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Have you noticed that Bitcoin influencers are almost never objective? This is a Pierre Rochard quote from today (but could really be any of the Bitcoin influencers on any given day) "Bitcoin’s November candle was ugly. Lots of uncertainty about USD rate cuts, AI investments, and altcoin leverage. Notice that these are all external factors? Bitcoin’s fundamentals are stronger every day. The long term BTC accumulation thesis is unchanged." So "Bitcoin’s fundamentals are stronger every day... long-term accumulation thesis unchanged." 1) Are Bitcoin’s fundamentals "stronger every day"? Depends what you call a "fundamental". If you actually list them, you get a mixed picture, not a monotonic up-only story. A) Monetary fundamentals (fixed supply, issuance, uptime) Still strong / unchanged: - 21M hard cap still intact. (Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/why-bitcoins-21m-cap-is-not-guaranteed ) - Halving schedule intact. - Chain uptime high. - Global awareness higher than ever. These are the only things influencers usually mean when they say "fundamentals". They talk about design, not control surface. But there are other axes they conveniently ignore. B) Censorship resistance & sovereignty This is where things are not "stronger every day": 1. Paperization — A growing chunk of "Bitcoin exposure" sits in: - ETFs - MicroStrategy & treasury cos - Custodial exchanges - Structured products, futures, notes This pushes more BTC into KYC, surveilled, easily frozen pools, and more price discovery into instruments that are trivial to regulate. 2. Self-custody share vs AUM: More normies hold "BTC" via brokerage accounts and apps, not cold storage. That weakens the monetary sovereignty story, even if total holders go up. 3. Node centralization & implementation politics: - Heavy reliance on Bitcoin Core + a tiny dev set, with funding from a small number of entities ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/how-bitcoins-developers-are-attacking-2a5 ). - Now a split narrative (Core vs Knots) over policy and spam / OP_RETURN / inscriptions. - A non-trivial part of the full-node network sits on centralized cloud providers (AWS, etc.) - Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/governments-dont-like-sovereign-bitcoin . 4. Chain bloat / illegal content risk — Inscriptions, arbitrary data, and v30-style policy loosening expand the attack surface: - Legal/regulatory risk for node operators and infra providers. - Easier vectors for spam from actors with deep pockets. From a regulatory capture perspective, that's bearish sovereignty, bullish for "we need to regulate/filter nodes" ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/governments-dont-like-sovereign-bitcoin ). 5. Bitcoin mining is more centralized than ever. Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/bitcoins-mining-centralization-problem These are just a few. Obviously, I won't cover everything in a nostr note. Net: monetary schedule is still clean, but sovereign, censorship-resistant usage is under attack on multiple fronts. That is not a daily increase in "fundamentals". C) Use as medium of exchange vs asset If BTC's real threat is as self-custodied, censorship-resistant MoE, then: - KYC perimeters, FATF travel rule, AML pressure, exchange surveillance ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/how-governments-and-large-institutions ) - Stablecoins + cards giving people "almost-crypto" UX with fiat rails - Institutional BTC treated as risk asset, not transactional money All of that is pushing BTC away from MoE, toward "digital gold-ish risk asset". So the honest version isn’t "fundamentals stronger every day"; it's: - Monetary design mostly unchanged ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/how-bitcoins-developers-are-attacking-2a5 ); freedom properties under strategic containment pressure; usage skewed toward paperized SoV, not sovereign MoE. D) "Multiple implementations" as a positive It's good that not 100% of nodes run Bitcoin Core. A monoculture is easy to capture. So yes, on this narrow axis, BTC's fundamentals are better than when Core was a totally unchallenged monoculture. That's one of the few genuine positives. 