Most of these businesses are speculative and/or attempts by the established finance world to contain Bitcoin. So they bring leverage, KYC, and scam tactics to try to win users and investors.
The proven use cases for Bitcoin, savings and mining, don't need leverage or KYC. Bitcoin mining is a brutal business which requires a lot of capital, tech expertise and a solid supply chain. As we saw with the last cycle when financial games attempt to be played with mining people get wrecked. Bitcoin as a savings tool just needs hardware wallets, and the better it gets (here comes discomfort) the more it challenges established finance.
Discomfort is the proper vibe when NFTs are the best thing you can come up with, when you don't make hardware, or you're not building for mining or savings.
When I first learned that Bitcoin wasn't just beanie babies and that it would challenge the dollar, I looked at it like a techie who was used to upgrades and troubleshooting. Mail got an upgrade, so why not money? Little did I know the power that would cling to fiat and fight the true innovation. Imagine Windows vs. Linux except the stakes are the ability to tax and control economic value, not software licensing fees.
tl;dr Savings and mining are Bitcoin's proven use cases. Discomfort is natural when you go beyond that.
How is savings a proven or good use case?
reply
Bitcoin is a provably scarce asset which is immune to debasement. Yes, the price fluctuates and the common refrain to any sort of stated gain is cherrypicking of the date range, but time has proven that with proper opsec and risk management it has succeeded so well as savings that it turned into a moonshot. Even from here, we know 21M is the kind of hard cap possessed by no other asset in the world.
reply