Lately I have noticed something that keeps happening when I talk to people new to Bitcoin.

As I start explaining how fiat money works – how it’s created out of thin air, who gets the new money first, and how it quietly transfers wealth and power to the few – I watch the other person’s expression change. After their initial curiosity, an unease settles in.

What is interesting is that the visible discomfort isn’t usually about the details I am trying to convey. Most people already know the world is an unfair and messy place. What seems to bother them is the way I am saying it. And mainly, that I am saying it at all.

To them, I sound like a conspiracy theorist. Like I am looking for villains and secret plots instead of just seeing ordinary incompetence or things accidentally snowballing into something ugly. They would rather have me quiet.

I hear some version of the same pushback again and again: ‘Not everything is a grand conspiracy, you know.’

In saying that, these people are not really defending the fiat system. They are defending the image of the world they are embedded in. They are protecting a basic assumption that the institutions and money we grew up with are still basically trustworthy. Questioning these beliefs feels destabilising to them.

This reaction has started to fascinate me, because it points to something very old in us. We are wired for trust. For most of human history, survival depended on being able to cooperate and believe in the people around us. But we have also been burned enough times. The human story is full of betrayals, wars, and governments that turn tyrannical. It proves we can’t rely on trust alone. Distrust is a vital survival strategy too. If we want to thrive, not just survive, we must apply healthy scepticism when needed.

However, when someone suggests that the money itself might be quietly exploiting that deep need to trust, to people, it doesn’t feel just like an economic discussion anymore. It feels like I am pulling away the cushion they have been resting on.

That is why Bitcoin lands so strangely for a lot of people. A system that says ‘you don’t actually have to trust the people in charge’ doesn’t come across as clever or liberating. To many, it sounds cold, cynical, sometimes even paranoid. And, unnecessary. Like I am giving up on the possibility of a decent world.

What if those people allowed themselves to linger with the facts for a bit longer. Maybe, they would start to see the fiat system not merely ‘flawed’ or ‘imperfect.’ They would begin to recognise it as a pattern that is more deliberate. They would see the fiat system is a near-perfect monetary expression of kakistocracy.

The word ‘kakistocracy’ (meaning government by the worst possible people) is ugly, and it should be. It comes from the Greek kákistos, meaning ‘the worst,’ and kratia, translated as ‘rule.’ It’s no coincidence that the word kakistocracy evokes something foul and low. Almost like you are hearing the words ‘caca’ or ‘kaka’ whispered in the back of your mind. Etymologically, it’s rooted in ancient ‘shit’: from Proto-Indo-European *kakka- (‘to defecate’), which became Greek kakós (‘bad/evil’), then kakistos (‘worst’). Add -cracy (‘rule’), and you get government by the worst, or, poetically, rule by the shittiest.

A kakistocracy isn’t just incompetent; It is actively rotten at the top. Think networks of the powerful and depraved – the Epstein-connected elite, blackmail rings, unaccountable insiders who treat society like their personal sewer. When the ‘worst’ hold power, the stench rises from the throne itself.

Kakistocracy is government by the worst possible people – not because some evil cabal planned it that way, but because the system itself reliably lifts up the short-sighted, the politically connected, the irresponsible, the moral relativists, while quietly punishing those who try to act with prudence and long-time horizons.

And here comes the uncomfortable part: modern fiat money isn’t some neutral technology that unfortunately fell into the wrong hands. It is the financial architecture of kakistocracy.

Think about it. We gave a small group of institutions – the money issuers – the exclusive power to create money out of nothing. These entities not only have the power to set the rules of the game, but they also operate the game – and audit it, too! (Do you remember the Fort Knox claims of all the gold being there, safely? No need to do an audit. People just need to trust those institutions).

Then we act surprised when that power gets abused. The people who control the monetary spigot are rewarded for expanding it, not for preserving its value. Inflation is not an accident or a side effect; it is the predictable outcome of a system whose incentives are completely backwards. The more money they create, the more powerful and wealthy they become, while the rest of us pay for it through the slow erosion of our savings, wages and in bailouts.

In a healthy system, responsibility and long-term thinking should be rewarded. In ours, they are often punished.

This is why Bitcoin feels unsettling to many people.

It doesn’t try to fix the kakistocratic system by replacing the ‘bad guys’ with ‘good guys.’ It does something far more radical. It removes the need to trust the people running the system in the first place. No more praying that the next generation of central bankers and politicians will suddenly become wise and virtuous. No more hoping the incentives will magically align.

Instead, Bitcoin offers a quiet, peaceful exit ramp, an evolution of money, a monetary network where the rules can’t be changed on a whim, where new money can’t be printed to bail out the reckless, and where trust is replaced by verifiable scarcity and transparent code.

What’s wrong with trusting code and mathematics rather than flawed humans? It is not cold, or cynical. It is an ingenious solution to an eternal problem - how to build cooperation without vulnerability to betrayal, and, ultimately, how to sideline kakistocracy – the rule by the shittiest- itself.