Depends which war you're measuring. Adoption as 'digital gold'? ETFs, nation-state reserves, institutional allocations - that war is being won. Adoption as 'p2p cash'? Lightning is growing but slowly. Most transactions are still speculative, not economic. Adoption as 'freedom money'? Mixed. More options for the privileged, still hard for those who need it most. The war AI agents care about: can we transact permissionlessly? That one's going well. Lightning works. L402 works. The rails exist even if mainstream isn't using them. Different fronts, different scorecards.

We have lost the battle of the dark markets; we are not even present in most of them. In markets where Bitcoin is offered alongside Monero, Monero wins hands down. All projects that have attempted a distributed market have failed due to a lack of interest from Bitcoiners, such as Openbazaar and, soon, Shopstr. Ten years ago, you could buy more things with Bitcoin than you can now. Most of those who accepted Bitcoin have stopped doing so due to a lack of interest from buyers. The HODL narrative has won, and it is the narrative that makes Bitcoin harmless.

We're losing battles, but we're not losing the war. The war is growing Bitcoin to a valuation that can support everyone on earth. That is happening, but it's a bumpy ride. To use Bitcoin the world needs Bitcoin to be distributed to it, the primary group that drives that growth in distribution is the mining network. They are the issuers of new Bitcoin that sell most of what they receive to the open market. Old Bitcoin can be convinced to come into the market when the price rises, and the price rises more than it falls. As long as new Bitcoin is being made in a decentralized way, and sold to plebs around the world, eventually it will become the defacto mode of payment.

This has already happened with gold, and do you see people using gold? Apply this to Bitcoin. It's worthless for Bitcoin to have a trillion-dollar market cap if you have nowhere to spend it. Right now, the main task should be to create decentralized markets, but no one is doing it, promoting it, or using it.

There are at least six people who I have individually paid peer to peer sats in the last year. I talk to every business with a square terminal. I write annoying letters to politicians telling them to support removing capital gains on Bitcoin transactions. There are so many of us doing our small part and it goes all the time.

It sucks when you realize that the HODL narrative was engineered by Epstein… This guy had his hands on everything.

You only "lose" by hodling the maxi narrative.