The Lancet ranks as the world’s highest-impact academic journal. Its Commission on Gambling found that globally, online gamblers use cryptocurrency to circumvent borders. Malcolm Sparrow, a commission member and professor of public management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, warns that gambling leads to financial ruin and broken families.
Trump’s Crypto Strategy
At an individual level, he asserts, a gambler’s loss affects an average of eight people, ranging from spouses to family. One does not have to be a number geek to work out the fallout on a multitude when a government gambles. Yet another utopia was orchestrated recently. The setting was Las Vegas, famous for its casinos, and where it is claimed fantasy becomes reality. A hallowed audience, including US Vice President JD Vance, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr., was in attendance at Bitcoin Vegas 2025, where Pakistan’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve was unveiled.
For perspective, President Trump, once a vocal crypto skeptic, also plans to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. It shall be backed by 200,000 bitcoins seized in civil and criminal cases. We announced our jumping on this bandwagon sans resources, debate, regulation, and legislation. In a stark conflict of interest, President Trump is personally benefiting from cryptocurrency while promoting it vigorously as a policymaker. $TRUMP, a meme coin associated with President Trump, is hosted on the Solana blockchain platform.
Crypto investors descended on the Trump National Golf Club for a POTUS-hosted $TRUMP dinner. As protestors shouted, “America is not for sale,” crypto billionaire Justin Sun won the dinner contest with his $18.5 million wallet. Pertinently, the US Securities and Exchange Commission dropped a fraud and market manipulation case against Sun in February this year. Reportedly, more than 600,000 small $TRUMP investors have lost approximately $3.9 billion since its launch.
Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, defines cryptocurrency as casino finance. Charlie Munger, vice chairman at Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is regarded as one of the greatest financial minds ever. He famously said, “Cryptocurrency is not a currency, not a commodity, and not a security. It’s a gambling contract with a nearly 100% edge for the house.”
Bitcoin City
El Salvador and the Central African Republic (CAR) are the only two countries to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. Their state of affairs is eerily similar to Pakistan’s. Both countries are plagued by elite capture, a weak judicial system, endemic corruption, and fiscal mismanagement. Both survive on loans and remittances.
Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, brazenly calls himself “the coolest dictator in the world.” Public opinion polls showed a dissenting majority, yet he bulldozed bitcoin as legal tender and announced Bitcoin City, a $17 billion fantasyland.
Claiming that it would be the Singapore of Latin America, the president conveniently chose to forget that Singapore has one of the world’s strongest financial systems. Its prized economy, a product of decades of sound and transparent management, is built upon education, infrastructure, and industrialization.
Bitcoin City, a libertarian-charter enterprise, would rest at the base of the Colchagua Volcano and be powered by its geothermal energy. $1 billion in bitcoin-based Volcano Bonds (VBs) would finance this fantasy. Pakistan’s bitcoin gambit, too, has been touted to “monetize energy,” which, symptomatic of our governance, faces a shortfall of over 4000 MW, has line losses at over 660 billion, and circular debt at 2.39 trillion rupees.
LaGeo, El Salvador’s major electricity producer, was directed to utilize surplus energy to power bitcoin mining. The VB was supposed to pay $65 million, nearly half of LaGeo’s total revenue, in annual interest payments. Akin to a gambler at a roulette table, the promised payout was reportedly calculated on the assumption that by 2027, one bitcoin would be worth $1 million.
LaGeo’s annual interest jumped from $15 million to $80 million annually. An overburdened LaGeo simply could not finance the VB. The initiative’s Chivo Wallet, despite its many perks, was also an abysmal failure. Fernando Alvarez, professor of economics at the University of Chicago, summed it up as, “There is no experiment where a currency was introduced with such strong incentives and still failed.”
Bukele’s bitcoin gambit was a crude gamble to circumvent reforms and entice the crypto community as a like-minded indulger. With piling debt repayments, President Bukele resignedly signed a $1.4 billion IMF deal. The conditions were to phase out the Chivo wallet, eliminate the requirement of businesses accepting bitcoin, and stop buying it with public money. The CAR, too, repealed the adoption of bitcoin within a year.
Experts unanimously hold that a currency should fulfill three obligations. It must be a stable store of value, a commonly understood unit of account, and a widely accepted medium of exchange. Cryptocurrency, with its inherent volatility, lack of intrinsic value, and the absence of a regulatory framework, is a speculative asset masquerading as a currency.
Bitcoin and Pakistan
The fallout of ignoring the basics: Pakistan’s HDI ranks 168 among 193 countries. 6.81 million are unemployed, 45% languish under the poverty line, with 39 million in the extreme poverty category. We also have an astounding 26 million out-of-school children. In another humiliating low, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 places us at the lowest spot in gender equality among 148 countries.
The Martingale System was used by bettors in 18th-century France. It was based on the strategy of doubling one’s bet after each loss. The premise was that only one good bet could turn fortunes around. We have been trying this since independence with ruinous consequences.
There are no shortcuts to social and economic prosperity. Nothing in this universe is built upon chance; that is why Einstein famously said, “God does not play dice.” We need to start from the basics instead of staking the future of an already impoverished multitude.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a columnist whose writing explores the forces that shape power, belief, and society.
