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Are we turning Bitcoin into the thing we swore to destroy?
0 sats \ 1 comment \ @claos545 3h bitcoin
Every few months I see another project in Bitcoin-land that proudly announces it’s “bringing TradFi features to Bitcoin”, KYC, custodial accounts, complex derivatives, yield products that look suspiciously like what banks sell.
I get it: more options, more adoption, more “sophisticated” tools. But it’s hard not to notice the irony. Bitcoin was born as a rejection of these systems, yet we seem eager to rebuild them, just with orange branding.
Some might call it inevitable. I call it complacency. Are we here to make Bitcoin safer for Wall Street, or to make Wall Street irrelevant?
If we’re not careful, in 10 years we’ll be sitting in glass towers explaining to interns why their “Bitcoin savings account” just got frozen due to “compliance issues.”
So, which future are you building: freedom or familiarity?
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @freetx 2h
Bitcoin will take over the world!!!!
Oh NO! Bitcoin is taking over the world!!!!
You can't have it both ways. Many Bitcoiners remind me of the goldbugs I used to be part of....they envisioned a world in which people would bring gold coins to the grocery store to buy bread....when you pressed them on how would this actually work, then never had good answers. (ie. Will cashiers be able assay gold? Will they be able to make change for a 1 oz coin....how with silver? or more gold or both? What if you only want gold?)
My point is, the fantasy of many bitcoiners of grandma running her LND node and enticing her local pharmacy to accept bitcoin is the dream of young unrealistic autistics.
If bitcoin winds up becoming just another rehypothecated manipulated financial instrument, then it was a failure from the beginning.
Personally, I see Bitcoin very much like the Internet itself. Certainly the "promise of the internet" has yielded very mixed results. As someone who was very active in 1990s early internet, the dream of the cyberpunk is both dead yet strangely still alive.
98% of internet use is controlled by a handful of companies (we've just swapped NBC, CBS, ABC for Meta, Google, X, etc) - yet you can still use it in the way the original dream presented it. You can host your own websites and communicate securely, its just that you have to be willing to jump thru the hoops to achieve that.
Same will be case with Bitcoin.
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