Come on Guy, you’re smarter than this. I know she’s your friend, but that’s not what I’m arguing about.
If money is a ledger, what is the unit in which entries on that ledger are recorded? Without a meaningful, salable monetary good, the ledger is just empty math - a glorified spreadsheet with no market value.
She wrote a 400-page book on money, defined it in a way that borders on trivial, and somehow didn’t cite Mises, Rothbard, or Hoppe even once. I mean, what? That alone tells me her grasp of monetary theory is shallow at best. She treats money like a tech abstraction, ignoring the deep economic roots that give it value.
And then there’s the claim: “Scribbling on USD doesn’t ruin USD, so it doesn’t ruin Bitcoin either.” That’s not just wrong, it’s embarrassingly naive. It confuses physical defacement with systemic degradation.
When you scribble on a dollar bill, you’re not harming the monetary system. You’re just defacing a piece of paper that can be easily replaced. The dollar’s infrastructure, banking networks, clearing systems, the Fed, remains fully intact.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is its infrastructure. The timechain is the monetary system. When you cram it with JPEGs, meme tokens, and non-monetary junk, you’re not scribbling on the surface, you’re polluting the foundation. That’s permanent economic friction. And in Bitcoin, economic friction becomes consensus risk over time.
Every non-monetary use dilutes Bitcoin’s function as money. Thanks to mining centralisation that you’re well aware of, the censorship resistance is not a set in stone guarantee anymore. If you degrade the monetary premium, the very thing that gives Bitcoin value, beyond its network effects, is mostly gone.
Take silver vs. gold: silver is more “useful” as a base metal, but gold dominates as monetary commodity because it’s better suited to store value. Same logic applies here. Bitcoin’s strength is in doing one thing better than anything else: being incorruptible, decentralized money. That’s what gives it staying power.
So yes, there’s a direct correlation between “scribbling on Bitcoin” and ruining it as money. The only question is: how much scribbling does it take to ruin the system over the long haul?
P.S. I never said that she claim Bitcoin to be a general database.
