Barcelona El Caganer to Bitcoin : A satire on money and modern myths

economictimes.indiatimes.com · Feb 21, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Last month, while walking through Barcelona on my way to purchase some breakfast delectables, I realised that, despite the elements of Gaudi-and-Miro Modernisme that grace the parks, museums, and edifices of this most Art Nouveau of Spanish cities, a middle-class tolerance pervades its being.Especially in the quirky tolerance for the human act of producing excrement. The evening prior, while visiting a ceramic store, I became aware of the tradition of El Caganer - The Crapper - a playful insertion in public nativity installations, in which a peasant with a red cap is included with the other Christmas figures, conspicuous not just because of his anachronistic apparel, but also for defecating at leisure in the presence of divinity. This sacrilege is meant to remind people to contain their earnestness, stay honest, maintain a sense of humour, and remain grounded. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that their repertoire of figurines included, beyond the generic paysan, a large collection of worthies including musical, scientific, and historical stalwarts that included the Spanish king, the Spanish premier, mayor of Barcelona, Don of La Mar-a-Lago, Vlad Putin, Supreme Leader Kim, and our very own Naren-bhai. When, therefore, I accosted what, at dawn, appeared to be a gently steaming mound of manure before me, I was far from shocked. But just as I raised my head to snigger at this latest Catalonian assault on propriety, I was horrified to see, some 10 feet higher up, a poster on a building facade which insisted that bitcoin - and not the US prez - could be the silver bullet that would stop all wars by making them unaffordable.I stared at the poster and the pile beneath it, trying to ascertain whether the one had birthed the other. Soon, however, this scatological musing gave way to a mental argument against the quotation at the top of the poster comparing Henry Ford's suggestion in 1921 to replace the gold standard with a new energy standard to the notion of bitcoin replacing the current financial system. Now, it's easy to equate some of the driving motivations of Ford's proposal to those which accompany the bitcoin creation myth. Ford proposed a system in which $1 would be pegged to a certain amount of energy - kWh - because he believed that this would allow money to be released from government and bank control; that it would allow money to be democratised because energy could be produced anywhere; and that it would link money to useful production, not political manipulation or financial speculation. But this is where the analogy ends. The similarity between bitcoin's 'proof-of-work' concept - expending energy to mint new cryptocurrencies - and producing energy for useful production does not bear consideration. Moreover, bitcoin, by being valued in dollars and not the other way around, is a highly speculative digital counter-trade asset or collectible, and not a currency. Even if all this stood up to some psychotropic scrutiny, Ford mistook the function of monetary currency by conflating it with a measure of the real economy. For one, money is a political tool - not an economic necessity - created to circulate government debt, reorganise labour, and drive compliance. For another, money is a lien on future resources, processed by dint of human labour, from which its value derives. If this is abandoned, the concept of a human-based economy would be nullified. In the meanwhile, I hypothesised that ordinary people had become estranged from the real fruits of the earth because money's many layers, including bitcoin, have falsely projected greater intrinsic value. I was allowed to test this assumption at once. I chanced upon a homeless man who asked me for some change to buy bread and cheese. I informed him to wait and bought him food. But he refused my offer with the indignation of an orthodox Viking offered a bribe in lieu of pillage. 'Solo dinero, por favor,' he declared, demanding euros instead. I shrugged and, reassured that I had hypothesised correctly, returned to my hotel and savoured his breakfast after mine, without a shred of middle-class compunction.(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)