But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.
Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.
I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of fact, for very valid reasons:
- custody is really hard, and damn near impossible for most people, including people who like to think of themselves techies and who all end up getting caught with their pants down when exchanges get hacked because they forgot the number one tenet of Bitcoin. Please repeat the mantra after me: Not Your Keys, Not Your coins.
- the 10mn confirm thing is a pain for small, casual transactions
- scalability (it won't and was never designed do what eg VISA can do in terms of TX/second)
- most people are downright horrified when they realize the non-reversibility aspect
- most people don't understand what money actually is and hot it works in the first place, so seeing the advantage of BTC is damn near impossible
- etc...
Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated).
Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room: skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument: there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason.
I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time to understand what Bitcoin actually was.
However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who knows.
But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful (and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an inescapably clear proof of that).
Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something that no other thing in tradfi can boast having:
- demonstrable finite supply, and therefore a rather predictable outcome on a long term timeline.
- first mover advantage (aka network effect). Other cryptos might be better and get better all the time technically, might better for the environment, but at this point, displacing BTC in terms of mindset and allocated capital ... good luck
- demonstrated long term hedge against inflation (it's been 15 years, and if you can afford to ignore volatility at the one year scale, it's undeniable). On that topic, I can't NOT post this link:
- transactions are impossible to censor, be it by corps or sovereign entities (for me personally, the number one attractive trait, a basic unbreakable defensive guarantor of individual freedom). This goes from simply giving you a ton of actual leverage in e.g. a divorce, to being able to work your way around tyrannical governments (see the Canadian truckers who got all their bank accounts frozen for daring to disagree with the thugs in charge).
- operates 24/7 trustlessly and outside any jurisdiction
- quasi-instantaneous transmission of value across borders, geographies, distances, etc ...
- pseudonymity and privacy. While not perfect in this regard, you neighbor could be a freaking multi-billionaire and you wouldn't have the first clue.
- you can physically disappear and travel with *ALL* of your wealth at an instant notice.
- it cannot be confiscated short of physically torturing the relevant information out of you. And even then, you can protect yourself by not knowing the full secret to accessing your BTC. And this assume people know you have them.
- etc ... the list is long
- For the majority of financial transactions you might want to make, fiat is still what you need, because realistically very little IRL uses any L2 solution. Thus, you need a fiat off-ramp... Like an exchange. - Exchanges mandate you identify yourself to them - KYC/AML and all. Governments might not be able to know which wallet is yours, but they sure as hell can and have secure those off-ramps this way.
I've seen plenty of pro-BTC arguments on a technical level about privacy, resilience, independence from central banks, etc. but fundamentally I've never seen anyone able to come up with something that can out "your opponent is the government and no technical project can overcome a legal obstacle".