national politics, judicial appointments, education, sexuality, and abortion law.
France in the 1970s had its own version of that dynamic on the left: a disciplined, ideologically confident movement that believed history was on its side.
The Communist Story
That was the great power of communism. It did not merely offer policies. It offered inevitability.
The story went like this: capitalism would concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands — think Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The owners of capital would become richer, more dominant, and more detached from ordinary life. The working classes would be squeezed until the contradiction became unbearable. Eventually, the workers would rise up and overthrow the system.
The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie would give way to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and history would finally resolve itself.
It was a grand story.
It had villains.
It had victims.
It had a mechanism.
It had a destination.
And for a while, it appeared to be coming true.
When the Map Seemed to Prove the Theory
The Russian Revolution of 1917 seemed to be the first great breach in the capitalist order. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 made communism look like a global force. Then came Vietnam, Cuba, parts of Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, and revolutionary movements throughout Central America.
If you opened an atlas in the late 1970s, it really did look as though the United States and its European allies were in retreat while communism advanced across the globe.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, many people did not believe he could reverse that tide. The communist narrative seemed not only plausible, but historically validated. I was eighteen at the time.
And yet the cracks were already there.
The Cracks in the Ideology
In 1978, communist Vietnam went to war with the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Vietnam was backed by the Soviet Union. The Khmer Rouge were backed by China.
Then, in 1979, China invaded Vietnam. Again, these were communist countries fighting communist countries.
Around the same time, communist Ethiopia and communist Eritrean movements were locked in brutal conflict in Africa, often with one side backed by Moscow and another by Beijing.
Meanwhile, Deng Xiaoping’s China began moving closer to the capitalist United States in order to counterbalance the Soviet Union.
At some point, it became impossible to pretend that ideology explained everything. The old-fashioned interests of states, borders, armies, markets, and power had not disappeared. They had merely put on ideological clothing.
History had not ended. Human nature had not been abolished. Nation-states had not transcended self-interest. The narrative of communist inevitability turned out to be far more fragile than it appeared.
What Remained After the Faith Faded
I have traveled to China. I have lived in Southeast Asia. I do not meet many people there today who are particularly interested in converting me to communist ideology.
Most of the Chinese people I know are interested in making money, educating their children, buying property, building businesses, and improving their lives.
The revolution became a state.
The state became a market machine.
The ideology became wallpaper.
This is what I think about when I listen to Bitcoin maximalists.
The script feels familiar.
Bitcoin’s Own Theory of Inevitability
Bitcoin maximalism has its own theory of historical inevitability.
It says, in essence, that fiat currencies — the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Chinese yuan, the Indian Rupee, the Japanese yen — are doomed because the governments behind them are doomed to overpromise, overspend, overborrow, and overprint.
Welfare states will become too expensive. Aging populations will demand benefits that cannot be paid. Debt will compound. Political leaders will lack the courage to tell voters no. Eventually, governments will debase their currencies to preserve the illusion of solvency.
Then, as fiat money weakens, governments will tax wealth more aggressively, regulate capital more harshly, and try desperately to trap citizens inside failing monetary systems.
The rich will seek escape. The middle class will seek protection. The poor will be crushed by inflation.
And when all the paper currencies have revealed themselves as political instruments rather than stores of value, one asset will remain standing: Bitcoin.
Not the dictatorship of the proletariat this time.
The dictatorship of the protocol.
Gold, But Better Than Gold
In this story, Bitcoin becomes the final money. The one incorruptible asset. The one monetary system politicians cannot manipulate. The one store of value immune to central banks, bureaucrats, and the endless temptation to print.
Because there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, the argument goes, its value must rise as the world’s trust in fiat falls.
It is gold, but better than gold.
Gold is heavy. Gold is hard to move. Gold can be seized. Gold must be stored, guarded, assayed, and transported.
Bitcoin, by contrast, is digital, borderless, algorithmic, and theoretically portable across any frontier. You can carry it in your head, convert it in a friendly jurisdiction, and escape the predations of the state.
That is a very powerful story.
It may even contain a lot of truth.
The Problem With a Perfect Story
Governments do debase currencies. Debt does matter. Inflation is not imaginary. Central banks are political institutions, whatever their claims of independence. Fiat money ultimately rests on trust, law, taxation, military power, and habit.
None of those things are eternal.
But the problem with a compelling narrative is that it can become more real to its believers than reality itself.
Bitcoin has been around for roughly a generation in technology terms, and yet you still cannot use it in any normal sense as money. You cannot easily use it to buy a slice of pizza. You cannot pay your mortgage in it. You cannot use it at the grocery store.
Its practical role is not currency but speculative asset, ideological symbol, and long-term store-of-value bet.
That does not make it worthless. Lots of things are valuable without being currencies. Art is valuable. Land is valuable. Gold is valuable. A beachfront lot is valuable. Bitcoin just happens to have extreme liquidity for now.
But when something claims to be the future of money and, after nearly two decades, functions mostly as something people hold rather than spend, it is fair to ask whether the narrative has outrun the evidence.
