I love BTC however:

Money has to be:

• ⁠scarce

• ⁠secure

• ⁠fungible

• ⁠portable

In equal measures. Trade offs in any one need to be balanced against gains in the others (notice value in fiat isn’t on the list lol).

Gold and silver are perfectly fungible. Usefully scarce. Reasonably secure, but fails portability in a major way. Anything beyond face-to-face transactions for small amounts breaks security to make that exchange work (portability).

It is way better than fiat obviously which is as portable as we can imagine something being in the digital age but the scarcity, security and fungibility of fiat are all broken and entirely dependant on the whims of corrupt states.

BTC as the crypto break-out technology was an attempt to do better than gold and silver by building something with some of their great qualities but maintaining the portability of modern fiat. It mostly worked.

Code gives us utter control over scarcity. ‘How much’ can be controlled literally in the source code without issue. It is secured by the same mechanism as the entire project: decentralization.

Greed and competing interests are immutable, reliable, and powerful. Decentralized power of work (PoW) captures those forces of human nature into a beautiful sustaining and healthy ecosystem much like how free markets can spontaneously react to freely pursue good things and leave bad behind as people seek value and positive outcomes. It works perfectly to secure BTCs scarcity.

However the technological leap to ASICs was a strong centralizing force applied to decentralized PoW. Inherently bad. The ability for ASICs to exist could and should have been instantly patched out of BTC (the way Monero addressed it) but instead mining conglomerates (the ones profiting from ASICs) followed profit and stopped that code from changing. They in fact built and codified a community and societal pressure resistant to ANY change - the perfect way to secure their profits and make bank short term. And short term it will be, because Satoshi’s security design depended on minimal hashrate comparative to the flow of fees. A reasonable assumption to make in a world without ASICs which didn’t exist when they were designing Bitcoin and the lower hash of CPUs. The idea being that the block reward could eventually be lowered to the point of being fees only while maintaining a secure decentralized PoW network. ASICs broke that.

Additionally we have discovered in a post-Satoshi world that transparent blockchain like serial numbers on government paper bills is bad for fungibility (no shit). Governments and other bad actors love it but go back to the base principles: sound money requires fungibility. Gold and silver taught us that. The history of each Bitcoin is being written and that history IS impacting value. BTC is NOT fungible.

So we are faced with BTC breaking fungibility and with security concerns. The security concerns at the VERY least could have been easily and quickly fixed by a willing community. We know how to fix them or at least better solutions than BTC has implemented awaiting the next Satoshi to be born and build a perfect one. Instead we have a ‘no change’ society willing to ride something cool into the ground.

Personally I favour Monero. XMR is updating and challenging itself constantly. It is staying on top of the tech and staying true to the vision and the principles of sound money. At least until something unimaginable happens again (like BTC) it is the best thing I see for the money of today and the money free from government.