I’ve been interviewed this week by Bernardo Braga from Brazil on his podcast. In his words:
“Bitcoin doesn't need to be destroyed to lose the war.
If people give up self-custody and agree to exchange Bitcoin for pieces of Wall Street paper, defeat has already begun.
In this conversation, Efrat Fenigson and I talked about Bitcoin Core, Michael Saylor, stablecoins, and the risk of Bitcoin becoming another piece of the fiat system.
She also shares how the pandemic turned her life upside down and why she turned down a larger sponsorship offer from Coinkite before the Coldcard debacle.”
If Bitcoin is money, you shouldn’t have to care what other people do with theirs.
Self-custody matters. That’s the whole point of Bitcoin.
That's not what's happening.
This isn't self-custody people transitioning to exchanges. The ETF buyers are noobs that don't deserve self-custody yet. This is a necessary learning experience.
That line really grinds my gears too because it implies that Americans are the bitcoin community and that we are the bitcoin community. I reject the premise of the statement because bitcoin is being used everywhere as intended. He himself likely doesn't use bitcoin for any exchange of goods or service so it's easy for him to just spout.
🔗 Privacy-friendly: https://invidious.f5.si/watch?v=8Lz6Dwayptc
This is a virtue signal that causes undue angst among those who signal it.
Even if Bitcoin were mostly backing paper, that's not a fiat system. It'd be more analogous to the gold standard, yet still an improvement, because gold's physical properties make for terrible money and therefore redemption that keeps the system in check never happens.
Fiat is a product of the gold standard, since no one was redeeming when they could have, the redemption muscle atrophies to where the paper can redeem nothing.
Bitcoins redeem-ability is the step-function improvement over gold. It is the unit of account against paper. Institutions are the peers in "peer-to-peer", Infinity/21M is what makes it that unit of account. Who holds the unit is immaterial.
Bitcoin being the world reserve currency means it must sit on institutional balance sheets to replace fiat paper. Bitcoin is not being destroyed, it's winning so hard that it's destroying the ego's of people that never understood it: #906514