Bitcoin and the Crisis of Trust
I had a good friend who was obnoxiously enthusiastic about Bitcoin. From my perspective, his devotion to it bordered on cultish. He would ramble endlessly about how much he believed in its future, and he had developed the peculiar habit of pricing practically everything in Bitcoin.
“Why don’t you fix the air conditioning in your car?” I asked him one afternoon as we drove to a nearby Chipotle. My back was sweating profusely against his scorching hot leather seats.
“No way! That would cost me 0.026 Bitcoin, which will be worth three times as much in a couple of years. Rolling down the windows works just fine for me.”
Keep in mind, we lived in Tampa, where summer temperatures routinely climb into the mid-90s. Add the oppressive humidity, and you can imagine just how miserable those car rides were.
I also remember when we were both bachelors, regularly going on dates with women we'd met through dating apps. One evening, he told me, almost triumphantly, “Sarah bailed on our date tonight, and I'm not even mad. Taking her out would've probably cost me $100. Now I can put that money toward my next Bitcoin purchase instead.”
As God is my witness, this is a true story. And it didn't happen just once!
When our group of friends would go out to the bars on Friday nights, he was notorious for never buying a round. Somehow, whenever it was his turn to buy everyone drinks, he was nowhere to be found.
At the end of the night, you could almost guarantee he'd come up with some excuse for why he couldn't contribute to the group's Uber ride home. His phone was dead. His card was missing. His bank account was overdrawn. You name it, he'd probably used it.
It became a running joke among our friends. We'd constantly tease him about the extraordinary lengths he would go to just to add a little more Bitcoin to his portfolio.
To his credit, though, he was remarkably disciplined in his pursuit. He was laser-focused on accumulating as much Bitcoin as humanly possible. In his mind, every dollar spent on something unnecessary represented another dollar that could have been invested in Bitcoin. Dinner dates, air conditioning, drinks with friends, even a ride home. Everything had an opportunity cost, and he measured that cost in Bitcoin.
At the time, I thought he was completely ridiculous. How could someone become so obsessed with an investment that he'd willingly sacrifice life's simplest comforts just to accumulate more of it?
But beneath all the jokes and frustration, I couldn't help noticing something about him. He wasn't merely investing in Bitcoin. He believed in it with a conviction I had rarely encountered.
One afternoon in June of 2021, as we were hanging out by the pool, my curiosity finally got the better of me.“Tell me something,” I asked. “Why are you so obsessed with Bitcoin?”
That afternoon, he planted a seed that little did I know would fundamentally change the way I thought about money. My opinion didn’t change until over a year later.
Fast forward to December 2022. I was spending Christmas with my family at their farmhouse when my parents invited a couple of neighbors over for dinner. They were two sisters who lived together, and both had a peculiar fascination with some truly outlandish conspiracy theories.
To give you an idea of what I mean, they genuinely believed Donald Trump was a time traveler sent on a mission to save humanity from a malevolent cabal of powerful elites secretly plotting the destruction of civilization.
I kid you not.
As the evening went on, I found myself growing increasingly troubled. It wasn't necessarily the absurdity of their theories that bothered me most, but rather the reasoning behind them. Every time I questioned one of their claims, their answers revealed something more concerning: they had virtually no trust in any of our nation's institutions.
The government, the media, the courts, the intelligence agencies. In their minds, practically every institution was compromised, corrupted, or actively conspiring against the American people.
And yet, despite their seemingly universal distrust of authority, they placed extraordinary faith in one individual: Donald Trump.
The irony was difficult to ignore. They distrusted almost everyone in a position of power, except the person they believed was uniquely capable of saving them from it.
Now, these women were certainly an extreme example, but they weren't entirely unique. Across the country, there are people whose skepticism toward institutions has hardened into an almost reflexive distrust of anything associated with established authority.
That evening left me thinking about a much larger question:
How did we reach a point where distrust has become so pervasive that some people find elaborate conspiracies more believable than the institutions meant to serve them?
Of course, questioning authority is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, a healthy degree of skepticism is essential to a functioning democracy. Governments make mistakes. Institutions can become corrupt. History provides plenty of examples of both.