2) Why Bitcoin influencers almost never give this picture A) Their income, identity, and status = "number go up" Most big Bitcoin voices have: - Bags (obvious). - Revenue tied to: Courses / coaching ("how to hodl / self-custody / retire with BTC / BTC inheritance"), Bitcoin Treasury Companies, Conferences, merch, subs, referrals, sponsorships, Speaking gigs premised on being a maximalist voice. If they seriously said: - "Look, BTC's sovereignty is under coordinated pressure; paperization and regulatory capture are real; upside is path-dependent on state behavior," they would: - Lose a big chunk of their audience (no one wants nuance, they want certainty). - Threaten their own business model (fear + hopium sells, balanced realism does not). - Risk ostracization inside the tribe (maxi culture punishes deviations). So they rationalize: - Any negative is "short-term noise". - Any structural attack is "bullish because it means we're winning". - Any critique is "FUD". Incentives > ideals. Full stop. B) Audience capture & algorithm design Platforms reward strong, one-sided emotional narratives. "Ugly candle but fundamentals stronger than ever" outperforms: "Mixed structural picture: some fundamentals up, some under attack". Audience selection: - People who need BTC to be salvation filter into those feeds. - Over time, the creator optimizes for retention: more hopium, less doubt. If they suddenly became fully objective, their audience would either leave or revolt. That's the prison. C) Cognitive dissonance / sunk cost Most of these guys: - Went all-in socially and financially. - Built their entire identity on "Bitcoin fixes this". Admitting: - "BTC is being co-opted as a controlled, paperized SoV and its true sovereign potential is under active containment" is psychologically brutal. So the mind does what it always does: selective blindness + glorious narrative spin. 3) My best attempt to steelman "fundamentals stronger every day" If I had to steelman that tweet, the strongest points: - Global knowledge / Lindy effect: more people, companies, and states now know BTC exists and treat it as an asset; it hasn't died; that's real Lindy. - Infra maturity: wallets, custody solutions, multisig, hardware devices, and analytics tools are better than they were 5–7 years ago. - Implementation plurality: Knots vs Core, other clients exist — less monoculture. - Regulated access: ETFs / brokers make it easier for large pools to get exposure (even though this as a double-edged sword). Bitcoin is stronger as productized financial exposure, weaker as off-grid monetary counter-system. 4) A more accurate statement would be: - BTC's monetary design fundamentals (fixed supply, issuance) are intact and robust. - BTC's institutional acceptability as a paperized SoV is increasing. - BTC's sovereignty fundamentals (MoE freedom, censorship resistance, self-custody share, uncaptured infra) are under sustained attack and not obviously "stronger every day". - Influencers mostly cannot say this because their incentives, audience, and identities punish that level of honesty. I have explained this in more detail here - https://controlplanecapital.com/p/what-made-me-sell-most-of-my-bitcoin Perhaps this is obvious but unfounded hopium does more harm than good. You can't expect the community to address issues they don't know exist. image
2025-12-01 04:51:31 from 1 relay(s) 16 replies ↓
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I wouldn't say #BTC 's monetary fundamentals are intact and working. The fixed supply leaves the network vulnerable to the question of a long-term security budget. Especially when it gets combined with small, unelastic blocks. Also no privacy leaves users exposed in a hostile environment (like we can see in the EU for example).
