We are currently experiencing unprecedented territory for Bitcoin. There has arguably never been a more bullish time for Bitcoiners. It appears that everything is lining up perfectly for not only Bitcoin to go mainstream, but also to become a juggernaut in the financial sector for good. This has led many experts to begin wondering just how high Bitcoin’s price could go in the near future, and there was a large consensus. The sky is the limit.
Yet with all of that said, it is quickly becoming apparent that Bitcoin might have lost something along the way.
They will tell you that money changes you, but for Bitcoiners, that might be true.
Bitcoiners sacrificing ideals for number go up
People in the cryptocurrency market will often say, “I’m in it for the tech,” even though a large percentage actually only care about making money. However, in the early days of Bitcoin, everyone was actually in it simply for the tech and freedom that Bitcoin could provide.
The reason for that is that in Bitcoin’s earliest days, it had no value, and there was a high chance it would never be worth anything. Back then, there weren’t any large corporations or governments investing in the project. It was simply people who were excited about Bitcoin and how it could potentially change the world one day.
That was a time when Bitcoin was the only cryptocurrency, and development was king there. It was considered a definite thing that there would be constant development and experimentation to continually improve Bitcoin. Even Satoshi talked about scaling Bitcoin and adding privacy features. And even after Bitcoin began to gain actual value, Bitcoiners were more than happy to use it as much as they could. The idea that Bitcoin was digital gold and should only be HODLed had not even been considered yet. People forget, but in the early days of Bitcoin, there was a real threat that it could become illegal to even own it. The early investors were risking their freedom to participate in this ecosystem.
However, as time went on, Bitcoin’s price began to soar much higher than most of us could have ever imagined. That is the moment that Bitcoiners changed. They went from a cypherpunk movement that was here to change the world. Trying to escape the governments and large corporations that were controlling the world, and give more to the little guy. Changing to a group that had become blinded by money. Now that they saw their portfolios rise to levels that they never thought possible, their main goal shifted to focusing on protecting the monetary value of their assets, rather than continuing to evolve and improve Bitcoin.
They became frozen with greed. Everything had shifted to focusing on what could pump their bags next. Bitcoiners began sacrificing their ideals for number go up.
That is the exact moment when hopes for a Bitcoin ETF began. Soon after, the next big thing was companies putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet, and also governments beginning to adopt it as well. Everything had shifted to catering to these groups and organizations.
In fact, it’s likely that most Bitcoiners hardly ever think about the actual development of the Bitcoin protocol. All they hear is about banks, governments, and companies all beginning to invest in it.
Probably, few of you even know that there is a debate going on within the Bitcoin community about the censorship of the blockchain. With those who want to filter out transactions they consider spam to the network. This would include ordinals, Bitcoin’s version of NFTs. And there is the other side of the argument that is about Bitcoin’s freedom. Allowing anything that can be achieved on the protocol, as long as the transaction fee is paid.
In the early days of Bitcoin, this wouldn’t have even been a debate. But as people became wealthy in Bitcoin, they sacrificed their ideals simply to try to become as rich as possible. This is a very dangerous slope that Bitcoiners need to be careful.
If we censor transactions, what does that say about the decentralized nature of this network, where freedom was originally king? Also, if we show we have the ability to alter the network to censure certain kinds of transactions or things we don’t like. You can be sure that governments will soon come knocking on Bitcoin’s door. They will come with their own requirements of things that must be changed. It may not seem like it in the moment, but this truly could be a very pivotal point in Bitcoin’s history.
How about you? Do you think Bitcoin is no longer cypherpunk?
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