But there's a meaningful difference between questioning whether an institution deserves our trust and becoming convinced that no institution can ever be trusted.
And that distinction raises an even more fundamental question: What is trust, and why does society depend so heavily upon it?
And as it turns out, these women were hardly alone in their distrust of our nation's institutions.
According to Pew Research Center, in 1964, 77% of Americans trusted the federal government to do what was right either always or most of the time. By September 2025, that figure had collapsed to just 17%.
Think about that for a moment. In the span of roughly six decades, we've gone from a country where the overwhelming majority of Americans trusted their federal government to one where fewer than one in five consistently do.
Gallup's September 2026 survey paints an equally troubling picture. Just 28% of Americans expressed substantial trust in the legislative branch, 33% in the executive branch, and 46% in the judicial branch.
Our country certainly has a history of institutional failures, corruption, and abuses of power. Some skepticism is not only warranted but necessary. However, whether justified or not, the erosion of public trust is something we should all be paying very close attention to.
Why? Let me make my case.
Consider something as ordinary as the money in your wallet.
Printed on every piece of American paper currency are four familiar words:
In God We Trust.
We rarely give those words much thought, but trust is one of the fundamental principles upon which our monetary system, our institutions, and ultimately our society depend.
What makes that green piece of paper worth anything? Why is a hundred-dollar bill worth a hundred dollars?
You might assume there's some elaborate explanation involving a vault somewhere filled with gold, silver, or some other precious commodity backing every dollar in circulation. There isn't.
The United States operates under what economists call a fiat monetary system. Our currency is not redeemable for a fixed quantity of gold or any other physical commodity. Instead, its value rests on a combination of government authority, economic activity, widespread acceptance, and, perhaps most importantly, confidence in its continued purchasing power.
The government establishes the dollar as legal tender, but it is the willingness of millions of people and businesses to accept it in exchange for goods, services, and labor that makes it useful as money. Think about how remarkable that is.
You can spend forty hours of your life working in exchange for numbers deposited into a bank account. You accept those numbers because you believe they represent purchasing power. You trust that tomorrow, next month, or next year, someone else will be willing to exchange something of value for them.
And they, in turn, accept your money because they share that same expectation.
The entire system depends, at least in part, on a collective belief (trust) that this arrangement will continue to function perpetually into the future as it does today.
Of course, this confidence doesn't emerge ex-nihilo. It is supported by the productive capacity of the American economy, our legal system, the Federal Reserve, the government's ability to levy taxes, and a vast network of financial institutions.
But therein lies an interesting contradiction.
We live in a society where trust in government has deteriorated dramatically, yet we continue to rely upon a monetary system whose credibility depends in part on the very institutions we increasingly distrust.
That doesn't mean the dollar is worthless or that the monetary system is on the verge of collapse. Far from it. But it raises a question that I had never seriously considered before my friend introduced me to Bitcoin.
What if there were a form of money whose rules didn't depend on the discretion of governments, central bankers, or financial institutions?
What if instead of trusting people to honor the rules, we could build a system where those rules were publicly verifiable and extraordinarily difficult for any single party to change?
This, I eventually came to understand, was the idea that had captivated my friend and made him so zealous about the cause.
Bitcoin wasn't merely a bet on the future price of a digital asset. It was an experiment in whether human beings could establish monetary trust without relying on a central authority.
And for the first time, I began to understand why that mattered. Looking back, I finally understand what my friend was trying to tell me that afternoon by the pool on South Howard , Tampa FL.
For him, Bitcoin was never just about getting rich. It represented something much bigger: the possibility of a monetary system that didn't require us to place so much faith in the judgment and integrity of a handful of powerful institutions.
Whether Bitcoin ultimately fulfills that promise remains to be seen. But it has already accomplished something rather remarkable. It radically changed the way I personally think about money. This is coming from someone who had worked in finance for nearly a decade and studied it during my undergraduate and graduate studies.
The greatest innovation of Bitcoin isn't that it teaches us how to live without trust, but that it forces us to take a step back and reconsider whom, and what, we should put our trust in the first place.