2025-12-01 11:32:39 from 1 relay(s) ↑ Parent Reply
This is more a philosophical wander than anything else, but a lot of these Bitcoin influencers seem to have never taken a moment to ask what money really is. Money exists as an idea. A passing thought. It doesn’t have protons, nor neutrons, nor electrons, save for in the slips of paper that can represent it in physical form from time to time, or in the silicon wafers. The operating system for all money, given that it only ever exists as a pure idea, is the human brain. Penguins don’t care about money because the operating system for money doesn’t extend to the penguin brain. Penguins do care about the weather, or about fish, because these things, unlike money, exist outside of the context of the human brain; they are real things with real atoms and that have real impact for many creatures, ourselves included. Bitcoin, USD, Solana, the Yen: these are all apps that run exclusively on HumanBrainOS, and in that respect they are all the same. Their value is determined not by what they are in some objective “out there in the world” sense. It is determined exclusively by HumanBrainOS, by how the OS processes (or does not process) the app code. That is it. In the end all money is marketing. The rather random fact that Bitcoin supply is capped at 21 million—this is only a valuable fact insofar as it can effectively fuel lobbying campaigns that influence the development of HumanBrainOS. If a new version of HumanBrainOS comes out, and that version stops processing this particular fact/code, then this fact carries no value at all. HumanBrainOS updates can force any app to crash, be it the Bitcoin app or the USD app or any other app. If enough human brains with the means to affect the value of a given money make certain decisions then the value, well, changes (meaning these brains are in possession of, and are willing to part with, enough of something else already considered valuable in order to obtain this money, or they are willing to discard this money for something of lower value than was considered fair value for the same amount of money at an earlier time). Basically money is all marketing in the end. It has to be because nothing about money exists at all, in any form, outside of the context of human-to-human persuasion. This is something I try to keep in mind when I see people talking about this money or that money as if it has some objective value-defining property that exists outside of this very banal context. It never has and never will.
2025-12-01 15:18:17 from 1 relay(s) ↑ Parent Reply
This encapsulates my thoughts from the last few months really well, thank you for putting words to it When I ask people who work for bitcoin companies what they think about what's going on behind the scenes they hand wave and say bitcoin doesn't care, Luke Dashjr lost his stack so knots is therefore irrelevant, and have an overall sense that bitcoin is inevitable because reasons Bitcoin being co-opted by the powers that control the money printers was the only inevitability- not a head on, direct attack Is it too much to ask for the focus of bitcoin to just be non-inflationary sovereign freedom money that we can transact with outside of the beast system in the private?
2025-12-01 16:52:47 from 1 relay(s) ↑ Parent 1 replies ↓ Reply
I agree with very close to 100% of that. I would just beg to differ on the part that says "Incentives > ideals. Full stop. " I think the blocksize war proved that this is not always the case. The other side had the vast majority of the mining and almost all of the VC money. The UASF crowd was okay with the price going to zero rather than submitting to the dark side. We see that also with religions. Truly religious people are very willing to sacrifice their interests for their ideals. Faith in bitcoin can be almost religious, if the ideals are aligned. But v30 disaligns those ideals for many maxis, and thus undermines the "faith" in bitcoin. nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqvtw30knexxgwasss0qwafnz68hdx6u25xwpclsz4750ez46qpx2qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctv9uqzp5dqlg78j0ktwhpvhee5hndweggyz4pctjcgyux0t7tzjwrneglrfm3yd8
2025-12-02 00:39:15 from 1 relay(s) ↑ Parent Reply
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2025-12-02 07:04:19 from 1 relay(s) ↑ Parent Reply
