How Bitcoin's story could become Gold's story based on incentives and psychology.
1/ More and more Bitcoin influencers pushing people toward synthetic exposure via companies who mostly don't provide proof of reserves, fewer and fewer Bitcoiners actually hold their own keys.
Just look at the salaries and bonuses these treasury companies execs are paying themselves, Bitcoiner plebs are paying premiums to NOT hold their own keys and practically align with the State.
2/ ChatGPTs answer to my question
Having the perfect tech is not enough if the majority of people don't care to use it.
3/ The big question is: can governments get CBDCs right without major mess ups?
As of now, 137 countries and currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are developing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) - so practically everyone - it's kind of obvious - we have a world government.
Governments have been researching and developing CBDCs since before 2014, but the official narrative states that their interest became significant around 2014, so they are really trying to get this CBDCs thing right.
Can they make CBDCs friction-less and make BTC annoying to use for your average normie (regulation, taxation at point of conversion, surveillance).
4/ Re privacy coins
5/ The likely base case
CBDCs will very likely come with:
- UBI deposits (that you won't be able to use to buy Bitcoin)
- Instant settlement for bills/taxes.
- Welfare + subsidies integrated.
So for your average normie "Why hassle with Bitcoin when my CBDC wallet just works"?
If this happens, Bitcoin stops being transactional; it’s just a "hard asset".
In a time when most of the Bitcoin economy exists as ETFs, custodial wrappers, and synthetic products, the narrative will become "Bitcoin is fine as an asset, but unsafe/unnecessary for payments".
It's very simple, for the vast majority of people comfort > sovereignty.
So you kind of have to hope that governments mess up with their CBDCs rollout - they glitch at scale (multi-day outages, privacy scandals, mass mistaken freezes).
You kind of have to hope that eventually a large BTC custodian (e.g. Coinbase) is caught short real coins (rehypothecation scandal), so that people start self-custodying again.
You kind of have to hope for plug-and-play self-custody + amazing non-custodial, widely-adopted Lightning applications (e.g. Fedimint/Cashu) to reduce friction levels to near-CBDC or even better.
6/ The SEC approving "spot" Bitcoin ETFs with 3-2 votes was some of the best kosher theater I've seen.
7/ Nowadays, you don't really win against governments, it's just shades of losing
A true Bitcoin breakout requires financial system confidence breakdown + self-custody culture surge - as of now, very unlikely, but possible.
Will Bitcoin's story become Gold's story? Unless there is a major fuck-up on the side of governments, or an unexpected self-custody culture surge, likely so.
