Have you no honor? Did you lose track of the objective? Are you blinded by greed?
The last few days have been disappointing to say the least. A large part of the community has forgotten the very essence of our mission and is seduced by alluring riches at its expense. This is what I will allude to in this post, but before I do that I have a short message for the people who have not lost sight: Step out of the shadows! The community needs your voice; there are way too few voices of reason in these dire times.
Bitcoin was created with the ambition of freeing us from the death grip of the corrupt governments and banks. It was created to be our weapon and our refuge, and had the great advantage of being able to stay under the radar during its vulnerable childhood—which will never happen again. We must capitalize on this momentum now that we no longer are underground. The clock is ticking.
What worries me is the implication of the recent dip of the crypto market and the general excessive focus on becoming crypto-millionaires, which are the two things giving rise to this post.
Yesterday's Bitcoin-dip to $9,000 after news of several governments cracking down on crypto-currencies reflects the issue perfectly. Opposition from governments was always expected: this is precisely what Bitcoin was designed for! If one invested in Bitcoins not anticipating resistance from governments one clearly did not understand what Bitcoin is all about, and evidently this space is riddled with a lot of these people—dreamers who want nothing but to get rich quick.
Bitcoin was the first crypto-currency and is a great one. Its success gave rise to an immense increase in fruitful cryptography-research; the latest discoveries in the zk-SNARK field are extraordinary and should not be overlooked. There are teams of developers working tirelessly on great projects—the most notable one being Bitcoin Private—but a large part of the crypto community is regrettably fixated with "moons" and "lamborghinis". This behavior is highly destructive because regardless of how great a project is it needs a strong community to flourish—especially among all this misinformation and manipulation. The Bitcoin Private project has a large team of volunteers working on forking Bitcoin to include zk-SNARK, but is currently pestered by people merely looking to capitalize on the imminent fork. Projects like this should have the rest of us stepping forward and supporting them. There is no longer any time for passivity.