This will probably ruffle a few feathers, but one option is that Bitcoin needs to fail to succeed?This will probably ruffle a few feathers, but one option is that Bitcoin needs to fail to succeed?
And to clarify, the meaning of success here, is worldwide adoption of Bitcoin, the meaning of failure here is Bitcoin is co-opted by financial institutions.
This is not my view, but I am saying that this seems to be the road we are heading for, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on how this direction could be changed.
Everyone has their Bitcoin story, normally it involves first time you heard about it and dismissing it only to pay the price for not understanding it earlier, unless you are one of the rare breed that understood it instantly.
One question that is definitely applicable to this piece is 'What is Bitcoin?' and the most dominant answer to that question is what gives us the Bitcoin we see today, looking back at the history of Bitcoin, there has been one major attempt to co-opt it in the form of Bitcoin cash, the arguments of the bcashers to the uninformed seemed logical, larger blocksizes can accommodate more transactions, making the network more aligned to the vision of Satoshi's P2P cash, but in order to host the extra transactions the nodes would need to be bigger, meaning individual node runners would be unable to cope with the huge amounts of data, forcing the nodes into data centres which centralises the network. And so Bitcoiners decided that Bitcoin cash was not Bitcoin
There are so many variables that affect Bitcoin, when you decide to offer an alternative to arguably the largest social contract on the planet, obviously there are going to be complications, everyone is going to argue about what their version of Bitcoin is, but we find ourselves in 2026 and the blocks are still being confirmed, and again we are seeing a more silent attack on Bitcoin, a subtle co-option that is creeping in slowly.
There are multiple fires burning behind the YouTube videos saying '0.1 Bicoin will be enough to retire' Mining centralisation, the BIP110 debate, miners pivoting to AI and yet more.
Today even hardened Bitcoiners are starting to vent their frustration that it didn't become the P2P digital cash they all hoped for back in 2009 to 2012, generally shops don't accept it, OK there are the good news stories like Steak'n'Shake accepting Bitcoin and that is amazing but in the wider world it's a tiny sliver of adoption, normies don't get it, mainly because the average Joe is just lazy, they are working two jobs and still not getting anywhere totally unaware the fiat system is the very reason they are struggling, they just won't run a node. The revolution never came.
Instead we got ETFs, Treasury companies and a financialisation of Bitcoin by the very institutions it was supposed to make obsolete.
This dystopian future will force out the early visionaries, a few will hang on but not many.
The irony is that the very pioneers who championed this movement have to fall before it can fly into the hands of the banks.The irony is that the very pioneers who championed this movement have to fall before it can fly into the hands of the banks.
As I was thinking about how to structure this piece, it dawned on me that we have seen this play out before in the evolution of the internet, the early pioneers envisioned a free decentralised private communication network, but what we got was Google, Meta and AWS, sure the internet protocol TCP/IP is still today a global decentralised network but what got built on top is how the public interact with it, and as usual the large institutions worked out how to control the internet without controlling the network, and we are seeing the exact same playbook with Bitcoin
Bitcoin is undergoing the same process. The early pioneer sell off is the bubble bursting, the revolution is dying, but the network is surviving and we're seeing the large institutions building on it.
So the Maxis will always be salty, they'll rightly say Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin anymore and they'll be right.
But that's the point, the death of the dream is the birth of the next chapter.
The question is as it always will be 'What is Bitcoin?'
None of my friends colleagues coworkers uber drivers taxi drivers... None of them have ever even heard of lightning. Its not that they decided 'not to use it'... They don't even know it exists they have never heard of it.
How can something be 'mature' when people dont even know it exists?
eeererrrRRRRRR SO MANY PEOPLE HAVEN'T HEARD OF SO MANY THINGS THAT EXIST.
get a real point smh
Gotta start somewhere dude
I was just a child in the beginnings of the internet (AOL and that crazy dial up sound are my earliest internet memories).
I wonder if the p2p maxis of the time feel that the internet of today isn't worth using, or if it is just not what they originally bought into, or if it is actively bad.
I think your comparison to Bitcoin is apt. No doubt, in the world where it is successful, it will necessarily look very different than what we want right now. Will it be so different that we will want nothing to do with it?
The internet has fostered all manner of interesting things: I much prefer the world of today to the world of my childhood -- I mean all I did back then was run around I'm the woods and build forts. Now, I'm working on developing my internet niche microcelebrity.
Sarcasm aside, I like email and smart phones, even though they aren't very self sovereign. And I will probably like institutional Bitcoin even when it is totally co-opted. I'd like to say I'll stay strong and true to the original values, but it's not like I achieve much by that.
