🚩 Scaling, Fees, and Custody
1. “The limiter … is not how many people can self-custody bitcoin. It’s how many people want to.”
✘ Misleading: The actual limiter is both technical (running a node, limited throughput, UTXO set growth) and user preference. It’s not just a matter of willpower — scaling constraints are real.
2. “Bitcoin currently processes about as many transactions per year as Fedwire.”
✘ False.
• Bitcoin: ~350,000 transactions per day → ~130 million/year.
• Fedwire: ~200 million/year.
✔ She’s right they’re in the same order of magnitude, but Fedwire clears $1 quadrillion vs Bitcoin’s ~$12 trillion annual settlement. That’s almost 100× higher per dollar volume, and the average Fedwire tx is ~$5 million vs Bitcoin’s ~$90,000.
3. ”…open-source global Fedwire with low fees despite it being a $2T network.”
✘ Misleading. Bitcoin isn’t equivalent to Fedwire:
• Fedwire is final settlement for banks with virtually no reorg risk; Bitcoin is probabilistic settlement.
• Bitcoin fees are currently low mainly due to demand not exceeding blockspace, not inherent scalability.
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🚩 Custodial Layers and “Paper Bitcoin”
4. “Paper bitcoin holders add to stability and network size without clogging it.”
✘ Misleading/False.
• Custodial IOUs don’t strengthen Bitcoin’s security model; they introduce counterparty risk, weaken censorship-resistance, and often end in blowups (Mt. Gox, FTX).
• Hal Finney did speculate about Bitcoin banks, but that was not an endorsement that custodial Bitcoin was good for the system.
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🚩 Market Size and Capitalization
5. ”$2T network.”
✘ Misleading. Bitcoin’s market cap ≈ $2T at times, but the network value ≠ Fedwire settlement throughput. Fedwire moves orders of magnitude more in annual settlement volume than Bitcoin.
6. “Entering into a global fiat network of hundreds of trillions.”
✘ Misleading. The “$hundreds of trillions” claim lumps M2 money supply, credit, bonds, and derivatives together. Bitcoin is not directly comparable.
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🚩 Technical Development
7. “The technical foundation is good … scale has reached institutions.”
✘ Misleading. Institutional adoption of custodial Bitcoin products (ETFs, exchanges, custodians) ≠ scaling of the base layer. The base protocol itself still has the same throughput limits (7 tps theoretical, ~350k/day).
8. “Low base-layer fees” as a permanent feature.
✘ Misleading. Fees are only low during periods of low demand. During the Ordinals / BRC-20 craze in 2023, average fees spiked above $30.
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🚩 Government & Privacy
9. “The real battle is government crackdown on privacy.”
✔ True that privacy crackdowns are real, but ✘ misleading to imply Bitcoin is in a “good technical place” on privacy.
• Bitcoin’s base layer offers very weak privacy (pseudonymous, chain-analytic vulnerable).
• It’s incorrect to suggest the only issue is regulation; the protocol itself leaks data massively.
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🚩 Rhetorical Framing
10. “We live in a sweet spot … golden age.”
✘ Subjective, but misleadingly dismisses structural risks: centralization of mining, mempool congestion, reliance on custodians, and fee market sustainability are unresolved.
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✅ In short:
• She overstates Bitcoin’s parity with Fedwire,
• confuses market cap with settlement volume,
• downplays real scalability and privacy limitations,
• misrepresents custodial IOUs as beneficial,
• and frames low fees as intrinsic rather than demand-driven.
