Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and the French Central Bank: a new gap at Davos

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong corrected the Governor of the Banque de France on a basic point about Bitcoin’s architecture: it has no issuer and operates as a truly decentralised protocol, independent of any single authority. François Villeroy de Galhau’s comment that he “trusts independent central banks (…) more than private issuers of Bitcoin” revealed a conceptual blind spot—one that runs deeper than semantics and speaks to a broader issue in traditional finance.

This exchange is symptomatic of an “old guard” that, despite decades of monetary policy experience, has not engaged with Bitcoin on its own technological terms. Under Bitcoin’s architecture, miners are not akin to issuers: their distribution prevents them from setting the rules. Bitcoin is a network secured by cryptographic consensus, whose rules are public, verifiable, and immutable by design. Confusing it with a privately issued claim reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the protocol’s innovation.

As we argued in The Node last week, the hesitancy (or inability?) of some senior policymakers or otherwise savvy commentators to acknowledge this technological distinction reflects not just regulatory caution, but a gap in conceptual grounding. Bitcoin represents a break from the post-gold monetary order precisely because it embeds independent verification into its core code, rather than relying on discretionary policy. When influential voices conflate decentralisation with private issuance or distrust the technology on that basis, they slow constructive engagement and meaningful policy work.

Only through technological literacy, and not assumption, can the future of money be debated thoughtfully. The public deserves policymakers who are willing to do at least the minimum homework when it comes to innovations that are already being adopted globally.