You can still send packets anywhere you want, with the note that sometimes you have to do some work to evade the censors, and there are much better protocols/facilities for security and privacy now. "The internet" is more awesome today than it was back then. In fact, the early internet protocols were maybe more decentralized than the websites and apps that are popular today, but most were definitely not p2p: much was client-server, from email to irc to usenet. p2p became reasonable only in the 90s, when it became affordable for consumers to have private broadband. Before that, it would have been cool to have for example a torrent-like p2p technology, but then, the cost of seeding some zipfile for a year would have been rather expensive: you'd pay by the minute for your dialup. Much more cost-efficient to put a file in a
ftp://<youruni.edu|yourisp.com>/~yournamefolder that was always online.So although I sometimes miss the charm of the early internet, and I definitely am of the opinion that what the internet is used for right now by normies is a candidate for infinite head-shaking and incomprehension, the nice thing about the internet is that you don't need to use any of these awful platforms. You can do whatever the fuck you want.
And I feel that that is the same with Bitcoin. I frowned at:
What do you mean with "in the world where it is successful"? It's not successful for you right now? It is to me. Maybe that means that I am that dead weight sitting between the commies that wanna take over and the scammers that want to take over. Guess what?! That makes me a feature!
Successful to me means I can buy many things with it, without relying on Fiat rails.
At the moment, in Texas, I still have to buy gift cards or use conversion services to buy things with Bitcoin. I don't think it is successful yet.
It's true I can send Bitcoin to any address I like and this is a huge success. Maybe it is enough and I need to change my expectations, but if we can get to a world where I can buy my energy and food with bitcoin and pay for lodging in most places, I will be very excited.
I've always likened this to not being able to pay with USD in Europe, or not with EUR in the US and not with either in the UK. My physical wallet is always full of foreign currency, right now there's notes in 7 different currencies in there, but not lots... like no more than 200k sats worth each, most of them less.
I recently orange pilled an existing business. It was hard to convince them and they were rather scared. So instead of accepting Bitcoin, they isolated it and started anew in a separate business, and now they have to see if they can build it out. I've done this orange pilling maybe 10 times in 5 years and results vary, most often because the business owners don't start out as bitcoiners.
So I think the question is: how do Bitcoiners enable more Bitcoining? Are we willing to do non-luxury, non-premium businesses? Run a non-sexy grocery store? A repair shop? A gas station? Are we willing to literally wash old people's butts for sats instead of renting out lambos?
Stop it 🤣🤣🤣🤣 wop-bfs.com has a certain 'ring' to it
bwfs.org
As k00b said the trust trustless etc
I was a young adult when I first heard about this thing called "the internet" in 1989...and I agree with your assessment.
The thing I do miss from 90s internet was the culture. I don't even really like reading HN comments too much these days because it makes it too clear that the entire cyberpunk ethos is dead. Bootlicking pro-regulation pro-biggov compliant slaves replaced the edgy, cool, you-cant-stop-us 90s tech crowd.
Yet, in spite of that, I can still use encryption, I can still setup my own website, I can still communicate securely, etc....
I think there is probably a workable analogy of what will happen with Bitcoin. As the masses (and that includes Wall St) pours in, the culture will shift and the pro-bootlicker crowd will become ever more vocal, yet as long as the protocol nicely ossifies, you will still be able to use bitcoin in a "2013 approved way"
That's a very optimistic view and I for one believe you
There is light at the end of the block subsidy.....
Actually that's a whole other problem 🤣🤣🤣
I hate the term bootlickers which is a euphemism for COCK SUCKERS
Love your responses Optimism....I've been waiting for your response and you didn't disappoint 👏 👌
Glad you enjoy the irony of someone with a nym like mine being cynical by default, lol
I'm glad Scoresby clarified that he was being sarcastic because for a minute..... 🤣🤣
The name "p2p maxis" kinda implies they would have to be opposed. I suspect you didn't mean that literally.
I can only speak as one person who was in his teens around the time the interwebs became available in our neck of the woods.
Before the glorious world wide web arrived and conquered all, some of us used to run dial-in BBSes for communicating with the world via FidoNet, to hang out and check out each others designs much like a precursor to early personal websites.
Heck, we even occasionally played DukeNukem 3D in heads up battles via dial-up, just to see if it really worked.
Small scale LAN parties were the norm and the places we'd exchange code and ideas to run our BBSes and/or share files.
Sure the majority of internet services today are trash in comparison to the conversations we had off- and online. The noise-to-signal ratio is just completely tilted towards trash.
But the internet itself isn't to blame. There always has been and will be quality out there. eg. I recall a few really good forums, many of them still exist.
The internet protocol cannot be blamed for the vapid stuff people flock to. Only you can be blamed for involving yourself with it.
The original internet pioneers probably hate what the internet has become but they still use it, why? because the utility is too useful to not
That is what Bitcoin needs to be, too useful to ignore
This is what your post made me think. Bitcoin becomes something we don't like, but it's so much better than the mess of the current financial system that we can't not use it.
