Bitcoin and Freedom: Reimagining the Denomination of Energy from a Psychological Perspective

On October 31, 2008, a mysterious figure (or group) known as Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, describing a way to move money electronically without relying on governments, banks, or central authorities. By using a distributed, peer-to-peer network, Bitcoin proposed a radically different foundation for financial exchange.

At first glance, this may seem far from the concerns of professional psychology. Yet money is never only about numbers. It carries meaning: safety, loss, power, envy, freedom. When financial systems become unstable, those anxieties surface in our patients’ lives (and our own) and shape the professional practice of psychology itself. Bitcoin, whether one embraces it or not, represents more than a financial technology. It is a cultural and psychological event that asks: What happens when society reimagines money itself, when value and energy are redefined, echoing Saylor’s notion of Bitcoin as “digital energy” (2021) and Bansal’s reflections on value “denominated in energy” (2022)?

Since 2019, the cost of living has surged across America’s largest cities, from groceries and housing to healthcare and transportation. Meanwhile, the United States has crossed a staggering threshold: a national debt exceeding $36 trillion, larger than its annual output. Numbers this large are easy to dismiss as abstractions, but they have everyday consequences. When the value of money feels unstable, it activates both conscious worry and unconscious fantasy, as Eisold (2024) notes in his discussion of money as a social defense against loss and vulnerability.

Psychoanalysts have long understood that money is more than a medium of exchange. In 1917, Karl Abraham observed that spending and saving can serve as outlets for unconscious anxieties. Decades later, Santiago Dubcovsky (1982) described how runaway inflation in Argentina destabilized psychoanalytic practice itself, complicating fees, contracts, and even the analytic frame. More recently, Eisold (2024) argued that people hold “shared fantasies” about money — defenses that arise from anxieties that money cannot reliably protect and magical optimism about its potential to grow. Inflation, then, is never only economic: it destabilizes balance sheets and psyches alike.

Behavioral economics reinforces what clinicians observe. People think in nominal, not real, terms — the “money illusion” (Shafir, Diamond, & Tversky, 1997). When paychecks do not stretch as far, mistrust and resentment grow, even if changes in purchasing power are slight. Akerlof and Shiller (2009) describe these collective reactions as “animal spirits,” emotional currents that move markets as much as reason does. Empirical work confirms that inflation erodes well-being: Cupák, Riedl, and Weitzel (2023) found lower life satisfaction years after periods of high inflation, and Louie, Xu, and Lin (2023) linked inflation stress to greater anxiety and depression across gender and class.

Dubcovsky (1982) noted that Argentina’s crisis did not remain outside the consulting room. Even seasoned analysts found their attention divided by the chaos of shifting fees and the value of their own incomes. Inflation intruded into the analytic frame itself, making money an unavoidable third presence in the room. His observations remain strikingly relevant: when financial instability looms, it becomes nearly impossible to keep psychic and economic life separate.

If inflation represents intrusion, decentralization represents escape. Bitcoin’s design is simple yet radical: no central government can print more at will. The network issues new coins on a fixed schedule with a hard cap of 21 million. Its value is tied not to political promises but to verifiable computation and energy. For many, this offers not only technical innovation but psychological relief: a shared philosophy of money that cannot be diluted by excess spending or unchecked debt.

Yet no symbol of freedom is without shadow. Bitcoin’s promise of incorruptibility can harden into its own fantasy of purity and control. Its volatility, energetic foundation, and barriers to access risk reproducing some of the very inequalities it seeks to transcend. Those most burdened by debt or inflation may remain excluded from its liberating potential, a paradox that mirrors how ideals of freedom can serve as defenses against dependency and vulnerability. As psychologists, we might view Bitcoin not as a perfect refuge but as a projection screen for collective desires and fears about containment, trust, and loss.

For psychologists, this symbolism is not abstract. Many carry student loans whose interest compounds even as fees adjust. Patients feel the same squeeze: cutting childcare, delaying medical visits, wondering if they can keep coming to therapy at all. The Bitcoin community’s refrain “1 Bitcoin = 1 Bitcoin” captures the desire for money that holds its ground, insulated from dilution or political cycles. It would be naïve to imagine Bitcoin solving structural pressures on clinical practice, yet its presence reflects a collective yearning for sound money that restores predictability, reinforces trust, and eases the psychological strain of constant financial pressure.

For psychologists, money has never been neutral. It is both the medium of our work and a powerful symbol in the lives of our patients. When inflation erodes its value, trust frays in institutions, in relationships, and within the therapeutic frame. Bitcoin offers a different horizon. By grounding value in a decentralized, verifiable system that cannot be inflated at will, it represents a shift in how society imagines money. For some, it has become a lived practice of freedom: a way to secure value, plan for the future, and step outside cycles of debt and dilution. For psychology, it opens new questions about how symbolic systems of exchange shape the psyche and how stability might redefine our work itself.

These tensions invite further reflection. If inflation fuels fantasies of escape, what dreams emerge in prosperity? Would stability itself provoke new forms of risk and symbolic contest, as the psyche seeks arenas to test freedom and mastery? Even in a Bitcoin economy, human meaning-making would reinvent currencies of status, competition, and desire. The analytic question is not whether Bitcoin ends our projections, but how it transforms the psychic terrain on which they play out.

Whatever one’s stance on Bitcoin as technology, it is difficult to ignore its psychological resonance. It reflects a collective longing for sound money, for fairness, and for a future less burdened by financial corruption. If fiat systems remind us of fragility, Bitcoin suggests renewal. As specialists in mind and meaning, psychologists are uniquely positioned to witness and engage with this transition, not only as observers of cultural change but as contributors to a freer and more promising future. In this sense, Bitcoin is more than a digital currency; it is a reimagining of money itself, a new denomination of energy and value that points toward stability, freedom, and hope.