Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, walked onto the World Economic Forum’s Davos stage yesterday and said the quiet part out loud.
The rules-based order, the thing leaders love to invoke when they want the world to behave, is fading.
Carney called it a “pleasant fiction.”
He said we are living through a “rupture.”
He said great powers are using integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, finance as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
Then he reached for Václav Havel’s famous “greengrocer” from The Power of the Powerless, the shopkeeper who hangs a sign reading “Workers of the world, unite!” not because he believes it, but because he knows the ritual matters more than the words. It’s Havel’s shorthand for life under a system where everyone performs loyalty in public, even as they quietly recognize the lie.
He told the room, “It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
The Davos audience cheered and clapped in response.
Perhaps, one can argue that they are trained to nod along. This week, they have extra reasons.
The talk around town has been about tariffs and coercion, and whether allies are about to be treated like revenue lines.
The mood is tied to President Trump escalating pressure around Greenland and tariff threats against European partners, a story that keeps resurfacing across conference chatter and the news cycle.
Carney’s slot was listed as a “Special Address” in the WEF run-up. His message landed in a room already primed for it.
Here is the part crypto people should not miss: when geopolitics becomes transactional in public, money stops being background infrastructure and starts feeling like a border.
That shift changes what people pay for.
It changes what investors store value in. It changes what counts as a safe option.
Bitcoin sits right in the middle of that feeling.
Not because it suddenly becomes a global settlement rail for trade invoices. It probably does not.
Not because it replaces the dollar in a clean, straight line. It almost certainly does not.
Bitcoin matters because it offers an option: a credible outside asset that is hard to block, hard to rewrite, and hard to gate behind somebody else’s permission.
In a stable world, that sounds ideological. In a rupture world, it starts to sound like risk management.
Carney even used the language of risk management. He said this room knows it. He said insurance costs money, and the cost can be shared.
Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses.
That is the Davos version of a truth every investor learns early: concentration risk feels fine until the day it does not.
The human part of this story, the moment you realize access can be conditional
Most people do not wake up wanting a new monetary system.
They wake up wanting their salary to clear, their bank transfer to arrive, their business to keep trading, and their savings to keep meaning something next year.
They also have a moment, sometimes it is a headline, sometimes it is a blocked payment, sometimes it is a currency shock, when they realize access can be conditional.
Carney’s speech is basically a map of how those moments multiply.
He talked about tariffs used as leverage.
He talked about financial infrastructure as coercion.
He talked about supply chains exploited as vulnerabilities.
“Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
That is what a “rupture” feels like in everyday terms. Your costs move because of a speech in another capital. Your suppliers disappear because of a sanctions package. Your payment route gets slower because a bank somewhere decides your jurisdiction is riskier this month.
Even if you never touch crypto, that environment changes the way you value optionality.
Bitcoin is optionality with teeth.
It is not magic.
It does not make geopolitics disappear.
It does not exempt anyone from laws.
It does not stop volatility.
It does one simple thing: it exists outside most of the chokepoints that make modern finance such an effective tool of state power.
That is why this moment matters more than a single Davos speech.
Two Bitcoins show up in markets, the insurance one, and the liquidity one
If you want to talk about Bitcoin under a changing world order without slipping into slogans, you have to admit something that makes true believers uncomfortable.
Bitcoin has two personalities in markets.
- One is the insurance asset. People buy it because they worry about the rails, the long term, the shape of the world, and the rules. They want something that can move across borders as information.
- The other is the liquidity asset. In sudden shocks, Bitcoin trades like the thing that gets sold when people need dollars now.
That second personality is why “rupture” headlines can produce weird price action. The macro story gets scarier, and Bitcoin drops anyway.
The immediate response is a dollar grab: credit tightens, leverage unwinds, risk gets sold first, and questions get asked later.
There’s a sequence: squeeze first, repricing later.
Tariffs as leverage, why the first wave can hurt Bitcoin, then help its story
Tariffs are more than a tax; they are a signal.