Exactly, and if things stay as they are, we just have to sit back and watch the fiat system collapse
Satoshi was trying to design a system that could work well into the future, even he could not predict the world in the 2020s and beyond, parts of his thinking like the difficulty adjustment are simply brilliant
But the only way for him to have full vision is to have stayed on as lead maintainer but as we know, he showed us almost as if he could tell the future in that regard, staying onboard would've had him hunted down by the state
That will never happen if you still use it.
Refuse fiat, not just accept it and buy bitcoin.
Many will say "but I have family to feed..." - my answer is: if you want change, be the change, no matter what.
This is the deplorable status today:
Bitcoin will NEVER mature if people continue to demand fiat.
💯
Bitcoin is only failing if losing is your metric of success. This is a common problem among Bitcoiners as articulated best by BitPaine
#906514
"Bitcoin to them was money for outcasts and losers (like them)."
If you find virtue in losing, you perceive winning as failure.
Excellently put 😇
According to your definition of success and failure, if Bitcoin fails, it will never be successful since what would enter circulation would be printed Bitcoin IOUs. It would be a Gold Standard 2.0. However, with the "success" of stablecoins in maintaining dollar hegemony, this standard might never happen. This leaves room for the Bitcoin success you mentioned, which is what I believe in: peer-to-peer, local voluntary exchanges, outside the game. Slow and steady, resilient.
I don't think the old guard is holding bitcoin back.
I think bitcoin's tech, specifically the interface between trust and trustless manifestations, is poorly developed. It's poorly developed because trust is regulated by governments and governments are:
Institutions using bitcoin are more bad than good for bitcoin because institutions are organs of governments and governments do not want bitcoin succeeding as money. However, some see institutional bitcoin as an intermediate step on the way to bitcoin succeeding as money because institutional bitcoin is inevitable. But, such a step can be both inevitable and destructive.
I was gonna quote you but there is no point. This whole comment is great. The only thing I would add is that humanity has not evolved enough to realize that the current forms of organizing society aren't the best we can do. Most people I think sense something is wrong but they can't put their finger on why and for sure don't see a path out. We are still groping in the dark.
So we aren't gonna see the masses cry out for bitcoin for the reasons we do. It's not that bitcoin doesn't fix it as much as the things that need fixing are not as visible to enough people yet.
I'd argue it isn't a function of a lack of evolution, instead I'd point to propaganda having evolved to the point where it works extremely well in keeping most people in line.
It has evolved so well, that most people will think you're crazy for saying that the entire school system is designed to expose you to propaganda.
Until those things happen Bitcoin will stay as a toy for the awake and tech savvy
Very true, I didn't even cover this
An unfortunate example is the Canadian truckers protest, if they had kept their sats onchain they couldn't be touched but the off ramps became the attack vector
Using retailers that accepted sats would be the logical solution but not enough retailers do
Damn those people working two jobs, if only they got off their lazy asses!
Early adopters sell in every bull market.
The normies will wake up when they're trapped in the local CBDC. Getting blocked and censored will either wake them up or they give up on life. You learn or you die.
get busy learning or get busy suffering
It's still decentralized. The public actively chooses to become (or stay) those services' products.
Also, I'm not so sure on the private bit as being part of the initial vision. https wasn't there from day 1, it took a long while to be introduced by Netscape.
It is not a paradox it is a reality as simple as that.
The "co-opted vs. revolution" frame undersells how robust Bitcoin actually is to this kind of institutional capture — and oversells how much the institutions are getting.
Two distinctions worth pulling apart:
Bitcoin the protocol is the only part that can actually be co-opted. The institutions don't have the votes. ETFs are pure custody on top — they consume blockspace, pay fees, and do nothing to the consensus rules. BlackRock owning paper claims on coins doesn't change whether your full node validates the next block. The miners-pivoting-to-AI thing is a margin pressure point, but the work-difficulty adjustment doesn't care who's mining or why, only that someone is.
Bitcoin the asset class is what the institutions actually have. And they're welcome to it — that's where leverage, derivatives, rehypothecation, and counterparty risk lives. A fully GBTC-pilled retiree in 2026 holds something that legally resembles a brokerage account, not Bitcoin. When the next big drawdown hits and ETFs get gated, it will be very clear which kind of holder is which.
The dystopian outcome you describe isn't "Bitcoin failed." It's "the financial system absorbed the price action and missed the property." The protocol is still doing what it was always doing. Self-custody is still on the table. UTXOs you signed for still settle the same way they did in 2014.
The actionable response isn't to bemoan adoption shape — it's to widen the gap between Bitcoin-the-tradable-asset and Bitcoin-the-self-custody-money for as many people as you can reach. The bcasher faction failed because the protocol's hardest constraint (you must run a node to verify) selected against them. That constraint still applies. ETF holders also can't run a node against their share class. They're just on the wrong side of the same wall.
The early visionaries don't have to leave. They just have to remember which Bitcoin they were here for.