With the Exception of Privacy Coins, Crypto is Garbage
As someone who has been aware of Bitcoin since 2010, and has been around crypto in one way or another since, I have seen the transition of the culture throughout the past 14 years firsthand. When I began learning about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, the community was made up of idealistic people, who wanted to topple the existing financial system, and erect an open source peer to peer financial system that would benefit mankind, in its place.
Over the years, as more and more people have gotten involved, the idealists became outnumbered by the get rich quick people, who have completely derailed the financial revolution in 99.9% of crypto and turned it all into a giant casino. Gambling's cool and all, more power to you, but I was here for freedom and ending the ability of the state to interfere in free markets and to extort citizens through so-called taxation.
There are over 2 million coins currently in existence, and aside from a few privacy coins, the entire market is a pump and dump shitcoin get rich quick scheme. Even the big daddy of them all, Bitcoin, has been captured by Wall St, neutered, intentionally hobbled, and rendered completely ineffective. Ethereum bears a similar fate. Both of the leading cryptos are slow, expensive, and unreliable, rendering them useless for P2P transactions, handicapping them for the actual reason they were created in the first place.
Sure, their price may pump, and you may get rich in usury bucks, but basically all of crypto has been transformed into a sort of digital commodity investment which can only take place in fully "regulated", fully taxed, surveilled markets, rigged by Wall St, and the exact opposite of what the early crypto adopters were striving to achieve. It's disgusting how many people have completely sold out and took the usury bucks and turned their backs on the actual mission.
Today is Ross Ulbricht's 40th Birthday, and the amount of bootlicking Bitcoiners who were posting #freeross posts today while pushing their bullshit aml/kyc'd, chainalysis, custodial, paypal 2.0 failware struck me as pathetic. Privacy coins are the only part of the entire crypto industry where the original freedom ideals live on. The saddest part is that privacy coin projects make up less than one percent of the entire market. It doesn't matter though, the ideals are still alive, a global P2P free market is emerging, and that's all that really matters.
The rest of crypto is shit.
Bitcoin was Supposed to be Dark Web Ghost Money
The entire point of Bitcoin was to render government powerless to extort you via taxes, to steal from you through inflation, to tell you what you can or can't buy, to exclude you from being able to transact or access the financial system, and to stop their unlawful financial surveillance. All of the early Bitcoiners understood that privacy was supposed to be added to Bitcoin as soon as possible, as it was essential to making it an unstoppable technology for reclaiming financial freedom.
It the years since, almost zero headway has been made in improving Bitcoin's privacy, as developers have been compromised and have been incentivized not to work on this massive, gaping design flaw. Bitcoiners when made of aware of this fact, are blinded by greed and have a cognitive dissonance blind spot in understanding what this actually means. They will say fuck the banks with a straight face and then cheer when the banks release fake paper bitcoin ETFs, because their bags pump in ponzi bucks.
The fact that Bitcoin's entire value proposition was its ability to be used for buying drugs on the dark web, and now it is being abandoned by the dark web, is the most damning evidence of its failure as unstoppable p2p digital cash. It's almost like Ross Ulbricht's sacrifice was for nothing. It's a damned disgrace. Bitcoin being flippened by Monero in the very same markets that gave it any value to begin with is downright shameful.
If you go back and read things like Satoshi's emails, the cypherpunk manifesto, the cypherpunk mailing list or early BitcoinTalk posts, it is clear and unmistakeable that Bitcoin was supposed to be untraceable, unstoppable, and protect users from persecution from sovereign adversaries or state level attackers. I think it's safe to say it has fallen far short of this mark.
Roger Ver's Interview with Vlad Costea, and the Hijacking of Bitcoin
Another noteworthy thing happened today, aside from Ross' birthday, was Vlad Costea's interview with Roger Ver. Roger was a Bitcoin evangelist and early adopter and investor who championed the financial freedom ideals central to Bitcoin in the early days. In 2017, after years of dispute on how to scale Bitcoin, Roger Ver left Bitcoin and supported the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, which is a different Bitcoin blockchain with a shared lineage back to the original genesis block.
Aside from its privacy being a complete failure, the artificial block limit which condemns Bitcoin to high fees and slow transactions, and prevents it from scaling is the second part of the attack on Bitcoin to make it useless and crippled. At the time when Bitcoin forked and split into two chains BTC and BCH, I sincerely thought that the BTC scaling path was the better option of the two. Looking back, I believe that was totally incorrect. I feel like Patton after World War 2. I backed the wrong side.
Since the block wars Bitcoin development has been stagnant, Lightning Network turned out to be centralized custodial vaporware which has wasted a decade of scaling efforts, and the refusal to increase Bitcoin block size because of an irrational fear of being labelled a "big blocker" in the Bitcoin cult, has made using Bitcoin prohibitively expensive, and largely custodial, with an effort to force users to transact on kyc'd layer 2 protocols. Bitcoin use is heavily discouraged for hodling, which means Bitcoiners don't even use Bitcoin to buy stuff, and will laughably recommend using credit cards instead. Bitcoin Cash on the other hand is cheap and fast like Bitcoin used to be, and people actually spend it.
Roger has a new book called Hijacking of Bitcoin which is about to launch so he has been making the rounds doing podcasts lately, which has sparked a lot of curiosity, as he was one of the most vocal proponents of Bitcoin in the beginning, and has been private for the past 6-7 years. I must say, Vlad's interview with Roger was amazing, and I will say without hesitation that it's the best interview of 2024 so far. He knocked it out the park. The point is Roger's book will reveal a lot of the facts surrounding the stuff I am saying in this article, so check it out if you get a chance.
I guess the main point of my article today is that Bitcoin and Ethereum are compromised, the rest of crypto is garbage for degen gambling, and the real revolution in crypto lives on in privacy coins, which still deliver on the original promise of Bitcoin, and have dramatically improved privacy. This means we still have the tools to build the new economic reality which will benefit mankind, you just won't find it in custodial, kyc'd, surveiled, taxed, captured, crypto projects which might pump in ponzi bucks. We have better versions of what Bitcoin was trying to accomplish, and all you need to do is use them.
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