Blockchain, Bitcoin and Intermediated Payments: Celebrating Falsehoods

00:00:00 Intermediation of Payments
00:11:17 Trusting the Messenger
00:14:54 Recreating Old Problems
00:21:26 The Trust Issue
00:27:06 The Evolution of Money
00:35:53 The Future of Currency
00:41:28 The Illusion of Stability
00:48:51 The Illusion of Value
00:57:03 Low Faith Innovation
01:05:50 Speculation and Value
01:08:26 The Illusion of Stability
01:33:12 High Faith vs. Wealth
01:35:24 Renegotiating Governance
01:38:32 The Illusion of Bitcoin

The Bitcoin white paper promised “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” What we see today is the opposite: intermediated FX tricks, custodial risk, and false celebrations of “using” Bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper carried a bold title:
“Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”
It promised money without banks — instant, final settlement between two people, like handing over coins but digital. But what are we celebrating today? Falsehoods.
Take the Swiss Spar supermarket example that sparked this discussion: “Bitcoin accepted here.” In reality, the customer pays through DFX, custody sits with Binance, an unregulated custodian and centralised exchange that we are expected to trust and who do not segregate customer assets and funds. It’s not peer-to-peer. It’s an intermediated FX trade dressed up as Bitcoin.
Or stablecoins, sold as “fully backed digital dollars.” In practice, they behave like tokenised money-market funds: Treasuries in reserve, attestations not audits, and issuers keeping the yield while users hold the claim. When runs happen, there’s no lender of last resort.
Instead of disintermediation, we’ve rebuilt the very system Bitcoin was meant to replace:
- Exchanges as unregulated banks
- Single points of failure re-emerging
- Principles-based regulation gamed by clever structuring
- Marketing hype that papers over structural fragility
This conversation with Gregory Chew, Craig Everett, and Ulf Wiger calls it out directly: how crypto has drifted from its founding promise into a theatre of illusions.
If you want to see why “using Bitcoin” today is rarely what it seems — and why stablecoins don’t solve the problem either — this is where to start.