I wouldn’t be too smug about bankruns. Bitcoin has value because people believe it does. That numbers in UTXOs are widely agreed to have real monetary value is a remarkably unlikely bit of coordinated textual interpretation, which is a lot more contingent and fragile than bitcoiners let on. I think much of the discomfort around ordinals, for example, comes from the fact that it highlights just how much the meaning of anything within the system is a matter of convention. The durability of the convention that the symbols stored in the big bitcoin database represent money and not, say, a codex of mystic numerology is only minimally a matter of math or consensus mechanisms. It’s mostly a matter of the durability of the belief system that constitute BTC as a synthetic commodity money, which is at least as brittle and prone to sudden collapse as shared belief in the safety of deposits in a conventional bank. Bitcoin isn’t subject to fractional reserve bankruns, but it is subject to a loss of faith, or drift in the worldview that constitutes it.
Discussion
Money is what people believe it is. It’s a shared delusion much like the State that people tacitly accept when everything is fine.
Bankruns are going to make a lot of people question that shared delusion. More people are going to accept our shared delusion and as a result Bitcoin will grow.
This is going one way, the rugged adopting the unruggable. Sure confidence can be shaken but bitcoin looks infinitely better than fiat and it’s hard to see that changing with how broken fiat is.
The only thing a bank has is trust. That went a long time ago. Bitcoin is trustless. #Bitcoin just IS. Nuf said
Bitcoiners are more educated about Bitcoin and its risks than normies are educated about bank accounts and their risks so I think normie faith in banks is far more brittle than Bitcoiner faith in Bitcoin’s value.
It’s very easy to imagine millions or maybe billions of bank account holders all suddenly being like “wtf *that’s* how all this works??” in response to major banking system failures. I can’t really imagine Bitcoiners getting rugged en masse in the same way other than maybe if it turned out SHA256 is backdoored or Satoshi suddenly dumped his coins. Most of us accept that Bitcoin could go to 5K any time. Few accept or understand that they might suddenly not get a paycheck or be able to access their bank balance.