Why Bitcoin's price is being suppressed and how the community can pump the price without access to much capital Yesterday I wrote how Bitcoin's influencers are almost never objective and how unfounded hopium does more harm than good. In this note, I'll give you the TL;DR version of how the community can use accurate negativity (not doomerism) to pump Bitcoin's price without access to much capital. 1) What high levels of Hopium do to Bitcoin's price Hopium in BTC social spaces is very high, especially around "institutional adoption", "nation-state game theory", and "multi-cycle superstructure". Self-custody + Medium-of-Exchange usage are low relative to market cap, especially in developed markets. Paperization is accelerating (ETFs, treasury companies, structured products). The Controllers currently see BTC as mostly tamed: a volatile, monetizable, but containable Store-of-Value gadget that helps them (capital gains tax, fee revenue, data exhaust) more than it hurts. Bitcoin is managed into a rising, volatility-capped channel: paperized Store-of-Value, Medium-of-Exchange throttled, squeezes sold, crashes patched — never cheap enough to trigger a self-custody revolt, never euphoric enough to create escape velocity. Negativity about capture is still too niche and too uncoordinated to force any "pay up or lose us" moment. That means: - Volatility will be managed, not eliminated. - Upside blow-offs will occur mainly when they help: during liquidity expansions, or when "innovation/leadership" narratives are needed. - Structural usage as MoE will be discouraged, via: tax rules, compliance friction, "illegal content" and "unlicensed transmitter" narratives, and more convenient, subsidized stables/CBDCs. 2) "Hopium" = Compliance In Controller terms, Hopium max, price meh = - Community psychologically domesticated ("ETF flows, institutions coming, supercycle bro"). - Majority of flows inside surveilled pipes (ETFs, KYC exchanges, custodial wallets). - "Rebel asset" narrative is neutered by its own fans: they are now cheerleaders for BlackRock, not adversaries of the system. So from the System's Point-Of-View: - Non-compliance risk is low. - Capture is working. - There's no need to "overpay" for further control via higher price right now. The Controllers can afford to: - Run sideways, bleed out spec leverage. - Nudge narratives toward "digital gold / 60-40 allocation / wealth preservation". 3) Negativity is a threat telemetry Negativity in the community is not purely bearish from the System's point of view. Negativity like: - "ETFs = paper Bitcoin" - "Core is captured" - "We're being turned into digital gold" - "CBDCs are coming" ...is a signal of residual refusal cohort — people who might route around controlled rails. The System then has two cheap choices: - Ignore → allow a possibly growing adversarial subculture to form. - Co-opt → buy them off in fiat while constraining their actual freedom of movement. Price is the cheapest co-opt tool: - "Yes, you're technically right that it’s captured... but your net worth just did a 4–5x. Are you really going to fight the hand that made you rich?" 4) Hypothetical: if the Bitcoin community could organize, how could negativity be used to raise price? The System adjusts prices to serve its five goals: 1. Survival 2. Control 3. Growth 4. Stability 5. Comfort (optional extra) The only way a community without huge capital moves price indirectly is by changing how dangerous it looks to ignore or repress them. In other words: - More credible non-compliance → higher willingness of the System to pay (via price) to co-opt instead of crush. So, hypothetically, an organized, intelligent Bitcoin community would use negativity not as emo whining, but as signaled threat of off-rails energy. (A) Make the off-ramps real, not just memes Visible growth of self-custody + circular economy: - Businesses actually accepting BTC non-KYC. - Real, measurable commerce (local, cross-border) that matters at the margin. If the System sees: - "If we clamp too hard, these people can actually exit into a shadow monetary zone." - Then it must decide: co-opt (pay them) or confront (break them). One is cheaper than the other. (B) Weaponize accurate negativity, not doomerism Negativity that moves the needle: - "Here is how ETFs = paperization, with concrete custody/derivatives structure." - "Here is how Core governance is captured (funding, maintainers, client defaults)." - "Here is how CBDCs + KYC rails would shut off BTC-as-MoE." Negativity that does nothing: - Vague "it's all a scam", "we're doomed" posts. The System cares about credible threat, not vibes. If the critique is so clear that: - Regulators get asked hard questions. - Journalists can't easily wave it away. - Some subset of aligned-but-uncomfortable insiders starts to agree. ...then co-optation (bribe via price / ETF adoption) becomes cheaper than overt war. (C) Build internal norms that resist paperization This is the big one. The more the community self-organizes against capture, the higher the co-opt "price" the System would need to pay: Social status awarded to: - Self-custody, running nodes, verifying, demanding proof-of-reserves. - Merchants using BTC for actual commerce, not just HODL shrines. Social status penalizing: - Celebrating ETF flows as "adoption". - Flexing paper-BTC statements. If you made ETF/treasury exposure something like: - "Okay as a side sleeve, but not the core of