This will probably ruffle a few feathers, but one option is that Bitcoin needs to fail to succeed?

And to clarify, the meaning of success here, is worldwide adoption of Bitcoin, the meaning of failure here is Bitcoin is co-opted by financial institutions.

This is not my view, but I am saying that this seems to be the road we are heading for, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on how this direction could be changed.

Everyone has their Bitcoin story, normally it involves first time you heard about it and dismissing it only to pay the price for not understanding it earlier, unless you are one of the rare breed that understood it instantly.

One question that is definitely applicable to this piece is ‘What is Bitcoin?’ and the most dominant answer to that question is what gives us the Bitcoin we see today, looking back at the history of Bitcoin, there has been one major attempt to co-opt it in the form of Bitcoin cash, the arguments of the bcashers to the uninformed seemed logical, larger blocksizes can accommodate more transactions, making the network more aligned to the vision of Satoshi’s P2P cash, but in order to host the extra transactions the nodes would need to be bigger, meaning individual node runners would be unable to cope with the huge amounts of data, forcing the nodes into data centres which centralises the network. And so Bitcoiners decided that Bitcoin cash was not Bitcoin

There are so many variables that affect Bitcoin, when you decide to offer an alternative to arguably the largest social contract on the planet, obviously there are going to be complications, everyone is going to argue about what their version of Bitcoin is, but we find ourselves in 2026 and the blocks are still being confirmed, and again we are seeing a more silent attack on Bitcoin, a subtle co-option that is creeping in slowly.

There are multiple fires burning behind the YouTube videos saying ‘0.1 Bicoin will be enough to retire’ Mining centralisation, the BIP110 debate, miners pivoting to AI and yet more.

Today even hardened Bitcoiners are starting to vent their frustration that it didn’t become the P2P digital cash they all hoped for back in 2009 to 2012, generally shops don’t accept it, OK there are the good news stories like Steak’n’Shake accepting Bitcoin and that is amazing but in the wider world it’s a tiny sliver of adoption, normies don’t get it, mainly because the average Joe is just lazy, they are working two jobs and still not getting anywhere totally unaware the fiat system is the very reason they are struggling, they just won’t run a node. The revolution never came.

Instead we got ETFs, Treasury companies and a financialisation of Bitcoin by the very institutions it was supposed to make obsolete.

This dystopian future will force out the early visionaries, a few will hang on but not many.

The irony is that the very pioneers who championed this movement have to fall before it can fly into the hands of the banks.

As I was thinking about how to structure this piece, it dawned on me that we have seen this play out before in the evolution of the internet, the early pioneers envisioned a free decentralised private communication network, but what we got was Google, Meta and AWS, sure the internet protocol TCP/IP is still today a global decentralised network but what got built on top is how the public interact with it, and as usual the large institutions worked out how to control the internet without controlling the network, and we are seeing the exact same playbook with Bitcoin

Bitcoin is undergoing the same process. The early pioneer sell off is the bubble bursting, the revolution is dying, but the network is surviving and we’re seeing the large institutions building on it.

So the Maxis will always be salty, they’ll rightly say Bitcoin isn’t Bitcoin anymore and they’ll be right.

But that’s the point, the death of the dream is the birth of the next chapter.

The question is as it always will be ‘What is Bitcoin?’