The Bitcoin ecosystem, folks looking at it as an investment / get rich pathway, all the scam / poorly run companies, straight up crime ... really seems to fly in the face of the whitepaper and presumed ethos.
In spite of its issues, it seems like Monero is the only mainstream cryptocurrency that actually still lives up to the ethos of what Satoshi had in mind.
I don't doubt it, but the sort of "I'm escaping the financial systems that is stacked against me" attitudes are prevalent among folks, the ethos lives on in a weird sort of way ... but really individuals are going to a worse place more often than not.
You're right, but the people that say they're pilled/sticking it to the man/breaking out of the matrix -- they're just parroting things they saw on X or tiktok. And then shuffling their money based on that.
They haven't researched or thought about any of this, otherwise they wouldn't be reducing finance to repeating someone else's soundbytes.
There's no ethos there, it's just reposts. Yes, it is weird.
The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency and reached a stable exchange rate.
That world wasn't necessarily impossible. Imagine that the US reconceived the dollar as a coin, and everybody simply accepted it as a replacement currency. Potentially, a very large bank or credit card company could have done that with a stablecoin pegged to the dollar.
But that's not what happened. Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency so there was no way to anchor its value. Infinite shitcoins popped up, making cryptocurrency as a whole the most inflationary system in the universe (because anybody can mint their own coins). The whitepaper never considered that possibility.
It's still possible that the US government could decide to start taking BTC for payment of taxes, at some fixed exchange rate. That would anchor the price of BTC, and the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.
IMO it was always a bad fit for a prospective currency, since its nature is tilted towards deflation, a speculative asset to be hoarded while everyone continues to conduct normal "I need a sandwich" business in anything else.
> The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency... That world wasn't necessarily impossible.
That world has always been a hallucination at best and a cruel deception at worst, but it's never been possible and never will be.
> Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency
It was and it is, it's not a central bank currency but the promise of BTC is the opposite of that. BTC is officially tradable in the US, you can exchange it for dollars to pay your taxes.
> so there was no way to anchor its value.
The promise of BTC has never been "anchored value"... it's always been a "to the moon" scam.
> It's still possible that the US government could... anchor the price of BTC, the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.
That cannot happen without invalidating everything written in the white paper, in other words that wouldn't be Bitcoin anymore and nothing like that could function in the current financial system.
Good point. It's strange as it seems like using Bitcoin to buy things is structurally difficult anyway. If that should have held the price stable ... it isn't very good at doing that thing.
The presumed ethos flew out the door the second that fundamentals were traded for chasing the very asset bitcoin was trying to replace (an inevitability vis-a-vis human behavior).
That said, I don't think it's "dead," but rather showing itself for what it is: a well-intentioned attempt at solving corruption of money, predictably co-opted by (and made the bitch of) the very forces it sought to replace. Now, it seems to best exist as a secondary financial rail that you can use if and when it suits your needs.
The original ideological base case failed miserably, unfortunately (sound money).
No worries, they wanted to be considered a currency, and now with Trump's grift economy, they're really making a good case they're just as useless as real currency and even better for grift!
My guess is that Bitcoin was never a actual hedge. But instead fully speculative gambling. Hedge is really something someone would want in market correction or something that keeps value in such. Bitcoin never was actually wanted for anything but gambling.
The markets have hardly moved yet and there are far bigger dips and faster dips within the last year which did not have such an effect https://i.imgur.com/nYSdiUN.png. I also agree with the sibling it doesn't really make sense to call Bitcoin a hedge if it's supposed to drop with the market.
You can kind of explain it in four year halving/hype cycles. A downturn around now is what you'd expect if it keeps that up so not much of a story really.
AFAIK, after all the hype around Bitcoin proved to be false, the last justification for owning it among people who can't think straight was as a systemic risk hedge, like gold, but this has also not borne out.
I don't doubt the faithful's ability to conjure up some other BS story for why it's worth owning, but there has to be something.
This is also true of Boeing, Citigroup and the Argentinian peso.
Looking at the actual quotes on that website, I'm struggling to find the word death (or a synonym). Instead, it's a collection of criticisms. Many of them wrong. But not many showing thoughtless dismissal.
Aren't stablecoins better for that? Especially when the current US government is seemingly OK with a very centralized entity holding over $100 billion in T-bonds, backing a coin that's mostly used for pig butchering scams and sanction evasion. No need to pretend blockchains are remotely useful with such actors (BNB comes to mind too).
Bitcoin isn't going to die, but it isn't going to replace currency or gold. It'll remain as a speculation vehicle and a mechanism to move value outside of regulated financial systems.
Why? It’s a pure fiat currency with limited real-world adoption, what reason will people have to favor it over the alternatives next week which they don’t have today?
As long as the government continues to devalue the dollar, crypto is in a great position.
Speculating out several orders:
Once the new head of the fed takes over and pushes interest rate cuts per his bosses request, borrowing will get cheaper, money will flow and inflation will go up. The dollar will devalue. Congress will never stop going into a deficit with their spending bills as no one votes for austerity, requiring more and more money to be printed. Wages will not keep up with inflation as it skyrockets and taxes take an ever greater chunk of the workers check.
