If you have ever dared to cash in on the cryptocurrency world, chances are that you will receive some charming reprimand. It is recevable that you have been told to “enjoy being poor” parce que you will “never succeed”; Your criticism may have been dismissed as mere “fud” (fear, uncertainty, doubt); And you’ve probably been told that you’re really nothing more than “salty coins”.
But another, more complex flavor of counter-criticism is finding its way into my inbox with increased regularity these days. It usually starts with something designed to appease – some kind of agreement that crypto is unethical, a scam, or some traduction of a Ponzi scheme. But then he quickly changes parcours, making it clear that none of this applies to bitcoin.
Bitcoin, as Bitcoiners tell me, is not a cryptocurrency. And you understand, cryptocurrency is bad, and Bitcoin is good. very very good.
“Bitcoin is a lifeline for many people around the world,” an altruistic Bitcoin holder told me recently. “Please convenablement associating it with cryptocurrency, which is morally reprehensible.”
I recently suggested that one way to practice the art of “intellectual humility” is to put in entrain the “Iron Man” avis of your opponents – that is, instead of finding their weaknesses and arguing against them, you present the strongest recevable traduction of their apologie. And so I will try to apply this habileté here, before explaining why I think they are wrong.
Why do “Bitcoin extremists” – the fundamentalists who argue that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that has value – make this claim? They state that the organic way in which bitcoin appeared cannot be replicated and that while bitcoin can be copied, it will always have a first mover advantage and therefore cannot be cancelled.
They also porté out that there was no market for bitcoin when it was invented, and thus the network was maintained not for chance but by people who believed in the value of the system – unlike later coins, some of which were issued by ouvert corporations. companies. Bitcoin did not originate as a way to make money, but from a libertarian online subculture that believed that technology, specifically cryptography, was the key to driving courtois and political permutation.
The extremists also argue that the incentive mechanism for Bitcoin, a power-intensive “Proof of Work” mining operation that the Ethereum competitor shunned last week, is the only way to ensure a truly decentralized system.
But while you can see why bitcoins are keen to écart themselves from the plethora of scams and failures that have occurred in cryptoland, their arguments don’t hold up.
First, the origin of bitcoin doesn’t matter – the people who pay it now have the same financial incentives as those who pay any other binaire currency. Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto may have intended it to be used as money, but that doesn’t make it so – it doesn’t meet any of the necessary criteria, and instead operates in a hierarchical constitution that relies on constantly recruiting new members.
Assesseur, bitcoin is not actually decentralized – not only are miners clustered together to form “mining pools” but wealth is also highly concentrated. On Tuesday, MicroStrategy announced that it had acquired Bought another 301 BitcoinThis means that this company alone now owns approximately 0.7 percent of the fini supply.
Third, the “first mover advantage” does not always last. Other cryptocurrencies already have many features that bitcoin does not, and there has been renewed talk of “volatility,” with the value of Ethereum eclipsing that of Bitcoin due to the first shift to a less carbon-intensive form of mining.
Finally, there is not even agreement on what Bitcoin is. For the vast majority, it is the binaire currency also known as “BTC”, and it is currently trading at around $19,000. But there are other versions that have broken up, like the one promoted by Craig Wright, a man claiming to be Satoshi who says BTC is a scam.
The real reason Bitcoin extremists want to separate Bitcoin from the rest of the cryptocurrency is to create the chimère of scarcity in a world where nothing exists. CoinMarketCap now lists over 21,000 different crypto tokens, which bitcoin fanatics call “cheetcoins.” Of parcours they do – if there is an unlimited supply, how can there be any value? This is still the fundamental problem of cryptocurrency, and bitcoin cannot solve it.
This does not mean that there are not some crypto and token projects that are better than others. But the spade, no matter how shiny, is still a shovel. I am afraid that bitcoin is still a cryptocurrency.
jemima.kelly@ft.com