Jordan Peterson wraps his divisive giga-brain around Bitcoin

Controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson appears to have turned onto Bitcoin in the latest episode of his podcast.

On Aug. 10 Peterson published a podcast titled “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?” which hosted a panel of Bitcoiners including John Vallis the host of the Bitcoin Rapid-Fire podcast, Bitcoin coder Der Gigi, film creator Richard James, and Robert Breedlove, ex-hedge fund manager and host of the “What is Money?” show.

In the video, Peterson — who claims to have an IQ around 150 — puts forward a succinct description of the innovation from which Bitcoin derives its value from:

“It’s a very interesting idea that in some manner, Bitcoin provides an incorruptible language of value preferable to gold.”

Throughout the episode, the 59-year-old author prompted his guests to provide their views on the value that Bitcoin provides to society, and in turn he then re-articulated their answers back to them in an attempt to form a fundamental understanding of its key concepts.

“So [Bitcoin] is completely transparent. It’s completely distributed. There’s no centralized authority. It can’t be cracked. It can’t be stolen. It doesn’t inflate. It can’t be inflated. It isn’t subject to any form of overt administrative control,” he said.

While Peterson isn’t known as a crypto proponent, he may know more about Bitcoin and blockchain tech than he let on in the video. The psychologist started accepting BTC donations back in 2018 after he boycotted Patreon over free speech issues.

The clinical psychologist has publicly discussed the significance of blockchain tech on multiple occasions, and during an interview with Grant Blaisdell in January 2020, he tentatively stated that:

“There’s a whole bunch of problems that this new system solves, but you can be bloody certain that there’s a whole bunch of problems it’s going to introduce.”

Peterson also questioned the guests on what they thought were the downsides of Bitcoin, and referred to Elon Musk’s environmental concerns surrounding the sustainability of mining practices behind the asset.

Related: Is being late into Bitcoin about perspective?

The consensus among the guests was that the energy required to maintain the Bitcoin network was worth it because of its transformative effects on society in terms of decentralization, with Gigi suggesting that “society, in general, asks these questions about all kinds of things, are cars worth it? Are smartphones worth it? Is the internet worth it?”

Peterson then boiled down the discussion by stating if Bitcoin’s value propositions were found to be true, the result would be that:

“Whatever energy is expended in the production of Bitcoin and the maintenance of the system should be more than recouped by the increased efficiency of every system that uses Bitcoin as a transactional device.”

“And so there’ll be a net energy gain not a net energy loss if you calculated it across the entire system. And so it’s a mistake just to look at the cost of generating Bitcoin in the absence of considering the efficiencies that Bitcoin would produce, ” he said.

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