A banana duct-taped to a wall is supposed to represent the meaninglessness of life or something ... And people pay money for it because art critics (ahem, scammers) proclaim it’s great art.

Does that remind you of anything? It should, because this is how central bank-backed fiat money works.

The process of fiat money becoming less and less representative of reality is the same process that art has been undergoing. Art used to be representational and reached its peak during the Renaissance. Then came impressionism, surrealism and cubism. Art slowly degraded to the point where it no longer represented anything.

Postmodern art has no such proof of work. It doesn’t represent reality, which means that artists can churn out meaningless pieces in minutes. Picasso at one point most likely painted 50 pieces a day. Classical painters, by contrast, took months to produce a single piece. If ever there was a proof-of-stake artist where the signature was all that mattered, it was Picasso.

We can no longer identify what’s good or bad art and we must now trust others to make that value judgment for us. Fiat art has created a class of rent-seekers that extract value by declaring certain things worthy. We can’t judge for ourselves because we are uncultured heathen and we must instead let others judge for us.

The same value confusion is prevalent in fiat money. The elites tell us that we should value the money and ignore all the shenanigans around it. Some governments go so far as to impose price controls to tell us exactly what things should cost, telling us directly how much we should pay for certain goods.

Value is easier to assess when you get into bitcoin, which is why so many people find it life-changing. Owning bitcoin is owning a classical representational painting and owning fiat money or any altcoin is owning a picture of a Campbell’s soup can.