Bitcoin: What Went Wrong?

Something has fundamentally changed in this ecosystem. A big shift in the core ethos of things. Regardless of what you think about politics in the wider world, Bitcoin itself as a network and protocol was something explicitly designed to function in a hostile environment, in an environment where politics and governments are actively antagonistic towards it.

The core value proposition of Bitcoin itself is that, as a system, it can continue functioning despite such antagonism in a hostile environment. It can be a foundation for us to build upon, with everything built upon it inheriting that resilience to some degree in the face of a well equipped antagonist.

It seems like faith in that core value proposition has almost completely evaporated in this ecosystem. Determination to build upon that foundation, and to protect its soundness at all costs, seems to have evaporated. In its place we now have cheerleading politicians, favor trading for selectively beneficial regulation, and prioritization of short term financial gain over the preservation of what makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place.

People are less concerned with the creeping web of business relationships in the mining ecosystem, which is the bedrock of Bitcoin’s foundation of openness and censorship resistance, and more concerned with whether President Trump is going to just pump our bags, or pump the bags of shitcoiners too.

We are counting our chickens before they hatched.

Bitcoin has issues regarding mining centralization, and that part of the ecosystem’s vulnerability to regulatory attacks and mandates from governments that could put at risk the ability of people to openly use the network without fear of censorship. It has issues in terms of scalability, and the ability to support enough users using the network self-custodially to actually be a viable means of protests and opting out at a large enough scale to matter to governments. The custodians people otherwise will have to use are just as regulatorily vulnerable as miners are becoming. It also has a serious privacy issue, which opens users themselves to regulatory pressure forcing them into self censorship.

Bitcoin has all of these problems, and rather than focusing on solving them so that Bitcoin can remain the resilient system that made it valuable in the first place, people are more concerned with currying political favor with the current US Presidential Administration for token policy wins and short term financial gain at the cost of major concessions that very well could seriously damage Bitcoin’s foundation.

So where did we take a wrong turn? And frankly, what the fuck is wrong with everyone? 

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.