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For it must be hammered home, engraved in digital stone: Bitcoin was not designed to make you rich, but to make you free. And to confuse the two is to pave the way for your servitude.
I do believe this, yet I wonder if even I would spend as much time as I do on Bitcoin if there was never any big price jumps. If the price (what I can buy with my bitcoin) stabilized at whatever it is now and stayed there for 10 years, how many people would jump ship?
This empty mempool is the weak pulse of the revolution. It measures the growing centralization of asset control. It tells us that the sovereign user base is eroding in favor of passive speculators who, without knowing it, are weakening the network's fundamental value proposition and making it more vulnerable to state and regulatory pressures.
It is possible that it's not eroding, but rather that this is always how it's been -- the packed mempools being accounted for by various non-bitcoin as money things over the years. (I don't think this is correct, but I do wonder if the era of most self-custody was 2009-2011 before the exchanges really got going. And ever since it's been a downward slide.