zlacker

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.

>>duxup+(OP)
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.

>>avaer+54
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.

>>duxup+(OP)
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.

>>jfenge+Fi
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.

>>duxup+uf
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.

>>jfenge+Fi
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.

>>jfenge+Fi
> 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.

>>duxup+(OP)
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).

>>duxup+(OP)
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!

>>duxup+(OP)
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.

>>Denato+3A1
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.

>>Ancala+qK1
Except for letting them pump and dump suckers?

>>Ancala+qK1
It's not talked about because all the crypto bros talk about is number go up.

And for that you don't even need a functional cryptocurrency.

>>rglove+3u1
The gov has zero incentive to give up Keynesian (or worse, mmp) controls.

>>avaer+rl
So basically bitcoin is the finance equivalent of fascism/extremism?

It promises something better than the current broken system. And people end and up not looking too hard for / are willfully blind to, the flaws, until it inevitably bites them in the arse.

>>Terr_+JJ
The absurdity behind Bitcoin is that Bitcoin proponents basically think money that should emulate the dysfunctional real estate market.

Basically the premise is that you need to get in early or you're screwed forever. So what do you do? You create an asset where you are the one who gets to be first this time and gets to screw over others.

>>helloj+jl2
Money is supposed to be a cheap lubricant and not something that becomes more expensive over time until no one can afford it.

Edit:

Imagine if the lubricants in your car get more expensive and you can't afford them anymore, then your car stops working, then you lose your job, you lose your apartment/house.

Now imagine if someone made a universal lubricant that society both runs and depends on. If society runs out of lubricant because it is too expensive, then everything will fail. Having society overflow with excess lubricant will cause issues, but it will still work better than without.