Bitcoin’s critics tend to emerge in cycles, often tracking price movements or political moments. Boris Johnson, the former UK Prime Minister, has added his voice to that tradition with an opinion piece arguing that Bitcoin is a “Ponzi scheme” worth less as an asset than Pokémon cards.
The article, published in the Daily Mail, opened with an anecdote about a friend who initially handed £500 (roughly $661) to someone promising to double his money through BTC investment. Over the following three and a half years, the friend continued paying additional fees to the scheme’s promoter, eventually losing £20,000 (approximately $26,474) without ever recovering his funds. Johnson described the human cost directly: “He was struggling to pay his bills. He wasn’t the only one, said my friend. Other people in the neighborhood were going through the same nightmare.”
From that personal account, Johnson extended his argument to a broader comparative claim — that Pokémon cards represent a more legitimate tradeable asset than Bitcoin. “These curious little Japanese cartoon beasties seem to exercise the same fascination over the five-year-old mind as they did 30 years ago,” he wrote, arguing that a multi-decade history of demand gives the collectibles a legibility that BTC lacks in his view.
Industry Figures Push Back
The response from the Bitcoin community was immediate and pointed. Michael Saylor, co-founder of Strategy, challenged the foundational premise of the characterization: “Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi requires a central operator promising returns and paying early investors with funds from later ones.” Saylor went on to state that Bitcoin “has no issuer, no promoter, and no guaranteed return, just an open, decentralized monetary network driven by code and market demand.”
Pierre Rochard, CEO of The Bitcoin Bond Company — a BTC-backed financial product issuer — directed the Ponzi label back at the UK itself, describing the country as a “giant Ponzi scheme” financed by debt.
Where the Argument Breaks Down
Johnson’s framing conflates a documented fraud — a promoter collecting fees with no intention of returning funds — with the asset that fraud claimed to involve. The friend’s experience, as described, is consistent with a classic advance-fee scam that could have been run using any asset class as a pretext. The piece does not appear to address Bitcoin’s underlying protocol, its settlement properties, or the distinction between holding the asset directly and handing money to an unverified third party.
More Read
That conflation is precisely what drew the bulk of the online criticism, according to the report, with Bitcoin advocates arguing that the former Prime Minister applied the characteristics of a peripheral scam to the asset itself rather than examining the two separately.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.
Photo by addy bronzzz on Pexels
This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
