xposting a good long post by @Troy Cross
I share one bearish observation on here and people lose their f-ing minds. They also assume I'm short.
No. I'm just not a shill.
The recent viral piece about how bitcoin is in IPO mode and we all need to relax seemed to me pretty accurate. Bitcoin is distributing and that's good. Bitcoin has won and it's a bit boring now and OG's are taking their billions and buying yachts or gold or AI / quantum stocks, and this is all very normal and expected, so chill.
But that also just felt... empty. It felt like cope.
Like, think about where we were before institutional adoption and Trump victory.
The price was lower, but the narrative was amazing. We--all of us in bitcoin--were in on a profound secret. We were building better money for a better world. The world was either laughing at us or fighting us, but we knew we would eventually win.
After all, nothing stops the train of debt and debasement. Nothing stops the control-freak impulse to censor and surveil us either. And bitcoin wins every time financial and legal authorities abuse their power. (All still true, btw.)
The bitcoin hate, much more common then, actually fueled us. Environmental critics were so off base, so embarrassingly misinformed, that confronting them with facts was actually sporting. We ratio-ed GreenpeaceUSA into oblivion, eventually winning decisively as they handed over "the skull" to David Bailey in Vegas like Cornwallis surrendering to Washington at Yorktown. Good times.
Similarly, the human rights angle was (and is) unknown by a lot of mindless fiat elites who had never reflected on their financial privilege. We won those debates handily too, time and again, as people started to realize what bitcoin is, its potential for empowering billions and disintermediating banks, disempowering chronic debasers and authoritarians.
Vibes were incredibly high.
Then Wall St. stepped in with the ETFs. The water cooler talk about bitcoin changed a bit. Rather than resistance money, it was an uncorrelated asset and a hedge against risk and inflation, but one now available in a nice wrapper that your investment advisor knew how to handle. It wasn't a threat to dollar hegemony. Instead, it worked hand-in-hand with stablecoins to advance the dollar and American interests. Ok. I actually buy that I guess, at least near term. All good, ok?
Price went up. But the bitcoin brand itself again shifted just a bit in its meaning. It became, rather than a people's movement to reform money, more of a new thing for your retirement fund. Gold 2.0. Not a bad thing by any means, but... a different vibe and not quite as sexy.
Next was treasury companies, promising to exploit every financing trick in the book to port debt appetite from dollars into bitcoin. Ok, well again, this was to be expected. Who wants to hold dollars these days? Why shouldn't floundering companies pivot to stacking bitcoin? It worked for Strategy, after all. Bitcoin twitter became stock talk. Not a lot of focus on f-you money, more like f-you levels of wealth from PIPE investments.
Again, nothing wrong with this, but it once again shifted the tightest associations with bitcoin, as an idea. Bitcoin was somehow now a corporate thing, a finance thing. Bitcoin, despite being a financial instrument... didn't use to be a FINANCE THING. Finance bros hated it. It wasn't a CORPORATE THING either. Corporations wouldn't look twice at it. In some ways, it was anti-finance, anti-corporate. Now, it's good that finance bros and corporations are coming around (the vast majority still haven't!) but that's a brand shift, a vibe shift too.
Michael Saylor has been a tremendous advocate for bitcoin, don't get me wrong. But contrast his image--billionaire CEO conquering the fiat world of other billionaire CEOs in a contest of getting richer--with @aantonop, who declared bitcoin "punk rock, not smooth jazz" and promised that bitcoin would "bank the unbanked billions."
These are very different mascots for very different brands.
Next, Trump was elected and promised bitcoin-friendly regs and a strategic bitcoin reserve. This was undoubtedly better for bitcoin than the alternative. No question. David Bailey was ingenious and resourceful in making it happen. But... the vibe shifted again, as ideas of the orange coin and the orange man fused in the collective imagination.
Ok, so at the same time all this winning is happening, privacy-protecting open source development is targeted by the same admin, and bitcoiners don't seem to care about that so much as the number just continuing to go up. I am proud of @btcpolicyorg's work on this, but it's not the central focus of bitcoiners more broadly, or at least that is my impression. Would happily be corrected.
So it's in this context that we observe price hasn't even gone up that much, despite this embrace of bitcoin by the federal government and Wall St. and despite the many brand compromises, each of which pushes us farther from the cypherpunk core.
What is happening on bitcoin twitter these days? Well, our enemies have stopped posting much. Occasionally you get some old crank like Hanke providing us some target practice. But after we crossed $100k, most critics have learned not to make price predictions. The left wing departed twitter altogether for bluer skies. We turned on each other instead to debate, not even a consensus change but relay policy... and if anyone comes into this debate they see nasty infighting and csam speculations. Luke is crapping on the Treasury Secretary of the US, paying homage to bitcoin? Truly unappealing, and I wouldn't want any of my normie friends to visit right now.
We have a drawdown in price after some crab action. No big deal and not nearly what we've been through before, but in absolute terms, a lot of investors are down slightly. And it's now that we're told longer-term holders are selling to the ETFs and treasury companies. And we're told hey, don't worry it's the IPO moment for OGs. Relax, it's ok, they need to cash out, e.g., $9b of bitcoin to provide for their families. Don't worry, it's like the early days of Amazon.
I don't know, man. That is all true, but it is a lousy narrative compared to where we came from even a few short years ago. "Be the exit liquidity for OGs, they deserve it" doesn't hold a candle to "be your own bank."
Something about this felt really empty and depressing. So I tweeted.
To be clear... nothing has changed about bitcoin itself. It is just as much freedom money as ever. Moreso, as we improve privacy and utility. It's still a global, permission less censorship-resistant network anyone in the world can be a part of. It's still a monumental step forward in how we store and transmit value. It is all of the things it ever was. And the future is brighter than ever.
I remain all-in on bitcoin with my capital, my time, and my reputation. But I will also always tell the truth about how I see things, and right now I think we need a better focus and brighter narrative. We need to remember who we are and what bitcoin is. Thanks for reading.