your identity." Then to pull people off that stance, the System has to make paper payouts so large that even hardliners wobble. The levers are: - Norms (what's admired vs ridiculed), - Memes (what gets repeated), - Defaults (what wallets, what settings, what stacks). None of that costs capital; it costs coordination and discipline. (D) Timing negativity to exploit the System's own needs Our best leverage window is when the System needs BTC for something: - FX / sanctions arbitrage (states using BTC at the margin). - "Innovation" optics (e.g., a pro-BTC administration narrative). - Pension/ETF demand in a yield-scarce world. Organized community negativity at those moments — "we know what this is, we're not playing unless X" (X = legal self-custody protections, Proof-of-Reserves norms, etc.) — forces a choice: - Ignore → more off-rails adoption. - Co-opt harder → support price via official flows and "legitimacy" pushes. That's about as close as you get to "using negativity to pump" without capital: you turn resistance + coordination into a higher co-optation bid. Hopium/ETF narratives → comfort → docility. Negative but accurate narratives → discomfort → potential for real bargaining. The System's cheapest move is to pay people (via price and integration) to voluntarily stay in compliant pipes. The price is a control knob and the community's mood is a sensor. Hopium dominance + ETF worship → - System sees low non-compliance risk. - Comfortable to keep BTC in a managed corridor (contained upside, liquidity, periodic harvests). Serious negativity + visible self-custody behavior → - System sees growing off-rails threat. - More incentive to buy off that threat via: favorable ETF regimes, regulatory "clarity" that ignites flows, narratives that "normalize" confiscation resistance as "unnecessary extremism". If the community remains disorganized, negativity just becomes fodder: - Bear market: deep, correct critiques. - Bull market: drowned out by "wen ETF inflows" and memes. The System doesn't need to fight that — it just rides the cycle. 5) How the System uses price as the bribe The system doesn't argue in essays, it argues in charts. If "BTC is being co-opted" is the meme, the most efficient counter-meme is: - "You're being co-opted… but you’re richer. Number go up. Are you mad or grateful?" 6) Spectacle displaces scrutiny Spectacle displaces scrutiny (e.g. surveillance rollouts) with 'number go up' talk. In any bull phase: - 99% of the content is price, targets, halving models, "ETFs flows", "supercycle" chatter. - 1% of the content is boring but crucial: Who runs the nodes? Who sets the defaults? Which clients are actually being used by big custodians? How much of the supply sits in: ETFs, custodial treasuries, yield products? Negative, nuanced discussion about capture is always a bear-market topic: - In crashes: you get deep threads on governance, censorship, incentives. - In rallies: anyone raising those issues is called "bear", "FUD", or "has no skin in the game". The Controllers don't need to censor that scrutiny; they just need to drown it in euphoria when it matters most. Negativity in the community is not a blocker. It's: - A diagnostic of where resistance still is. - A pretext to run "clarity" cycles. - Eventually a minority voice that can be marginalized by "Look, if they were right, why are we all richer and why are pensions holding BTC?" If you understand the game, you see the green candle, and instead of saying "We're winning", you ask: "What did we just agree to for number to go up?" 7) TL;DR Sentiment isn't just "bullish/bearish"; it's a compliance signal. An organized, negative, self-custody Bitcoin community could, in theory, force the System to pay more to co-opt them — and that "payment" would likely come through higher prices and privileged rails for paper BTC. In practice, the community is fractured and heavily captured by price dopamine + ETF respectability, which makes BTC much easier to park in the controlled "digital gold" lane with occasional speculative thrills. The System doesn't win with arguments; it wins with defaults + price. That's the only language most people, including most Bitcoiners, actually respond to. My notes on this topic are actually much longer, but I realize this note has become too long to read. Of course, the more likely outcome is the one I've described in this article ( https://controlplanecapital.com/p/what-made-me-sell-most-of-my-bitcoin ), but maybe there's fight left. nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqvtw30knexxgwasss0qwafnz68hdx6u25xwpclsz4750ez46qpx2qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qqsdrg8683unajm4ct97wd9umtk2zpq4gwzukzp8pn6ljc5nsu728ccn2ygl9
2025-12-02 08:12:00 from 1 relay(s) ↑ Parent 4 replies ↓ Reply
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2025-12-02 18:44:27 from 1 relay(s) ↑ Parent 1 replies ↓ Reply