Jordan Peterson: Bitcoin is the Only Alternative to a CBDC

Famous Canadian psychologist and political commentator Jordan Peterson believes Bitcoin is the only “viable” monetary alternative in a future world dominated by central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The intellectual recently spoke with tech expert and entrepreneur Brian Roemmele about artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, highlighting how Bitcoin can serve to shield the world from its tyrannical excesses. 

Using Bitcoin for Communication

In an interview published on Monday, Roemmele said that he sees blockchain – specifically Bitcoin – being wrapped up into a popular payment system, due to the “way it was made.” 

Peterson followed up by saying that Bitcoin is the “only alternative I can see to a centralized bank digital currency,” which he predicted will be “foisted upon us at any point.”

“Bitcoin actually is decentralized,” said Peterson. “It isn’t amenable to control by a bureaucracy.”

As the psychologist noted how Bitcoin could, in principle, be used for “wealth storage” and as a “currency,” Roemmele added that it could also be used for “communication.”

“Encrypted within a blockchain is almost an unlimited amount of data,” he said. “You can actually memorialize information that you want decentralized and never to go away.”

Unlike traditional bank transfers, Bitcoin transactions that have been registered on the public blockchain for more than one hour are virtually irreversible and logged across tens of thousands of Bitcoin nodes across the world. This feature of Bitcoin has recently become popular for memorializing NFTs through the Ordinals protocol, which bakes image data directly into the public blockchain. 

Peterson’s Blockchain Idea

Peterson noted that he’d be interested in using Bitcoin as a form of “permanent, incorruptible information storage” to develop a “blockchain corpus of general knowledge questions” for running IQ tests, and prevent people from “gerrymandering the measurement of general cognitive ability.”

“You could derive random samples of general ability tests that would be 100% robust reliable and valid, and nobody could gerrymander them,” he said. “Just the way Bitcoins stops fiat currency producers from inflating the currency.”

Peterson has previously praised Bitcoin as a way of combatting tyrannical control imposed by CBDCs in the past. He’s also regarded it as an inflation hedge, and bought some as an inflation shield in November 2021 – though the asset hasn’t performed well since that time.