Bitcoin’s Unfinished Mission
Bitcoin Lost the Plot. It Is Time to Return to Our Roots.
I’m not in Las Vegas as I write this. I’m not attending the Bitcoin Magazine conference. I don’t think Satoshi Nakamoto would be there either. I don’t at all feel that I’m missing out on anything. I’ve been using Bitcoin for almost as long as it’s been around, and I’ve watched the culture of it change over the years. The ‘vibe’ of this conference disgusts me.
I bought my first bitcoins in 2012.
I own none of those first coins today. I spent them all, and I have spent many millions of sats more since then. I spent bitcoin because I found places to spend it. I spent bitcoin because there were people building things worth buying. I spent bitcoin because it gave me an exhilarating thrill to conduct commerce outside of the USD driven economy.
That thrill still matters.
Bitcoin was not supposed to be a number on a brokerage screen. It was not supposed to become a Wall Street yield product wrapped in regulatory compliance language and sold back to the public as an IOU. It was not supposed to become a digital casino chip for people whose only imagination is a higher dollar price.
Bitcoin was supposed to be freedom money for the internet.
It was supposed to undermine the financial monopoly of the banking cartel. It was supposed to let people transact directly, across borders, without permission, without gatekeepers, without begging a bank or payment processor for access to commerce. It was supposed to help build a parallel economy.
Somewhere along the way, the dominant culture in Bitcoin forgot that.
The Early Spirit
In the early years, there were many opportunities to spend bitcoin. Online shops were popping up everywhere. Services accepted it. Private VPN providers accepted it. File hosting services accepted it. Even major online retailers experimented with it.
I once built an entire PC with components from Newegg that I paid for in bitcoin.
That was not some abstract ideological exercise. That was real commerce. That was bitcoin functioning as money.
There were also the years of the darkweb marketplace heyday, with the Silk Road and many of its descendants. Whatever one thinks of those marketplaces, they demonstrated something important: bitcoin could support commerce that existed outside the permission structure of banks, card networks, and state supervised payment rails.
I spent an entire summer in introspective consciousness expansion with the help of LSD acquired through one of those markets. That is not a recommendation. It is an honest recollection of the time. Bitcoin was not merely an asset to stare at. It was a tool that opened doors to forms of exchange that the legacy system did not permit.
That was part of the point.
Back then, many early adopters were animated by the freedom aspect of Bitcoin. Yes, there were greedy people too. There have always been greedy people in Bitcoin. Even in the early days, there were people flaunting their gains, buying Lamborghinis, mansions, and whatever other status symbols they could use to advertise their newfound wealth.
But they were not the whole culture.
The broader spirit was different. People were willing to spend, buy, exchange, experiment, and build. There were bitcoin faucets giving away coins for free just to get people to try transacting. People wanted adoption. People wanted circulation. People wanted a parallel economy.
The mission was not merely to get rich in fiat terms.
The mission was to make fiat less relevant.
The insidious fiat mindset crept in…
Bitcoin is better than fiat for many reasons, and realizing that is an important step toward freedom. But if a person’s only motivation for interacting with Bitcoin is that they think owning it will make them wealthy, then they have not actually escaped the fiat mindset.
They have simply changed the object of their greed.
That is the cultural rot I see in Bitcoin today. The dominant mentality is not monetary freedom. It is capital gains. It is price targets. It is hoarding. It is watching charts. It is treating bitcoin as a speculative asset that exists to make the holder rich in dollars.
Many people who came later feel the psychological weight of having missed the early gains. Bitcoin went from below one dollar to more than sixty thousand dollars. That is more than a sixty-thousand-fold increase, or more than +6,000,000%. Those early returns became the mythical origin story of Bitcoin’s potential to benefit its holders. Many latecomers do not merely wish they had been there earlier. They feel, consciously or not, that they are owed a similar miracle.
Those gains broke a lot of people’s brains.
Capital gains in fiat terms becomes their overarching goal. They buy and hoard. They fantasize about Bitcoin to one million dollars, Bitcoin to ten million dollars, Bitcoin to whatever number makes their greedy little dopamine receptors light up. They rarely take part in parallel economies. They rarely spend. They rarely build commerce. They are paralyzed by fear of missing future capital gains.
They are not using freedom money.
They are clutching a lottery ticket.
What doth it profit a Bitcoiner if he lose his soul?
Price Is Not the Measure of Bitcoin’s Success
The USD/BTC exchange rate is not the true measure of Bitcoin’s success.
The size and resilience of the network matters. The decentralization of the node base and hashrate matters. The ability of people to transact without permission matters. The growth of a parallel economy matters. The willingness of people to use bitcoin as money matters.
By the measure of being used as an alternative currency outside of the banking system, Bitcoin has been stagnant.
You can see this malaise in the culture, but you can also see it in network behavior. Daily active wallet activity has declined from prior highs. Monetary velocity is weak. Few people want to spend bitcoin. They buy it, hoard it, and stare at price charts.
People who obsessively look at price charts day after day have completely lost the plot.
Bitcoin was not created so that a generation of spiritually bankrupt chart addicts could spend their lives waiting for a green candle to make them feel validated in their conviction.
Bitcoin was created so that people could transact freely.
Greed should not be the only motivator. Financial wealth should not be the only goal.
The Saylor Problem
Michael Saylor is more a sign and symptom of Bitcoin’s cultural malaise, than the cause of it, but he has probably also done more to further this sickness than any man alive.
