Bitcoin Could End ‘Like A Monopoly Game,’ Claims Wall Street Cassandra Michael Green
Macro investor Michael Green, who is known as the Cassandra of Passive Investing, has sharpened his critique of Bitcoin, arguing that its design makes it economically brittle and socially corrosive, setting up a winner-takes-all outcome “like a Monopoly game.”
In an interview with journalist Phil Rosen, Green said “the most important thing to understand is that Bitcoin has marketed itself as multiple different things to try to appeal to investors at various points in time,” but has failed on its original brief. Under the Satoshi white paper, he noted, BTC was meant to be “a peer-to-peer payment system” that removed the dependence of payment rails on banks. “By moving to a distributed ledger and a peer-to-peer system, we’d be able to get banks out of the system.”
“That’s been a total failure,” he argued. “There are almost no real transactions that are occurring in Bitcoin. We have tons of transaction activity in speculative markets trading Bitcoin, but the actual quantity of retail transactions or peer-to-peer payments that occur over the Bitcoin network are remarkably small.”
Green distinguished between emergency government “money printing” and day-to-day bank credit. “There’s money printing that comes from the government, in which they largely are trying to smooth over mistakes that have been made,” he said, describing stimulus as a way to “basically create a do-over by printing money.”
More frequent, he added, is the expansion of money when banks lend: when a bank grants a $1,000 loan, “they simply created a new account for you called your checking account that has $1,000 in it… That expansion is totally normal and it has a credit function associated with it.”
“Bitcoin destroys the ability to do that because it was intentionally designed to skip the banking system,” Green contended. Rather than a full credit system, “it is effectively just a monetary system where what you’re really seeing is Bitcoin is effectively the tokens that are paid to the accounting firms that keep the blockchain in order… every Bitcoin that’s out there is basically a payment to Deloitte & Touche.”
Why Bitcoin Is Supposedly A ‘Monopoly Game’
Because its supply is capped and banks cannot create new BTC via lending, “no new money can be created. There is no capacity for mistake forgiveness in that type of framework,” he said. That makes the system “very limiting. Interest rates and credit spreads are just too high for a real economy framework.” Despite dramatic price gains, he concluded, Bitcoin “hasn’t emerged as a payment system” or “in any meaningful economic context.”
Green’s harshest criticism was distributional. “Because we have a finite quantity of it, ultimately, that means everybody who is born after the Bitcoin has been released finds themselves in deficit,” he said. He compared this to “a serf living off land in the 14th century that didn’t belong to you,” where “there was no other land that would ever become available to you.” That, he argued, “creates a deeply unequal society.”
Although he said he “was an early adopter of Bitcoin” and initially thought it was “a really interesting idea” of private money, he now believes “if you run through the simulation, Bitcoin, because there is a finite quantity of tokens, means that it basically plays like a Monopoly game.”
In that game, “you can’t add additional players as the game is being played… because they’re just going to lose very quickly. They don’t have any other properties. They don’t have any other money.” “How does every game of Monopoly end?” he asked. “Someone wins. With a single winner.”
“That’s exactly what we’ve seen within Bitcoin,” Green maintained, citing “increased concentration” and a Gini coefficient “beyond anything we’ve ever seen in the real world.” Instead of democratizing access, he argued, Bitcoin builds “a system that ultimately collapses upon itself and locks people out. Far from democratizing access, it does the exact opposite.”
At press time, BTC traded at $87,589.
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