Bitcoin: The Keyser Söze of Traditional Finance’s Bad Ending

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Since I began this journey of consulting for firms looking to learn more about the future of AI and crypto, the most fascinating part to me is this concept of doubt that people have regarding the future. As I have said in the past, it feels like denial and stubbornness, but then I run into people I’ve known for a long time who trust my contrarian instinct on macro trends and technology, and even their reaction makes it confusing. It feels more like a fear of being wrong about something they know nothing about and have no time or desire to learn. They seem trapped in a fear of looking and sounding stupid about something that regularly sounds stupid and childish but at the same time being drawn in due to FOMO.

The intensity of the situation has grown significantly since the summer. As my vision of the future sharpened, I began to see Bitcoin as the ultimate macro representation of the acceleration of AI, the rise of an agentic world, and advancements in robotics—with all paths leading back to Bitcoin. This is a strong statement but one I now speak about regularly with firms, and I love that it not only provokes thought but also dismissal in many cases from the finance world I know well. As an example, I was shocked recently when I tried to move money market funds into the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF on one of the large platforms and it was rejected. You can buy triple ETF on shorting the SPX which is up 75% of years but not a Bitcoin ETF. Btw, of course you can buy MSTR which I did instead.

It is my daily reading on X, though, that has exposed me to the continuous battle between the crypto community and the traditional finance world I came from—a clash unlike anything I’ve witnessed before. I’m used to debates about whether interest rates will rise, stocks will crash, or a recession is imminent. But the fight between crypto and TradFi is uniquely fascinating. There’s no middle ground, no measured probabilities like “a 55% chance of recession.” Instead, it’s an all-or-nothing argument: infinity or zero. Financial savior or only for criminals.

All of this came to a head this past week, the night before the inauguration, when now-President Trump launched the TRUMP coin, and later the MELANIA coin came out, taking down the entire crypto space for hours. His son, Donald Jr., then posted that to commemorate the inauguration, the family DeFi project had bought five different cryptocurrencies in the total amount of about $100 million all with 47 at the beginning of the amount in honor of the 47th President. Needless to say, the people who did believe in Bitcoin that I knew from the TradFi world were now really scared of what had just happened. It just seemed insane and made up and destined to hurt Bitcoin from institutional adoption.

I just smiled, not surprised at any of this at this point—for both crypto and Donald Trump—and all I could think of was the movie The Usual Suspects. I see the traditional finance world as U.S. Customs Agent Dave Kujan and the crypto world as Verbal Kint. The story’s tension hinges on the interplay between the investigator and Verbal Kint, the seemingly unreliable narrator whose testimony weaves a web of half-truths and misdirection. By the film’s end, the audience realizes that Verbal Kint is, in fact, the elusive and feared criminal mastermind, Keyser Söze. The twist—that the truth was hidden in plain sight while the investigator focused on the wrong leads—provides the perfect analogy for the relationship between Bitcoin and the world of traditional finance.

Traditional finance investors approach Bitcoin with skepticism, viewing it through the lens of the fiat system that has defined their careers. However, this perspective leads them down the wrong path, much like the investigator who tries to piece together Verbal’s fragmented story. Bitcoin, as part of the larger cryptocurrency world, is surrounded by signals that appear to validate the notion of a speculative bubble: extreme volatility, periodic crashes, bizarrely named altcoins, and cultural phenomena like NFTs and the metaverse. Even cryptocurrency makes them think of currency rather than code for cryptography. These elements create a veneer of chaos and fantasy, distracting from the deeper truth of Bitcoin’s purpose and potential. This plays a huge part in people not taking the time to think about how they could be wrong.

From “Fartcoin” to “Hawk Tuah Coin” and even Donald Trump’s Trump and Melania coins launched the night before his inauguration, the cryptocurrency landscape often feels like an SNL parody of serious finance. Even, myself, someone who believes in Bitcoin sees all the other innovations and meme coins in this world to be disrupted continuously in the end making Bitcoin the only safe investment I see in the long run. These cultural distractions reinforce the narrative that cryptocurrencies are the domain of gamblers and rebels—not serious investors. As Bitcoin’s price rallies to $100,000, traditional investors not only reject buying it but see it as proof of doom to come for the stock market, signaling speculation across assets. Their reluctance to engage stems not only from skepticism but also from discomfort with the “rebels” making fortunes in a system they don’t fully understand.

The ultimate twist, however, is that Bitcoin’s disruptive potential has been hiding in plain sight all along. Much like Keyser Söze’s true identity, Bitcoin’s role as a foundational shift in the monetary system is often dismissed until it’s too late. While the fiat system teeters under the weight of debt, inflation, and concentration of wealth and corporate power, Bitcoin offers an alternative built on principles of decentralization, scarcity, and transparency. The very qualities that traditional investors fail to grasp—its independence from government control, its mathematical certainty, and its global accessibility—are the reasons it poses such a significant challenge to the fiat system. Like incumbents election failures, Bitcoin represents the anger of the median income problem in the world. Even when respected macro managers like Paul Tudor Jones, Ray Dalio, and Stan Druckenmiller endorse Bitcoin from a macro perspective, it is still called a scam and a bubble.

The parallel to the iconic ending of The Usual Suspects is striking. As Verbal Kint walks out of the police station, shedding his limp and revealing his true identity, the investigator realizes—too late—that he has been outsmarted. In the case of Bitcoin, the “bad ending” for traditional finance is the realization that their dismissal of Bitcoin has allowed it to quietly disrupt the very foundations of the fiat system. This reckoning will come as AI speeds up competition for all public companies from the same sort of rebel entrepreneurs able to start businesses with no people. As the digital entrepreneur private company ecosystem grows, I think Bitcoin will continue to achieve widespread adoption, undermining fiat currencies and reshaping global finance while traditional investors owning fiat assets are powerless to stop it.

Many traditionalists view Bitcoin through the lens of historical bubbles, comparing it to tulip mania or the dot-com crash. Yet Bitcoin’s volatility and speculative nature are not indicators of its demise but rather growing pains of a revolutionary technology that continues to make new all time highs moving up the asset size list. Much like the internet in its early days, Bitcoin represents a paradigm shift that defies traditional metrics and models. By conflating Bitcoin with the speculative excesses of meme coins, NFTs, and the metaverse, investors miss its fundamental difference: Bitcoin is not just another asset but the code that enabled the digital economy to have digital money where both will now accelerate due to AI.

In The Usual Suspects, the investigator’s failure is not in asking questions but in failing to ask the right ones. Similarly, traditional finance’s inability to understand Bitcoin stems from a fundamental misreading of its nature. Bitcoin is not a stock, a bond, or a commodity; it is a decentralized monetary network with the potential to upend the fiat system built on code like the entire digital economy. The signs are there for those willing to look past the noise and recognize the deeper truth.

As Verbal Kint said, “Keaton always said, 'I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him.' Well, I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Söze.” For those of you waiting for the fiat bubble to end, Bitcoin is Keyser Söze in my story.