If things continue as they have been, at some point, the dollar will not be a good value proposition for average normal people to use for day to day exchange, and they will start to look into other options to maintain economic normalcy.
Crypto currency is poised to take over.
If you take speculation to even further orders beyond that... once people start to switch over to crypto en masse, the government will then start to track people's crypto usage to recoup it's tax money that it's losing.
Then privacy crypto currency will be poised to take over that.
Another interesting monkey wrench. The dollar is somewhat bastioned from inflation by being the worlds reserve currency. But imagine if the world lost faith in dollar and started to use something else like a EU or BRICS currency. I wonder how that would affect the dollars value?
BlackRock & Wall Street funds/banks pumped Bitcoin for the past couple of years. They slowly started dumping 2 months ago, before the Epstein emails. I'm sure they had no insider information and it's a total coincidence. /s
Russia-Ukraine war is being wound down and Russian sanctions will be lifted probably in the next 1-2 months. Crypto is the financial tissue that connects sanctioned entities to non-sanctioned Western banks. What you are seeing is Russians and other sanctioned entities dumping their coins since they won't be needed soon.
This is quite a wild take — but I‘m willing to not dismiss it outright. Not that I’m in any position or capacity to know anything more than the next guy about these matters. But it has a „so wild it could actually be true“ vibe.
The Bitcoin ecosystem, folks looking at it as an investment / get rich pathway, all the scam / poorly run companies, straight up crime ... really seems to fly in the face of the whitepaper and presumed ethos.
In spite of its issues, it seems like Monero is the only mainstream cryptocurrency that actually still lives up to the ethos of what Satoshi had in mind.
I 100% agree and don't understand why Monero isn't talked about more. I own none of it but it accomplishes everything the crypto bro's talk about.
To a first approximation ~nobody who "invests" in crypto has read a whitepaper or considered the ethos.
It's one of the bugs/features of crypto.
I don't doubt it, but the sort of "I'm escaping the financial systems that is stacked against me" attitudes are prevalent among folks, the ethos lives on in a weird sort of way ... but really individuals are going to a worse place more often than not.
You're right, but the people that say they're pilled/sticking it to the man/breaking out of the matrix -- they're just parroting things they saw on X or tiktok. And then shuffling their money based on that.
They haven't researched or thought about any of this, otherwise they wouldn't be reducing finance to repeating someone else's soundbytes.
There's no ethos there, it's just reposts. Yes, it is weird.
The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency and reached a stable exchange rate.
That world wasn't necessarily impossible. Imagine that the US reconceived the dollar as a coin, and everybody simply accepted it as a replacement currency. Potentially, a very large bank or credit card company could have done that with a stablecoin pegged to the dollar.
But that's not what happened. Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency so there was no way to anchor its value. Infinite shitcoins popped up, making cryptocurrency as a whole the most inflationary system in the universe (because anybody can mint their own coins). The whitepaper never considered that possibility.
It's still possible that the US government could decide to start taking BTC for payment of taxes, at some fixed exchange rate. That would anchor the price of BTC, and the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.
IMO it was always a bad fit for a prospective currency, since its nature is tilted towards deflation, a speculative asset to be hoarded while everyone continues to conduct normal "I need a sandwich" business in anything else.
> The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency... That world wasn't necessarily impossible.
That world has always been a hallucination at best and a cruel deception at worst, but it's never been possible and never will be.
> Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency
It was and it is, it's not a central bank currency but the promise of BTC is the opposite of that. BTC is officially tradable in the US, you can exchange it for dollars to pay your taxes.
> so there was no way to anchor its value.
The promise of BTC has never been "anchored value"... it's always been a "to the moon" scam.
> It's still possible that the US government could... anchor the price of BTC, the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.
That cannot happen without invalidating everything written in the white paper, in other words that wouldn't be Bitcoin anymore and nothing like that could function in the current financial system.
Good point. It's strange as it seems like using Bitcoin to buy things is structurally difficult anyway. If that should have held the price stable ... it isn't very good at doing that thing.
The presumed ethos flew out the door the second that fundamentals were traded for chasing the very asset bitcoin was trying to replace (an inevitability vis-a-vis human behavior).
That said, I don't think it's "dead," but rather showing itself for what it is: a well-intentioned attempt at solving corruption of money, predictably co-opted by (and made the bitch of) the very forces it sought to replace. Now, it seems to best exist as a secondary financial rail that you can use if and when it suits your needs.
The original ideological base case failed miserably, unfortunately (sound money).
No worries, they wanted to be considered a currency, and now with Trump's grift economy, they're really making a good case they're just as useless as real currency and even better for grift!
When the US dollar definitively loses its status as the reserve currency of the world there is no great competitor to replace it.
Bitcoin has features which make it uniquely appropriate for this: namely that no other currency is so resistant to debasement.
I anticipate it will recover and set new records.
