This space suffers from a problem of inverted perceptions. What makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place is its decentralized nature. The fact that it is a distributed system, with no central point of control, no central point of influence, not even a central point of interface to its users. This is the source of your resilience and reliability. Without this property, without the ability to simply download a piece of software and start interacting with it, you can’t really find any value.
At that time it is not fundamentally different from a banking database. You can’t guarantee access to anyone when someone (the operator) wants to take it away, you can’t guarantee fundamental properties like the supply limit or the inflation rate when someone (the operator) can change them at will.
Many people in this space applaud the erosion of these properties at this point. They advocate solutions like ETFs and other custodians as a way to drive up the price and increase their own fiat-denominated net worth. They attack those who work and advocate for solutions that do not compromise Bitcoin’s fundamental value propositions, presenting them as ghosts who “risk what makes Bitcoin valuable.”
It is a complete inversion of reality. Ghosts are Heroes and Heroes are Ghosts.
Saylor is literally defending the custodians as a superior path to adoption than self-custody. You’re comparing people who create and sell self-custody tools to FUDsters and fear mongers, or “paranoid cryptoanarchists.” Paint the people who are building the tools necessary to defend and maintain the core properties of Bitcoin that give it value in the first place. It completely ignores the dynamics that led to gold and its role as sound money disintegrating over time as governments interfered and manipulated.
They achieved it because all the gold was in the hands of the custodians, no one had it. No one used it directly, but everyone chose to use paper substitutes disconnected from the precious metal itself. Bitcoin may suffer the same fate. Either through paper bitcoins diluting market demand, or custodians gaining influence over the consensus process and changing the rules to suit their own needs and desires.
Bitcoin is a social consensus system, its nature is defined entirely by the actors participating in the system. The scale of those actors, their own individual nature, vulnerability to government interference, how many of them make up the majority of economic activity (more is better, less is worse), all of these things greatly influence how it works. Bitcoin. will evolve and exist as a system.
Many people in this space applaud short-term actions that compromise their long-term resilience as a neutral and decentralized system to perceive short-term benefits in the form of price appreciation and economic profits. Developers who work diligently and with little gratitude to maintain those core properties that give them value are attacked as spies and government agents, while corporate lawsuits and actual spies who attack those properties are hailed as heroes.
The world in this space is upside down.
This article is a Carry. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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