I’ve seen versions of this take, and they all conveniently ignore the more obvious possibility:
This “intellectual dark web genious” and his buddies work together to orchestrate a stupid publicity stunt that is nothing more than a naked attempt to artificially inflate the price of bitcoin by trying to recreate the anxiety around USD that helped propel bitcoin to its tenuous quasi-legitimacy in the first place.
“Crypto millionaire sets money on fire to try to push more people to dump cash into a magical internet poker chips in order to cash out even more” is not some sort of philosophical experiment, it’s an obvious ploy to enrich some bitcoin maximalists by preying on economic anxiety.
I love how all of these crypto “philosophical true believers” always require that you take actual cash out of your bank account to buy into their experiments.