The Bitcoin ecosystem, folks looking at it as an investment / get rich pathway, all the scam / poorly run companies, straight up crime ... really seems to fly in the face of the whitepaper and presumed ethos.

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jfengel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The ethos assumes a world in which Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a currency and reached a stable exchange rate.

That world wasn't necessarily impossible. Imagine that the US reconceived the dollar as a coin, and everybody simply accepted it as a replacement currency. Potentially, a very large bank or credit card company could have done that with a stablecoin pegged to the dollar.

But that's not what happened. Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency so there was no way to anchor its value. Infinite shitcoins popped up, making cryptocurrency as a whole the most inflationary system in the universe (because anybody can mint their own coins). The whitepaper never considered that possibility.

It's still possible that the US government could decide to start taking BTC for payment of taxes, at some fixed exchange rate. That would anchor the price of BTC, and the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.

	▲	duxup an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Good point. It's strange as it seems like using Bitcoin to buy things is structurally difficult anyway. If that should have held the price stable ... it isn't very good at doing that thing.

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avaer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To a first approximation ~nobody who "invests" in crypto has read a whitepaper or considered the ethos.

It's one of the bugs/features of crypto.

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duxup an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't doubt it, but the sort of "I'm escaping the financial systems that is stacked against me" attitudes are prevalent among folks, the ethos lives on in a weird sort of way ... but really individuals are going to a worse place more often than not.

	▲	avaer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You're right, but the people that say they're pilled/sticking it to the man/breaking out of the matrix -- they're just parroting things they saw on X or tiktok. And then shuffling their money based on that. They haven't researched or thought about any of this, otherwise they wouldn't be reducing finance to repeating someone else's soundbytes. There's no ethos there, it's just reposts. Yes, it is weird.