Bitcoin was always on a collision course with the legacy financial system and state control. It's just that it's taken nearly a decade and a half for the two sides to reach the battlefield, but the battle lines were drawn in 2009 with Satoshis WhitePaper and BTC itself.
A new frontier
It was a call to war.
It was a call to action.
It was a call to wake up and start becoming financially self-sovereign and to start transacting with others in a truly permissionless, decentralized way while circumventing banks, states, and regulators everywhere.
2017 was the mainstreaming of crypto
We had Jamie Dimon call it a scam. He still calls it a "pet rock."
Over the past few years, we have seen a barrage of regulators and governments try to strangle it in any way that they can, and I only expect this to accelerate over the coming years.
How do they attempt to exert control?
Since Bitcoin is by nature decentralized, permissionless, and has no CEO or corporate headquarters the only way the powers that be can attack it is in a piecemeal fashion, using the old method of "death by a thousand cuts."
The state can try to blacklist crypto addresses as they did during the Canadian Trucker rally during the climax of the totalitarian Covid lockdown nightmare a few years ago.
They can use the climate narrative and onerous regulations to cut down on miners using electricity to run their massive warehouses of servers.
They can just create a CBDC and declare that it is now the only valid currency and that anybody caught using anything else will get fines, jail time, or lose the ability to get jobs, raise a family, or travel through the social credit panopticon that will undoubtedly come with the CBDC scam.
For now, they are using the heavy arm of the law and regulation, but it will get worse because as I said, true cryptocurrency poses an existential threat to their control over people and their monopoly on the financial system as a whole.
What can we do about it?
All is not lost, but we have to be willing to educate ourselves and others on what a real cryptocurrency is and how to use it, and then start building something like small decentralized networks of like-minded people who want to transact in cryptocurrency. Then we just start using it amongst ourselves.
I find that once people see how fast and easy it is to use, they immediately "get it" and see just what its potential can be. I have taught my wife how to use it, and when I send remittances to Vietnam I do it in crypto, and as long as you have someone on the ground who can convert that crypto into cash it cuts out the wait time and the fees by orders of magnitude. I showed her how to top off her Viettel SIM card with Litecoin using the many platforms that are available to do it using cryptocurrency. This is grassroots crypto in action, and everybody can do it.
The Elephant in the Room
Ultimately I am not sure I want mainstream adoption if mainstream adoption means legacy finance and the state will just start using cryptocurrency, because ultimately cryptocurrency was meant to free us from the shackles of both unjust states and banking entities. At heart, I'm kind of an anarchist and agorist in my train of thought, and thoroughly anti-state.
We are all David versus Goliath
At heart, this is a story as old as that of the myth of David and Goliath in the Bible. We are all David in this inevitable clash between the little people of the world and the corrupt States, banks, and regulators that try to crush us under their boots, and instead of a slingshot and stones, we have the 21st-century tools of hardware wallets, Bitcoin and our own ingenuity to slay the giants amongst us.
In the coming years, I think more people are going to see that this is not just about bull runs and Lambos and cash in the bank, but about an all-out existential fight for the future of the financial system.
Where do YOU stand?