Max Keiser did nothing but help magnify the Bitcoin community’s reputation as an irrational cult this weekend when he suggested that Bitcoin could have stopped the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
The famed Bitcoin enthusiast and host of the Keiser Report is unabashedly optimistic about BTC’s potential to change the world, and he claims to have bought in when it was priced at one dollar.
But this may be the first time Keiser has claimed Bitcoin could change the past. On August 11th Keiser tweeted an image of the World Trade Center buildings engulfed in fire, accompanied by the following optimistic claim:
“If Satoshi had released Bitcoin 10 years earlier, 9/11 would never have happened”
pic.twitter.com/z6yU9ztRGd
— Max Keiser, tweet poet. (@maxkeiser) August 11, 2019
Keiser’s grandiose optimism may look good within the bubble of Crypto Twitter, where everyone is already initiated. But when it was put to him that such exploitative grandstanding makes the crypto community look bad, Keiser resorted to more blind optimism, tweeting:
“Honey Badger don’t care. Just HODL and you’ll be fine. Even if you don’t know why you’re doing it. Just HODL.”
Humanity, Positivity, Consciousness, Buzzwords
The memory of the 9/11 attacks may never truly disappear into the past, but they did occur almost 20 years ago. Hindsight is one thing, but Max Keiser went one step further and made more bold predictions about the future in a world where Bitcoin is present.
For one thing, Keiser believes the BTC protocol will stop future terrorist attacks thanks to its impact on “our collective unconscious.” He wrote:
“What we can look forward to is the BTC protocol stopping future such events as it impacts our collective unconscious in a positive way.”
Keiser says Bitcoin is already changing humanity, triggering an evolution of the species away from such barbarism.
“Bitcoin is changing humanity. It’s impacting our collective unconscious. It’s fast-evolving is, as a species away from these types of events.”
Terrorism Booming Since Invention of Bitcoin
While the Twitter-sphere enjoys this latest hit of vague, nonsensical hopium from Max Keiser, I’ll just leave these statistics here for future reference.
Terrorist incidents have risen substantially since the invention of Bitcoin. Not only have they risen, but they’ve also peaked at levels of ferocity never before witnessed in human history.
According to figures from the OurWorldinData, and the Global Terrorism Database, the number of attacks in the United States rose from 11 in 2009 to 65 in 2017 – a 490% increase.
In the United Kingdom, terrorist incidents rose by a similar scale, increasing from 23 attacks in 2009 to 122 in 2017.
Worldwide figures paint a similarly bleak picture. Global terrorist incidents numbered 4,721 in 2009. By 2014 that number peaked at 16,903, before falling back down to just over 10,000 in 2017.
This is not to suggest Bitcoin has been the catalyst for these attacks (although it has certainly been used as a fundraising tool). This is just a sobering reminder that no amount of over-the-top optimism from an influential public figure is going to help Bitcoin’s case in the future.
Or change the past.