That's why I keep all of mine locked in a safe.

Yes, that's the way things should go.

But many of us were hoping Bitcoin would be a catalyst to free the world from the enslavement of fiat-money.

"Bitcoin isn't being used" is what OP's point was. It's just a shame that we have this amazing freedom technology, and all people want to do it use it for jpegs and other garbage. Hardly anyone is using it the way it was intended to be used.

It reminds me of something the great Hank Moody once said:

".... people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it's really given us is Howard Dean's aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People... they don't write anymore, they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it's just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King's English." - Hank Moody

I've made a lot of big-blocker arguments on SN in the past. I always have to preface by saying, I am NOT a big-blocker and I own zero B-cash or crypto of any kind outside of Bitcoin.

But goddamm if Roger Ver didn't make some good points. His book "Hijacking Bitcoin" changed my view on a lot of things. Not enough to join his cause.... but enough to question the honey-badger kinds of narratives pushed around here.

I can't help but think that Core was hijacked, exactly how he describes, in order to ensure that Bitcoin can only be used as a SoV, and never as a MoE. The "Freedom Money" ethos has slowly died out, and been replaced by bullshit narratives about how MoE will "happen eventually, just not now".

I'm still not a big-blocker, because I also understand the reasons why Roger is wrong. But dammit, I'm incredibly disappointed at the current state of Bitcoin... especially the human element of it...

OP, your post is really good. Thanks for making it.

"Naw bro, you don't understand. NGU happens first, then MoE can happen. It costs too much taxes to spend mah Bitcoin... just use dollars. Also, spend the weak money first." /s

(I completely agree with you)

Exactly.

What's bothering me so much is that Bitcoiners don't seem to be trying very hard to take down the fiat system. They are fine just using Bitcoin as savings tech, and have no desire to use it as a medium-of-exchange. This is NOT what Satoshi envisioned, and it's not what I'm here for.

We have to actively make a stand against fiat.... not bend over for it and continue to let it rape our civilization and our future generations.

Yes, easier said than done. But so are most things in life which are worth doing.

I don't expect it to be an overnight change. I just expect to see more effort from Bitcoiners who constantly preach the evils of fiat. They don't seem to be trying very hard to create local, circular economies. When you listen to them talk, NGU is the dominant theme.

It's the lack of trying to use Bitcoin as a medium-of-exchange that is bothering me so much.

If Bitcoin isn't directly threatening the fiat system, then it (and we) have failed.

Seems far-fetched, considering even the most hard-core "Bitcoiners" I know are unwilling to inconvenience themselves enough to do this today. Which means normies won't even do it even when pushed to the extremes as @teemupleb suggested in his comment here.

I agree with Lyn Alden when she talks about how MoE cannot happen as a charity. But I think can happen as a revolution.

This is the result of pushing the NGU narrative, and downplaying the importance of utility and MoE narratives.

I think Bitcoin decouples from speculative markets when it starts being used for commerce, and not only for "investing" or "savings" use-cases.

This would happen sooner if Bitcoiners who own companies either stop accepting fiat or at least charge a "fiat premium". Start pricing products in Sats, natively, where the fiat value is the variable instead of the Sats.

Or.... merchant adoption? If the local grocery store only accepts freedom money, it's kinda hard for people to call it "useless".

NGU is powerful. But it's just a parlor trick. MoE is 10x more powerful, and has staying power.

Yea, you're right. I had originally just written "5%". I added the 10 as an afterthought.

I guess 3-5% is more to my taste.

5-10% of my total stack.

I dunno... I'm with Patrick Henry: "Give me liberty or give me death!"

I think we should be acting like Bitcoin is everything, at this point in history. Maybe we should stop using their slave money, and start doing whatever we can to resist them. That includes the company we keep.

Using fiat. Most Bitcoiners I know are eagerly lining up to use the next great Bitcoin-Rewards credit/debit card. Fiat doesn't bother them, even though they talk about it bothering them. Actions speak louder than words.

If we don't find a way to break our fiat addiction, and stop using excuses such as "taxes" and "Gresham's Law", then we're doomed.

I cringe when I see Bitcoiners using fiat terms :(

3I/Atlas

I think this would happen a lot faster for everyone if Bitcoiners start ONLY accepting Bitcoin for their goods/services.

It needs to get easier for people to live on Bitcoin. That's when the real magic will happen.

Sure, we can use our earned fiat to buy Bitcoin. But that's not how we change the world.

Yup. Upper management is already botching this. They're firing too many people, thinking AI is going to be their panacea. In reality, AI will save them 20% on production costs over the next few decades, as you say. It's massive, yes, but it won't offset the damage they're doing by laying off entire segments of their workforce.

In the short-term, they're going to be surprised by the way they can no longer deliver products on time after leaning too heavily into AI and offshoring.

In the meantime, developers like me will refuse to come back to work for dollars. If they aren't paying in Bitcoin, I will refuse them.

There are some serious issues with Bitcoin.

But... Lightning is not one of them. Development is advancing fast. New deployments in 2025 make Lightning MUCH better than it was just 12 months ago.

The real issue is people's expectations. People thought Lighting was going to be a panacea.... a perfect solution. But it is not.... and it will not be. It is just another layer in the stack... another tool in our tool-belt.

Lightning will be the glue that holds other layers together. But at least now, small merchants have the ability to use it in a self-custodial way, if they choose to. It gives us freedom, compared to what we used to have under the central banking elite. It's amazing, for people who are willing to learn. And for those who aren't, there are amazing Layer-3's such as Fedimints which use Lighting in the backend.

That sounds awful. I'm sorry. Are you doing okay now?