Nostr Web Client

Gm, I woke up late today but my girlfriend made me avocado bread anyway 🥑

Anyway, let me tell you about the nightmare I had last night:

Bitcoiners were listening to this guy whose whole thesis is “we need more compliance to make the number go up”.

They surrendered privacy, they gave up on the medium of exchange aspirations, all they did was to accumulate more BTC and wait for the number to go up.

Except that the number wasn’t going up anymore. The magic that previously got them to $72k now wouldn’t work to break new ATH. Not even $100k so they can remove their laser eyes for the first time in 3 years!

So they came to the conclusion that they weren’t compliant enough. Which is why they gave up on self custody too!

Who needs that anyway? Why would you want to hold your own keys in a world where even Blackrock uses Coinbase? What are you, some anti-establishment libertarian who wants to delay NGU? Don’t you trust banks, the very foundation of our economy? Then you clearly don’t want $100k!

Anyway so they gave up on self custody because, as Alex Mashinsky famously said, people lost more bitcoins due to forgetting keys. But the number still wasn’t going up!

It was almost as if the compliance playbook didn’t work because the powers that be are not interested in helping Bitcoin but want to destroy it instead. Or maybe they were not complying hard enough?!

The high priests kept talking about digital gold and generational wealth, but the number wasn’t going up. The institutions would promote their ETFs to normie boomer investors, but the number still wasn’t going up.

So eventually, everyone lost patience and moved into stonks. First it was MSTR, then Coinbase (custodian of all ETFs), and ultimately every Bitcoin maxi had his own diversified stonk portfolio to beat inflation. Because of course, investing in the financial system that Bitcoin was designed to replace is much better than “shitcoining”. God forbid you buy Litecoin or Monero, you’re screwed!

But as a consequence of this stonk diversification, Bitcoin lost its mojo. It was just as boring as gold, but with a much smaller network effect due to the neutering of the medium of exchange dimension. Gold could at least be melted into a new shape for privacy – Bitcoin became so transparent that it made no sense to transact with it.

But this is still bullish, right? An open source money project gets integrated into the mainstream. The only problem is that the lack of NGU made mining unprofitable. Luckily, Blackrock offered to maintain a Proof of Stake fork which obliged users to KYC if they wanted to claim their coins. The old chain quickly died due to losing its purpose, while the new one came with the promise of HODLing rewards if you stake with big financial institutions!

Of course these institutions weren’t 100% honest and did fractional reserve. Sure, a few of them got caught. But to compensate their customers, they lifted the 21 million supply cap to give everyone fresh bitcoins!

At this point, all CBDC pilots were abandoned and Bitcoin became everyone’s favorite medium of exchange: tracked, custodial, inflationary, with no transaction fees thanks to Blackrock’s generosity, and with a vague distant link to a free market history that supposedly makes it fair and honest.

It all came full circle! And that’s when I woke up from this horrible nightmare!