In my view, Saylor has done immense damage to the spirit of Bitcoin. I see him as a false prophet of the fiat Bitcoin age. He pays lip service to Bitcoin’s ethos because it serves his balance sheet. His message is not “use Bitcoin to build a parallel economy.” His message is “buy, hold, never sell, and pump my bags.”
It is disgusting how many Bitcoiners idolize him.
A debt financed corporate bitcoin strategy is not cypherpunk. It is not freedom tech. It is not self-sovereignty. It is a leveraged fiat machine wrapped in orange branding.
I would be thrilled to see the dollar price of Bitcoin crash to $10,000 for a while just to watch that debt fueled house of cards get stress tested. Not because I want Bitcoin to fail. I do not. I want Bitcoin to outlive every grifter, every tourist, every bank, every ETF issuer, and every corporate bag pumper who thinks they can colonize it.
But a brutal price crash would reveal who is actually here for freedom and who is only here for fiat gains.
Wall Street Co-option Is Not Victory
It is telling that the majority of conference attendees a couple of years ago supported the launch of Bitcoin ETFs by major American investment banks.
That moment said a lot.
Fiat banks issuing Bitcoin IOUs does absolutely nothing to further the cause of freedom or digital self-sovereignty. It does not teach people to hold their own keys. It does not teach people to run nodes. It does not grow circular economies. It does not create censorship resistant markets. It does not undermine the banking cartel.
It gives the banking cartel a fee product.
That is not victory. That is co-option.
Bitcoin was supposed to undermine the powerful financial monopoly of the banking system. Years later, the majority of so-called Bitcoiners cheered as Wall Street banks wrapped Bitcoin in custodial paper claims and sold it back to the public through regulated brokerage accounts.
They chose greed over principles.
Speakers at conferences now talk about regulatory compliance more than they talk about circumventing the whole rotten system. The loudest voices over the past nine years have proselytized Bitcoin’s potential for capital gains far more than they have encouraged people to build, grow, and use the parallel economy.
It is fitting that this year’s Bitcoin conference is in Las Vegas.
That is not a compliment.
A conference culture that increasingly resembles a financialized hype machine might as well meet in the American capital of spectacle, gambling, neon, and empty promises. The symbolism is almost too perfect.
Buy and Hold Does Not Build a Parallel Economy
The narrative needs to change.
“Buy and hold” does not build and grow the parallel economy.
“Buy and spend” does.
This does not mean everyone should recklessly spend down their savings. It does not mean self-custody and long-term saving are bad. Saving is good. Holding some bitcoin for the future is reasonable. But a culture that only hoards will not produce a living economy.
Money has to move.
A parallel economy needs buyers and sellers. It needs merchants. It needs marketplaces. It needs service providers. It needs developers. It needs people creating value and people willing to exchange value.
There are already nascent markets that support bitcoin commerce. They need more users on both sides. More sellers. More buyers. More people willing to put goods and services into the bitcoin economy. More people willing to spend their bitcoin instead of merely holding it while watching price charts and fantasizing about the next pump.
A money that nobody spends is not a thriving currency. It is a collectible.
Bitcoin can be more than that.
It has been more than that before.
Building Is the Way Back
It is not too late to change course.
There are still people working to build the parallel economy. There are developers building tools of commerce. There are people building marketplaces, wallets, payment tools, privacy tools, merchant systems, local exchange networks, nostr integrations, Lightning tools, self-hosted infrastructure, and the practical machinery of digital self-sovereignty.
That work matters more than the price of bitcoin in dollars.
In the age of AI enabled coding, many more people can join this cause. You no longer need to be a professional software engineer with years of formal training to build useful tools. If you have sufficient intelligence, creative problem solving ability, patience, and strong written communication skills, you can build software today.
That is a massive opportunity.
Instead of endlessly reposting price predictions, build something. Instead of worshiping corporate Bitcoin influencers, create a tool that helps people transact. Instead of cheering for another Wall Street product, start selling something for bitcoin. Instead of measuring success in dollars, measure it in new nodes, new merchants, new markets, new users, new circular economies, and new ways for people to opt out.
Bitcoin does not need more spectators.
It needs participants.
Return to the Roots
Somewhere along the way, the greedy voices became dominant. They crowded out the people who cared about freedom, commerce, privacy, sovereignty, and building alternatives to the legacy system.
That can change.
But it will require a culture shift. It will require a return to values. It will require people to speak up and push back against the voice of greed that sways so many today.
There are people who pay lip service to freedom while letting greed guide them as their North Star. They talk about self-sovereignty while celebrating custodial products. They talk about escaping fiat while measuring their entire self-worth in fiat exchange rates. They talk about revolution while begging regulators and banks to bless their financial endeavors.
Enough of that bullshit.
Bitcoin is not dead. The original spirit is not gone. It is still there, under the noise, under the conference spectacle, under the ETF celebrations, under the price obsession, under the corporate marketing, under the casino culture.
It is still there every time someone runs a node.
It is still there every time someone self-custodies.
It is still there every time someone pays directly.
It is still there every time someone builds a tool that makes permissionless commerce easier.
It is still there every time someone chooses to transact outside the USD driven economy.
Bitcoin is meant to be used. It is meant to circulate. It is meant to support a parallel economy. It is meant to give ordinary people a way to exchange value without asking permission from banks, governments, payment processors, or any other self-appointed gatekeeper.
It is time to reject the narrative of greed.
It is time to return to our roots.
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