Wall Street is not doing well at the moment[1] and is probably calling on it's hedges[2] - including Bitcoin - to cover losses.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904619
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_(finance)
My guess is that Bitcoin was never a actual hedge. But instead fully speculative gambling. Hedge is really something someone would want in market correction or something that keeps value in such. Bitcoin never was actually wanted for anything but gambling.
The markets have hardly moved yet and there are far bigger dips and faster dips within the last year which did not have such an effect https://i.imgur.com/nYSdiUN.png. I also agree with the sibling it doesn't really make sense to call Bitcoin a hedge if it's supposed to drop with the market.
Bitcoin goes up, bitcoin goes down, you can't explain that.
Seriously though, bitcoin has always been highly volatile, is this really a story?
You can kind of explain it in four year halving/hype cycles. A downturn around now is what you'd expect if it keeps that up so not much of a story really.
It's a reference to the Bill O'Reilly line about tides
Bitcoin has been declared dead many times:
https://bitcoindeaths.com/
It just keeps on existing.
AFAIK, after all the hype around Bitcoin proved to be false, the last justification for owning it among people who can't think straight was as a systemic risk hedge, like gold, but this has also not borne out.
I don't doubt the faithful's ability to conjure up some other BS story for why it's worth owning, but there has to be something.
> Bitcoin has been declared dead many times
This is also true of Boeing, Citigroup and the Argentinian peso.
Looking at the actual quotes on that website, I'm struggling to find the word death (or a synonym). Instead, it's a collection of criticisms. Many of them wrong. But not many showing thoughtless dismissal.
I found a "RIP: Bitcoin" from a self described conspiracy theorist.
A number of them suggest that it'll become worthless in the future, but that's certainly not saying it's dead now.
As long as crime exists BTC will follow
Aren't stablecoins better for that? Especially when the current US government is seemingly OK with a very centralized entity holding over $100 billion in T-bonds, backing a coin that's mostly used for pig butchering scams and sanction evasion. No need to pretend blockchains are remotely useful with such actors (BNB comes to mind too).
> It just keeps on existing.
That is not in itself a recommendation. You could say the same of most infectious diseases and parasites, or antisocial acts.
>you'd have $70,482,477 today
I wish COVID had that ROI.
> I wish COVID had that ROI.
It had it... for some, same as BTC.
Bitcoin isn't going to die, but it isn't going to replace currency or gold. It'll remain as a speculation vehicle and a mechanism to move value outside of regulated financial systems.
It's a speculative instrument useful for enabling criminal activity and not much else.
It will be back up next week
Why? It’s a pure fiat currency with limited real-world adoption, what reason will people have to favor it over the alternatives next week which they don’t have today?
Figure out why it has gone up and up all these years while being a “pure fiat currency with limited real-world adoption”, and you’ll have your answer.
https://www.saylortracker.com
As long as the government continues to devalue the dollar, crypto is in a great position.
Speculating out several orders:
Once the new head of the fed takes over and pushes interest rate cuts per his bosses request, borrowing will get cheaper, money will flow and inflation will go up. The dollar will devalue. Congress will never stop going into a deficit with their spending bills as no one votes for austerity, requiring more and more money to be printed. Wages will not keep up with inflation as it skyrockets and taxes take an ever greater chunk of the workers check.
If things continue as they have been, at some point, the dollar will not be a good value proposition for average normal people to use for day to day exchange, and they will start to look into other options to maintain economic normalcy.
Crypto currency is poised to take over.
If you take speculation to even further orders beyond that... once people start to switch over to crypto en masse, the government will then start to track people's crypto usage to recoup it's tax money that it's losing.
Then privacy crypto currency will be poised to take over that.
Another interesting monkey wrench. The dollar is somewhat bastioned from inflation by being the worlds reserve currency. But imagine if the world lost faith in dollar and started to use something else like a EU or BRICS currency. I wonder how that would affect the dollars value?
More likely americans will start trading in € or £ cash, on a parallel market. The same way argentinians are doing it now with $.
I don't think the BTC market is worth playing unless you are good at knowing how the whales (who control it in its entirety) operate.
Everyone already knows BTC will be back at 110 in a few months. It might dip to 30 first, who the hell knows.
What can the whales do that is unclear until its over?
They can all sell massively to drive the price down, then all re-buy massively?
They'll have to pay taxes on the sales, it's an attrition game and BTC is on losing side. Most retail "investors" are cooked.
BlackRock & Wall Street funds/banks pumped Bitcoin for the past couple of years. They slowly started dumping 2 months ago, before the Epstein emails. I'm sure they had no insider information and it's a total coincidence. /s
Russia-Ukraine war is being wound down and Russian sanctions will be lifted probably in the next 1-2 months. Crypto is the financial tissue that connects sanctioned entities to non-sanctioned Western banks. What you are seeing is Russians and other sanctioned entities dumping their coins since they won't be needed soon.
This is quite a wild take — but I‘m willing to not dismiss it outright. Not that I’m in any position or capacity to know anything more than the next guy about these matters. But it has a „so wild it could actually be true“ vibe.