Betraying the Principles — BTC Modern Maximalism & The Regulatory Agenda
BTC is today a distorted image of its revolutionary past.
There is nothing in it except an endless, pointless discussion to regulate it, put it on the shelves of Wall Street as an ETF, and tax it. The BTC version of Bitcoin is an empty cell, full of broken promises and abandoned hopes of financial inclusion.
How many more disappointments can the Bitcoin adopters handle and how massively can they shift from their initial revolutionary positions, just to see the number going up.
It was not always about becoming “lawful”. Before Blockstream, Bitcoin was about removing the middle-man, under a decentralized network, acting as a vehicle towards financial freedom.
Today, this is about regulating Bitcoin, but not being too strict about it. It is all about the SEC allowing an ETF and nothing more. This is the agenda Peirce is pushing all these years.
The network didn’t care for regulations and becoming “lawful” wasn’t a feature. It became a feature with the steps taken by Blockstream devs to ignore the massive calls for scaling and cripple Bitcoin instead.
The modern Maximalists
I wonder how many of the BTC early adopters still haven’t found out the moment they betrayed their core beliefs, acting out of expediency instead of principle.
The individual freedoms Bitcoin was providing are in the trash bin today and Bitcoin under the Blockstream’s flag is officially bankcoin.
High fees may require a celebration by Gregory Maxwell (ex-Blockstream CTO), but it is obvious he was wrong when uncorking that champagne bottle.
It is just sad to see how wrong can some people be about the market.
“Personally, I’m pulling out the champaign that market behaviour is indeed producing activity levels that can pay for security without inflation, and also producing fee paying backlogs needed to stabilize consensus progress as the subsidy declines.”
Lead Blockstream dev GMaxwell — Source (Dec, 21, 2017
I guess the market sees things differently, though.
The markets are much more punitive than one dev in a position of power thinks.
Back to the present, BTC fees once again reached an extreme price, even surpassed the previous all-time highs, and once again the result was a crash.
The result is everyone now understands that BTC is unusable and unable to scale. It could have been different, although it was the Blockstream’s side that prevailed, hijacked the network, and proceeded with crippling the BTC version of Bitcoin.
The stagnation in BTC development that leads to the inability of the BTC blockchain to scale has these results:
- Base scaling on side-chains (LN, Liquid, etc.) -> Intermediaries ( Read more)
- Centralization on financial hubs -> Strict regulations, governmence interference (KYC, AML, transactions censorship) (See: BTC (LN Coin): 99,8% BANK Compliant)
- Remaining characteristic: Speculation
Adam Back (“ who is this annoying Adam Back guy?”) pushed this agenda before Blockstream was even founded. It was all perfectly planned and executed. With the funding of AXA/Mastercard, Bitcoin passed into what banks & governments would describe as safe hands.
The instant action was to take control of the narrative. This was already centralized at the hands of just two anonymous individuals (Theymos and Cobra), so it wasn’t going to be a difficult task.
In Conclusion
“I don’t know when they got into Bitcoin, but absolutely that is not the community that I come from in Bitcoin.”
Erik Vorhees, embarrased at the current state of BTC maximalism
I got into Bitcoin in 2017 and got to admit, the community back then was a lot different. Bitcoin Cash didn’t exist yet, and while there was a lot of speculation, there were always rational people around.
But there are none today. BTC in community terms has changed, and those that kept supporting and advocating it had to sell out their values, contradicting with their previous speeches and promotional activities.
The fact that BTC blockchain daily transactions are dropping is a sign the network doesn’t have that many years ahead of it.
From a speculative point of view, BTC is just institutional hype today; it was always speculative, but there used to be principles.
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Originally published at https://read.cash.
