re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme—the Internet’s favorite currency will collapse.

Why stop at poli board stuff when you can venture even further by going into religion stuff?

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1 A satan* rose up against Israel, and he incited David to take a census of Israel.

2 David therefore said to Joab and to the other generals of the army, "Go, number the Israelites from Beer-sheba to Dan, and report back to me that I may know their number."

3 But Joab replied: "May the LORD increase his people a hundredfold! My lord king, are not all of them my lord’s subjects? Why does my lord seek to do this thing? Why should he bring guilt upon Israel?"

4 However, the king’s command prevailed over Joab, who departed and traversed all of Israel, and then returned to Jerusalem. ( 1 Chronicles 21:1-4)

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Afterward, however, David regretted having numbered the people. David said to the LORD: "I have sinned grievously in what I have done. Take away, LORD, your servant’s guilt, for I have acted very foolishly." ( 2 Samuel 24:10)

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10 Samuel delivered the message of the LORD in full to those who were asking him for a king.

11 He told them: "The governance of the king who will rule you will be as follows: He will take your sons and assign them to his chariots and horses, and they will run before his chariot.

12 He will appoint from among them his commanders of thousands and of hundreds. He will make them do his plowing and harvesting and produce his weapons of war and chariotry.

13 He will use your daughters as perfumers, cooks, and bakers.

14 He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his servants.

15 He will tithe your crops and grape harvests to give to his officials* and his servants.

16 He will take your male and female slaves, as well as your best oxen and donkeys, and use them to do his work.

17 He will also tithe your flocks. As for you, you will become his slaves.

18 On that day you will cry out because of the king whom you have chosen, but the LORD will not answer you on that day."

19 The people, however, refused to listen to Samuel’s warning and said, "No! There must be a king over us.

20 We too must be like all the nations, with a king to rule us, lead us in warfare, and fight our battles." ( 1 Samuel 8:10-20)

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16 It forced all the people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be given a stamped image on their right hands or their foreheads,

17 so that no one could buy or sell except one who had the stamped image of the beast’s name or the number that stood for its name. ( Revelation 13:16-17)

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But why should taking a census or controlling all currency transactions be a bad thing?

Consider what was said by the late Sir John James Cowperthwaite (1915 - 2006):

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On taxes: "Economic expansion remains the door to social progress, and I am convinced that in our circumstances low taxation can in general produce a greater growth in revenue than can tax increases."

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Cowperthwaite was the Hong Kong financial secretary whose free-market convictions helped the war-weary colony grow into an economic powerhouse. Milton Friedman once explained the significance of this example: "Hong Kong's been very useful to me and it would be hard to overestimate the debt Hong Kong owes to Cowperthwaite."

Friedman first traveled to Hong Kong in 1955, when it was flooded with refugees from Communist China and life, he wrote, was "miserable" for most of its inhabitants. He returned again in 1963, when things had improved, and there he met Cowperthwaite. Asked why he forbade officials from keeping numbers even for things such as gross domestic product, Cowperthwaite told Friedman a version of what he would tell me over lunch at Hong Kong's Mandarin Hotel three decades later. "If I let them keep statistics," he said, "they can only misuse them." LINK

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EDIT: See also Ludwig Erhard, who was director of economic administration in occupied West Germany in 1948 when he formulated plans to break free from price controls. ( LINK) FWIW, both the Deutsche Mark and the Hong Kong dollar had pegs to another currency that were altered a few times during the Bretton Woods era.