We truly cannot make this up. In a world currently grappling with the devastating aftermath of persistent inflation, ballooning sovereign debt, and profound shifts in global finance, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently took to the pages of the Daily Mail to deliver a financial hot take for the ages. His core thesis ? Pokémon cards are a fundamentally more sound investment than Bitcoin.

This was not an article published in a satirical outlet like The Onion or The Daily Mash. This was a genuine column, penned by a man who recently held the highest political office in a G7 nation, fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of money, fraud, and technology.

To justify labeling the world’s foremost cryptocurrency a “Ponzi scheme,” Johnson leaned heavily on a tragic, yet entirely localized, anecdote. He recounted the story of an elderly man from his village who handed over £500 to a stranger in a local pub. This stranger promised to magically double the money. Instead, over the next three and a half years, the scammer drained the elderly man of £20,000 in various “fees” and administrative costs. Because this con artist happened to mutter the word “crypto” while executing a classic advance-fee fraud, Johnson confidently concluded that Bitcoin itself is the scam.

This level of economic analysis is not just intellectually lazy ; it is dangerously misleading to a public desperately seeking safe havens for their wealth. It demands a rigorous dismantling, not just to defend a digital asset, but to expose the glaring blind spots of the political class that continues to mismanage our traditional financial system.

Let us begin with the most glaring logical fallacy in Johnson’s column : conflating a decentralized software protocol with the malicious actions of a human criminal.

Bitcoin did not steal a single penny from the elderly man in the pub. A con artist did. What Johnson described with such indignation is one of the oldest tricks in the criminal playbook—an advance-fee fraud. It is the same psychological manipulation used in the infamous “Nigerian Prince” email scams, romantic catfishing, or traditional boiler room operations. The scammer promises an unrealistic return, demands continuous upfront fees to “unlock” the phantom funds, and eventually vanishes into the night.

The criminal in Johnson’s village could have just as easily promised to invest the £500 in foreign exchange markets, rare gold coins, a bridge in Brooklyn, or even a pristine, first-edition holographic Charizard. The vehicle of the promised return is entirely irrelevant to the mechanics of the scam. The fraud lies in the deception, not the asset being used as the bait.

Concluding that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme because a criminal used its name to defraud a pensioner is exactly like calling the US Dollar or the British Pound a scam because someone got robbed at knifepoint next to a Barclays ATM.

A Ponzi scheme is a very specific type of financial fraud. It requires a central operator who takes capital from new investors to pay fake returns to early investors, relying on an ever-expanding base of victims to keep the illusion alive until the inevitable collapse (think Bernie Madoff or Charles Ponzi himself).

Bitcoin has no central operator. It has no CEO, no marketing department, no sales pitch, and no corporate headquarters. It yields no dividend and promises no return. It is simply a decentralized software protocol—a neutral, open-source ledger of transactions maintained by thousands of independent nodes worldwide. Blaming a neutral mathematical ledger for the existence of thieves is a profound category error.

What Johnson conveniently left out of his column is the objective, verifiable reality of what Bitcoin actually is and how it performs on the global stage. He dismissed it as a fleeting illusion, ignoring empirical data that paints a vastly different picture of its role in the modern economy.

1. Massive Scale and Liquidity

Bitcoin is not a shadowy pub-corner hustle. It is a mature, $1.42 trillion asset class. To put that staggering figure into perspective, its market capitalization rivals or exceeds some of the largest, most established publicly traded companies on Earth, including Meta and Silver. Furthermore, it boasts a daily trading volume of roughly $62 billion. This kind of deep, sustained, 24/7 liquidity is characteristic of a major global currency or commodity, not a localized Ponzi scheme waiting to collapse.

2. Radical Transparency

The bitter irony of the pub scam is that if the elderly man had actually bought Bitcoin and held it himself in self-custody, he would have interacted with the most transparent financial network in human history. Bitcoin runs on a public blockchain. Every single transaction, dating back to the very first genesis block mined in 2009, is permanently recorded, universally verifiable, and entirely auditable by anyone with an internet connection. Traditional banking operates in closed silos, requiring blind trust in opaque institutions that often obscure risk. Bitcoin operates out in the open, relying on cryptographic truth rather than corporate promises.

3. Unrivaled Performance

If we are to talk about investment value—which Johnson attempted to do with his Pikachu comparison—the math is unforgiving to his argument. Bitcoin has outperformed every single fiat currency, stock index, and precious metal on Earth over any rolling four-year window since its inception.

The four-year metric is not an arbitrary cherry-picked number ; it aligns with Bitcoin’s built-in “halving” cycle. Every four years, the new supply of the asset issued to miners is automatically cut in half, enforcing its absolute, programmatic scarcity. While the price is famously volatile in the short term, its long-term trajectory has been a steady march of value accretion, driven by growing global adoption and its strictly capped supply of exactly 21 million coins.

This brings us, finally, back to Pikachu.

Johnson’s assertion that a piece of cardboard featuring a cartoon mouse is a superior store of value to Bitcoin is a masterclass in financial illiteracy. Yes, rare collectibles have robust markets. A first-edition Charizard can fetch a handsome price at auction due to nostalgia, physical condition, and physical scarcity. But a trading card is fundamentally not money.

You cannot divide a Pokémon card into 100 million smaller, fungible units to buy a cup of coffee or price a loaf of bread. (Bitcoin is endlessly divisible into Satoshis).

You cannot beam a Pokémon card across the globe to a relative in El Salvador in three seconds, settling instantly on an immutable final ledger without an intermediary taking a cut.

You cannot cryptographically verify the authenticity of a Pokémon card without relying on a centralized, subjective grading authority (like PSA) that charges hefty fees and introduces human error.

Bitcoin represents a profound technological and economic breakthrough : the discovery of absolute, verifiable digital scarcity. It allows humanity, for the very first time, to store wealth in a decentralized network that cannot be inflated, manipulated, or censored by any CEO, board of directors, or Prime Minister.

In conclusion, the assertion « Pokémon cards are a fundamentally more sound investment than Bitcoin » is false.