'Bitcoin is a zeppelin': Why this historian says BTC looks more like the past than future

I was really interested in some of the parallels you draw between cryptocurrencies and uh, the American currency, what we called the Greenback before it was invented in the around the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln times, because it was kind of a wild west. You had all kinds of competing currencies. So what do you think, what would you say to a Bitcoin holder? Would they recognize uh the way money worked way back in the day? Would they see the build the parallels if you could kind of go back in time?

Well, I I will tell you this, cryptocurrency looks a whole lot less like the future to me and a whole lot more like the past because we've seen a lot of this before. and I wrote an essay on Substack called Bitcoin is a Zeppelin because Bitcoin is to money right now very similarly as Zeppelins were to air travel, which is to say they were actually the first innovation that showed the future could happen. They were not the technology you actually wanted to use when you got there.

Well, hydrogen, it kind of explodes. We saw the Hindenberger and the Hindenburg, excuse me. Um, so is that was that FTX blowing up?

Well, I'll tell you this, they not only did they have a bad habit of exploding into hydrogen bombs, but they also could be blown off course and these things, but we forget that for almost a quarter of a century before airplanes were clearly the way of the future, there were Zeppelins. Uh there was the first airliner was a Zeppelin airliner. It used to make regular flights across the Atlantic. There was even a route to the North Pole and when HG Wells wrote his famous book War of the Worlds, his follow-up book to that was War in the Air in which the US is invaded by Zeppelin and loses. So if I go back to that era and I tell people, will people fly? They said, well of course. and I say, how will they do it? They will go by Zeppelin. And then over time the logic of the airplane won out over the first technology. and my fear for Bitcoin holders is that they are holding the Zeppelin of the money future.

So, is is it stable coins? Because what blows my mind about stable coins is they arose out of the D5 movement, right? And that and it was kind of like uh an alternative to government currency, but stable coins are now becoming intertwined with the global payments and Treasury system, uh so that they're actually increasing demand for Treasuries. And that's just a 180 for me. What are the what's the history there?

The historical analogy right now to the future of crypto looks a whole lot like Euro dollars, which arose in the 1950s and 60s. By the way, this is a Nick Carter argument. I'm not that's not original to me, but the idea here being that you're live outside of the US, you do business outside of the US, but you live in an often inflationary currencies and you would really like to do business in US dollars. So your banks put dollars on their books to trade against. And that's what's happening. What happened for businesses in the 50s, 60s and 70s that we just assume is normal today was new. And stable coins are going to look like that for the everyday retail consumer. So you'll have people who can quickly trade in what is a de facto US dollar. and ironically, this entire movement that started with Bitcoin fighting against the authority of a Fiat US currency is going to end up supporting it because you have to buy all those treasuries to support all those all those dollar backed coins.