Whether the topic at hand is gender equity in a multinational corporation or the diet of the future, images of Neanderthals lumbering around unspoiled nature are, as Sam Kriss pointed out in a recent essay for The Outline , readily conjured up to point out the correct path to us. They scream: Humans are naturally competitive, men are naturally more assertive than women, and so on. Prehistory has this in common with the future: It is what we dream it to be. The result is a past that resembles an episode of The Flintstones, which is a funhouse mirror reflection of The Jetsons.

"The 20th century was disastrous for human health and wealth, and the rise of central banking and industrial food was clearly a major reason why," Michael Goldstein, founder of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and a vocal Bitcoin carnivore, wrote me in an email. "Bitcoin is a revolt against fiat money, and an all-meat diet is a revolt against fiat food."

No trend epitomizes this better than "Bitcoin carnivory," a diet-slash-lifestyle being promoted by a small but prolific group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts online. The idea is simple: Use only Bitcoin, eat only meat. The espoused benefits are as much spiritual as they are financial and physical, and its advocates are self-serious. For the Bitcoin carnivore, there is a kind of metaphysical parallel between decentralized digital ledgers and an imagined idea of what our ancestors ate, and by extension, how they lived. Politics, food, and money—it's all connected.

(I reached out to a couple of well-known nutritionists for this article. One responded in an email, saying that the diet is "too ridiculous to be covered." Another wrote, "Yet another extreme diet. Sigh.")

The implication of "fiat" is that modern money and modern foods are both artificial, and Bitcoin carnivorism supposedly solves this problem. Goldstein has been a dedicated carnivore since 2015, he told me, and eats "only from the animal kingdom, and mostly fat." When I asked him to spell out the apparent Bitcoin-carnivory-libertarianism trifecta at play, Goldstein responded, "Once you put on the They Live glasses, you can't take them off," referring to the 1988 film in which a drifter finds a pair of sunglasses that when worn reveal the world is controlled by evil aliens.

You can think of Bitcoin carnivory as an extreme version of the "paleo" diet (as in paleolithic) that supposedly mimics what humanity's ancestors ate—nuts, vegetables, and lots of meat. Paleo and Bitcoin carnivory are distinguished from other meat-centric diets by their explicit reference to prehistory. Paleo, by basing itself on a past that wasn't recorded in writing but can only be conjured in imagination, invites politics.

"The people who tell you to eat your 6-10 portions of indigestible toxic grains a day 'for a healthy and balanced diet' are the same kind of people who tell you central banks have to determine interest rates for a modern economy to function"

John Durant, the author of the 2014 book The Paleo Manifesto, describes paleo as an alternative to the "left-wing plant-based movement." At base, the paleo lifestyle says that a return to health (as in politics) means a return to our past. The past here being, of course, a fiction. Recently, University of Adelaide paleomicrobiologists analyzed Neanderthal dental plaque and found that our ancestors' diets were extremely varied based on what was available to them, and some populations were essentially vegetarian. But nevermind that; both paleo and Bitcoin carnivory, for all of their nods to the past, are about reacting to the politics of now.