They tell markets the temperature of international relationships, they tell companies how stable their cost base will be, and they tell central banks how messy inflation might get.
This is where Carney’s argument about weaponized integration connects directly to Bitcoin’s near-term and long-term path.
If the latest tariff threats escalate into real measures, companies reprice supply chains, consumers see price pressure, and policymakers face uglier trade-offs.
The JPMorgan framing around tariffs is a reminder that they are not just politics. They are a macro variable that shows up in growth, inflation, and confidence.
In the first phase, markets often do what markets do. They go defensive, they prefer cash, they prefer the most liquid collateral, and they chase dollars.
Bitcoin can get dragged lower with everything else.
Then the second phase arrives.
Businesses and households realize this is not a one-off. They start paying for resilience. They diversify, build redundancy, and look for assets that sit outside the obvious pressure points.
That is where Bitcoin’s insurance narrative gains weight. Not everyone becomes a Bitcoin maximalist because they read the Bitcoin Whitepaper, but because a larger share of capital starts treating optionality as worth paying for.
Financial infrastructure as coercion, stablecoins live on the rails, Bitcoin sits outside them
Carney’s line about financial infrastructure matters because it points to the part of the crypto stack most people misunderstand.
Stablecoins are crypto, and stablecoins are also the dollar’s long arm.
They move fast, they settle cheaply, and they make cross-border value transfer easier. They also live inside an ecosystem of issuers, compliance, blacklists, and regulatory chokepoints.
That is beyond a moral judgment. It is the design, and it is also why stablecoins can scale.
In a world where financial infrastructure becomes more openly coercive, stablecoins can feel like a superhighway with more toll booths.
Bitcoin feels like a dirt road that still gets you out. That distinction becomes more important as countries and blocs start building their own resilience stacks.
Carney called it variable geometry: different coalitions for different issues. He talked about buyers’ clubs for critical minerals, bridging trade blocs, and AI governance among like-minded democracies.
You can see the same logic in the policy world around defense procurement, including Europe’s SAFE push.
It is about capacity, coordination, and optionality. Crypto will get pulled into that same orbit.
Some blocs will prefer regulated, surveilled rails. Some will build their own. Some will restrict foreign dependencies. Some will quietly keep a foot in every camp.
Bitcoin’s role in that environment is leveraged through existence.
If you can exit, even imperfectly, coercion becomes costlier to apply.
Middle powers, “third paths,” and why Bitcoin’s biggest impact might be psychological
Carney’s speech is a manifesto for middle powers: countries that cannot dictate terms alone, and that get squeezed when great powers turn the world into a bilateral negotiation.
He said negotiating alone with a hegemon means negotiating from weakness. He said middle powers have a choice: compete for favor, or combine to create a third path.
That is a geopolitical argument.
It also rhymes with what Bitcoin represents in finance.
Bitcoin is a third-path asset.
It is not the hegemon’s money. It is not a rival’s money. It is not a corporate ledger. It is not a treaty.
That matters most when trust is thin and alignment is messy, when alliances feel conditional, and when sovereignty sounds less like a principle and more like something you have to finance.
Carney stood with Greenland and Denmark in his remarks.
He opposed tariffs over Greenland, and called for focused talks on Arctic security and prosperity.
You do not have to take a view on Greenland to see the pattern. Trade tools are being discussed as leverage among allies in public.
When that happens, every CFO, every pension committee, every sovereign fund, and every household with savings gets a little more serious about tail risks.
That is what matters for us, the slow shift in what feels safe.
US President Donald Trump, speaking today, asserted that he “would not use force” to take Greenland but reiterated that he does still want to purchase the “big block of ice.” He reaffirmed that he expects Europe to support the purchase for world security reasons, but if it refuses, “the US will remember.”
Three forward scenarios for Bitcoin by 2030, “managed fragmentation,” “tariff spiral,” “rails fracture”
Carney called this a rupture.
