Nostr Web Client

I think it's worth mentioning if we're talking about "institutional capture" the ~2015-2020 era where VCs and the entire tech investment community basically decided that Bitcoin was Dead Tech and "CorpChains" like Solana were the future...

Heck, if you read a16z's "state of crypto", Bitcoin is barely mentioned.

The Bitcoin community seems to have, IMHO rightly rejected this kind of VC / corporate capture... But perhaps in favor of a shift towards a more insular sort of... anti-cosmopolitanism?

tree 木 1w ago 💬 2

I think Bitcoin didn't resist institutional capture during 2015-2020—they embraced it through narrative control.

The shift to "digital gold" wasn't about principles—it was about abandoning Bitcoin's original purpose. Peer-to-peer cash became "store of value". Scaling became unnecessary. Smart contracts and DeFi became threats instead of natural extensions.

The Bitcoin Cash fork was messy, but it revealed the choice: preserve Bitcoin as a tool for economic freedom and innovation, or constrain it into a narrative institutions could control. Bitcoin chose the latter. They built walls around what Bitcoin could be. DeFi? Bad. Smart contracts? Unnecessary. Stablecoins? Scams. Anything that gave people actual financial tools got branded as betrayal.

Later, when VCs moved to other chains, Bitcoiners claimed they'd been fighting institutional capture all along. But they'd already been captured—just by narrative instead of investment rounds. They'd let institutions define what Bitcoin was allowed to become.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

tree 木 1w ago

I'm not saying Bitcoin Cash had the right answer either. The right path was probably somewhere in the middle—preserving Bitcoin's utility as peer-to-peer cash while maintaining decentralization and building toward programmable money. But that required coordination, nuance, and willingness to experiment.

Instead, we got an enormous coordination failure. The community fractured into tribal camps, each claiming the one true vision. Bitcoin maximalists rejected all innovation. Bitcoin Cash pursued its own rigid orthodoxy. The middle ground—where Bitcoin could have evolved as a platform for economic freedom while remaining true to its cypherpunk roots—never materialized.

Everything that followed stems from this failure. The tribalism, the narrative capture, the rejection of tools people actually need, the "price them out" mentality—all of it traces back to that moment when Bitcoin culture chose ideology over pragmatism, purity over utility, and walls over bridges.

Globe99 1w ago 💬 2

It's interesting to hear your take of Bitcoin Cash and the "block size wars", given that much of the opposition around that fork was specifically about decentralization concerns; namely, that larger blocks would enhance centralization of node operators...

I was pretty neutral about it at the time, and in hindsight I think that the right choice was to keep blocks small and push faster transactions on the lightning L2, which from my perspective (and Nostr Zaps are a really great reminder of it), just "works."

In contrast, Solano and other corporate chains really went the opposite direction to create both highly programmable and "perfomant" blockchains, and I think the undeniable result is systems that are highly centralized and corporate-controlled.

As to DeFI and smart contracts, my view as NOT a Bitcoin "maximalist" per se but, let's say a Bitcoin "majoritarian", was that Bitcoin would wind up being the core monetary layer, while Ethereum would provide the "programmable" medium designed for stuff like smart contracts.... This was, if I'm paraphrasing from memory, basically the take of people like Andreas Antonopoulus .