The Deflation Problem
There is also the problem of deflation.
Bitcoin’s fixed supply is one of its central attractions. No politician can print more Bitcoin. No central banker can inflate the supply to rescue a failing government or stimulate a slowing economy.
But that same feature also makes Bitcoin inherently deflationary if it were ever to become the dominant currency.
If economic activity grows while the money supply remains fixed, each unit of money becomes more valuable over time.
That sounds wonderful if you own the money.
It sounds less wonderful if you owe the money.
Deflationary currencies punish debtors. They reward hoarding. They make people reluctant to spend. They make loans harder to repay because the money owed becomes more valuable over time.
In a growing economy, a deflationary currency can become a trap: everyone wants to hold money, nobody wants to part with it, and debtors are crushed by obligations that become heavier every year.
We have seen this movie before. In the late nineteenth century, hard money nearly reopened the wounds of the Civil War, pitting debtors, farmers, and frontier states against the creditor class of the East. By the 1930s, the same deflationary logic of the gold standard helped turn a severe downturn into the Great Depression.
America’s Own Hard-Money Fight
The United States struggled with versions of this problem in the nineteenth century.
After the Civil War, the country wrestled bitterly over hard money, greenbacks, gold, silver, debt, farmers, creditors, railroads, and regional development.
The monetary question was not an abstraction. It was a fight over who would bear the burden of growth: the creditor East or the debtor West and South.
Hard money may sound virtuous in theory. In practice, it often means that people who already have capital become stronger, while people trying to build farms, railroads, towns, and businesses are squeezed.
A rigid monetary system can preserve value, but it can also preserve hierarchy.
That is why American monetary history was so explosive. The fight over gold and silver was not just technical. It was sectional, political, moral, and economic.
It was about whether the future belonged only to creditors or also to builders.
The Advantage of Arriving Early
Bitcoin enthusiasts often speak as though the fixed supply solves the problem of money once and for all.
I suspect it merely relocates the problem.
It protects holders against debasement, but it creates a world in which early holders have enormous advantage over everyone who arrives later.
It is a monetary system that rewards conviction, but also timing.
And timing is not morality.
This is where the Bitcoin narrative begins to resemble other totalizing ideologies. It explains too much. It predicts too confidently. It divides the world too neatly between those who understand and those who do not.
It turns skepticism into ignorance, caution into cowardice, and uncertainty into betrayal.
The Citizens of the Future
The believers are not merely investors.
They are early citizens of the future.
Everyone else is still trapped in fiat illusion.
That structure of belief is what I distrust.
Not because Bitcoin is obviously wrong. It may not be. Bitcoin may continue to rise. It may become a permanent part of the global financial system. It may function as digital gold. It may become a reserve asset. It may protect people in countries with collapsing currencies. It may prove to be one of the most important inventions of the twenty-first century.
But none of that requires believing in inevitability.
When Analysis Becomes Theology
The danger is not that Bitcoin has no value.
The danger is that its most passionate advocates often treat its future as already settled.
The story is so elegant that it becomes immune to contradiction. Every price increase confirms the prophecy. Every crash proves the weakness of unbelievers. Every government regulation proves that the state is afraid. Every failure of adoption is temporary. Every criticism is fiat thinking.
That is not analysis.
That is theology.
Communism once had its own theology of inevitability. It believed that history had a direction, that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, and that the future had already chosen sides.
For a while, the map seemed to confirm it.
Then reality intruded. Communist states fought each other. National interest defeated international solidarity. Markets returned through the back door. The workers did not unite in the way the theory predicted.
The narrative survived in slogans, but history moved on.
The Part That Bothers Me
Bitcoin’s future may be very different.
It is not communism. It is not a state ideology. It does not command armies or run prisons. It is a protocol, an asset, a network, and a belief system.
But the emotional architecture feels familiar: the promise of historical inevitability, the collapse of the old order, the salvation of the elect, and the final vindication of those who saw the future first.
That is what bothers me.
I do not object to Bitcoin because I am certain it will fail.
I object to the certainty that it must succeed.
There is also a political problem that Bitcoin advocates rarely address. The blockchain is public. Its transparency is part of its genius, but also part of its danger. If Bitcoin were ever to become the last reliable store of value in a collapsing fiat world, the early holders would not merely be wealthy; they would be visibly wealthy. In a society where government payments failed, pensions were impaired, and ordinary people felt abandoned, that visibility could become politically explosive. A transparent ledger does not just record wealth. In a crisis, it may also identify targets.
History Never Follows a White Paper
The future is never that clean.
History never follows a white paper.
Human beings are too contradictory, governments too adaptable, markets too strange, and technology too unpredictable. Every ideology that claims to have solved the future should be treated with suspicion.
Bitcoin may be gold. It may be a bubble. It may be a hedge. It may be a religion. It may be a brilliant invention wrapped in a bad philosophy. It may be a good trade surrounded by a dangerous story.
But whenever someone tells me that history has only one possible destination, I reach for my wallet — not to buy in, but to make sure it is still there.