He also warned against a world of fortresses and argued for shared resilience. Those are two different futures, and Bitcoin’s path looks different in each.
1) Managed fragmentation
Blocs form, standards diverge, and trade routes adjust. Coercion exists, but it stays bounded because everyone realizes escalation is expensive.
Bitcoin in this world trends upward as a portfolio’s final insurance policy. Volatility remains.
Correlation to liquidity cycles remains. The structural bid grows because the world keeps paying for optionality.
2) Tariff spiral and dollar squeeze
Tariffs escalate, and retaliation follows.
Inflation uncertainty rises, central banks stay tight longer, and risk assets get hit. A dollar squeeze shows up.
Bitcoin here can look disappointing in the moment.
Price falls with leverage unwinds, narratives get mocked, then policy eventually shifts, liquidity returns, and the underlying reason people want an exit option becomes stronger.
3) Rails fracture
Financial coercion expands. Secondary sanctions and controls become more common. Cross-border payments get more politicized.
Some countries build parallel settlement stacks, some companies reroute exposure, and everyone pays more for friction.
Bitcoin’s insurance value is highest in this world because the cost of conditional access is highest.
Stablecoins still matter for commerce. Bitcoin matters for reserve optionality, for portability, and for the ability to move value when doors close.
This is also where regulation gets harsher. A fractured world tends to be a more suspicious world, and the easiest thing for states to tighten is anything that looks like capital flight.
Bitcoin’s upside here exists alongside higher enforcement pressure. That tension becomes part of the story.
The quiet tell, even Davos is arguing about resilience, not efficiency
The old globalization story was efficiency: just-in-time supply chains, single-point optimization, and frictionless capital.
Carney’s speech is about resilience, redundancy, shared standards, and variable coalitions.
And it is happening at Davos, the temple of integration. That is the tell. Even the “rules-based order” language is changing in public.
The WEF theme is still cooperation. The framing is still dialogue. And the agenda is full of resilience talk because the room knows the bargain Carney described is under strain.
Outside Davos, the news cycle reinforces the point.
The UN Security Council is still extending reporting around Red Sea attacks, reminding everyone that shipping lanes are strategic terrain. The UN record captures how persistent that risk remains.
The Venezuela tanker seizures covered by AP show hard power and economic control blending in the Western Hemisphere, too.
Le Monde’s report on a US-Taiwan deal around advanced chips and tariffs shows how industrial policy and trade are merging, even in sectors that used to be treated as pure economics.
Bitcoin does not cause any of this.
And it does not solve it.
It becomes more relevant because the world is changing around it.
What to watch next, five signals that the rupture thesis is becoming investable
A watchlist to remain alert:
- Tariff implementation dates, and whether threats turn into policy. The Greenland-linked tariff reporting is one real-time test.
- Signs of allies building redundancy stacks: defense procurement coordination, trade bridges, critical-minerals buyers’ clubs, and the policy plumbing that makes “shared resilience” real.
- Cross-border payments politics. Any move that makes access more conditional increases demand for outside options, and also increases pressure on crypto on-ramps.
- Energy and shipping risk. The Red Sea remains a live variable.
- Bitcoin’s behavior during stress. If it sells off first and rebounds when policy shifts, that fits the two-personality model. If it starts holding up during shocks, that signals the insurance bid is getting deeper.
The point Carney made, applied to Bitcoin
Carney’s speech was a warning about pretending, about “living within a lie,” about acting like the old system still works as advertised.
For Bitcoin, the parallel is simpler. People have treated money as plumbing for decades. They are starting to treat it like a geopolitical instrument again.
In that world, Bitcoin becomes easier to understand.
Not as a promise. Not as a religion. And not as a straight-line trade.
It becomes what it has always been underneath the hype: a volatile, imperfect, stubborn form of financial optionality.
A way to keep one window open when more doors start coming with terms and conditions.
