I think we can all agree that everyone here is pretty bullish BTC.
Dreaming of hyperbitcoinization is easy, but what about the flip side: what's the worst that could happen?
If Bitcoin was to retrace back to $0, what has to happen for it to get there?
Has Bitcoin truly achieved escape velocity (as espoused by popular influencers), or is there still massive overhead risk that we aren't factoring into the discussion enough?
I get annoyed when people act like btc is inevitable, but I suppose I shouldn't -- I think it probably is inevitable, by which I mean it will be (let's say) a force in the world that's at least 10x as big as it is now, maybe more. So that's a lot of success coming its way, obviously.
What is not clear is on what timescale. Being able to retire on my modest stash in fifty years is no comfort to me at all, since I will not live fifty more years. So the worst case scenario is that the US Govt basically declares war on it -- exchanges close, it becomes illegal to own or trade or mine, they set a few harsh examples by prosecuting people, etc. A handful of other governments would likely follow suit (e.g., the EU) and make similar laws.
This would not kill bitcoin! It wouldn't go to zero! But it would crater the shit out of the price for decades, and at that point I don't care anymore, it's useless to me. I'm not leaving my family and living some Jason Bourne life on the run in Guatemala just so I can pay for my hovel in sats.
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Jack Dorsey said irrelevance on a podcast and I can't get that out of my head.
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I mean, the "irrelevance" scenario sounds quite depressing. But for me it's not quite the right word. Because the need for a hard decentralized currency isn't irrelevant. The right word for me is "ignorance". What if Bitcoin is relevant but people ignore it.
Let me tell you about the Ancient Greece Steam Engine (wikipedia):
Of course the steam enginewould have had "relevance" to ancient Greeks. But they didn't go through the first industrial revolution. It just didn't catch on.
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which podcast was that?
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The one with Jack Mallers
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Don't want to seem more pessimistic than I am, but I'm close to think that the worst possible scenario IS happening right now.
After nearly 15 years, Bitcoin has barely 100M users. It means that 99% of the people on this planet don't use Bitcoin. And out of the 100M, the vast majority are day-traders, who actually don't give a damn about Bitcoin, as long as it's a volatile asset that bring them profit.
If this path doesn't evolve quickly, Bitcoin will remain an "oddity", only used by a tiny community of people. Its value will probably never be 0, but it will have failed and changed nothing to this world.
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This seems overly pessimistic. 100M users in 15 years may not seem like a lot if you're talking about a tech company (even though it actually is a lot)... but Bitcoin is money which has probably the strongest network effect of any technology out there, so you can't really judge things in the same way.
When I look at Bitcoin I see a real technological and social achievement. A public decentralized ledger has been running for 15 years with almost zero downtime and miraculously everyone in the world agrees on the state of the ledger. Not only that, peoples' willingness to pay for the asset traded on this ledger has gone from <$1 to $30,000.
Sounds like a success so far to me.
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I am missing retail adoption. This would be driving btc like crazy.
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You don't need to convince me of the benefits of Bitcoin ;-). The question you should ask yourself is why so few people in the world see these benefits. After so much energy spent to advocate/explain Bitcoin (and its obvious advantages for citizens), the vast majority is not using it. This really is the only question to ask.
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Because most of the benefits are not immediate and are public, rather than private in nature.
Most people don't really care about, or even think much of, how their choice of money affects the public sphere--they're just interested in getting through life, and Bitcoin just doesn't really help with that right now. Unless you count the potential for "number go up", but we know that's not reliable on any predictable timescale.
Combine that with how most people are quite allergic to technical jargon... and there isn't yet a user-friendly app that lets you start earning and spending bitcoin right away... and many merchants don't accept it anyway... and it's easy to see why more people aren't using it.
But even in the face of such challenges, many people have become educated about Bitcoin over time and many people are slowly coming to see its advantages. Adoption is increasingly, slowly but surely. I really have a hard time viewing the state of things today as anything other than a success. I think we need to have more patience... people don't just suddenly adopt new monetary conventions over night.
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it can be very difficult for people to see the importance of some things beyond what's right in front of them currently
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You have to factor in the amount of destruction "crypto" has caused. The majority of people laugh and mock "crypto" and rightfully think it is all a scam or ponzi. Although it might be unfair they lump bitcoin in with crypto, actually they conflate it as one and the same because bitcoin is the only crypto asset many people know. So this has done great damage to the Bitcoin brand. I think people are slowing coming around to the idea that bitcoin and crypto should be treated differently.
Sure crypto has been a gateway drug for some to touch the stove and then become bitcoiners but overall it has done more damage than good.
If you factor in the level of trust one must have to convert to a different money to save in (it's not like switching from twitter to threads or blockbuster to netflix- we are talking people's life savings here and breaking their worldview of what money is) and the damage crypto has caused it is going to take some time or a major tipping point to get to mass adoption.
There will be some increased bitcoin usage in jurisdictions with failing currencies (which there will be many more to come) but most will first run to the dollar, when that fails they will say let's try gold that worked in the past, when that fails and they see more and more people have been successful preserving wealth with bitcoin they will begin to consider it.
If we could be at a billion users in 10 years that would be amazing but it might take 20.
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I'm still as convinced as ever about Bitcoin, but the longer it takes for adoption, the more likely it seems touching the hot stove might unfortunately be what it takes for the majority of the world
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The hodlers are hoping for a doomsday scenario and hyperinflation, as a driver for the ultimate mass adoption. I see this as quite plausible, but far from certain.
As a currency, BTC is too slow and not compelling. Lightning is way to complex, over-engineered by committee, does not work when the recipient is offline, I doubt it will gain much more mass adoption than PGP email signatures from the 1990s.
The valid use cases for layer 2 are micropayments, lack of chargebacks and lack of benevolent payment processors that decide which transactions are appropriate. But Lightning as a tech just does not cut it IMO.
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Oh and in lighting you need a balance to initiate a custodial channel, or trust some rando provider online. This kills onboarding and interest from ux perspective with an y real amount of money.
From the over engineering point you make and the UX perspective Monero is great.
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This does seem discouraging, but take heart that governments all over the world will continue to debase fiat at ever increasing rates making Bitcoin an increasingly attractive alternative over time.
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I remember the time back in 1992 when a friend of mine said hey i’m typing all these ip addresses ans I’m chatting with somebody at the other side of the world.
He had a list of 50 ip addresses which he needed to type to get to a chatbox.
No netscape, no chrome, no videos, no stacker.news, no whatsapp, no web forms, nothing.
Ans look at us now: we talk to an artificial intelligence chatgpt at the other side of the world in just 30 years. 1 generation. That’s how much it could take to change the whole world!!!
In 15 years you could have people asking themselves: what is fiat paper money? Mom: what are they talking about? Can you tell me what a dollar bill means mom?
That kid would be born in a world where the native internet money is the sat. Stack sats.
I did not see the Internet coming like this in 1992. I couldn’t.
But now I believe in some way or another sats will be embedded in the fabric of the internet. You will be able to stream sats just like you stream sats like “words”. 5 sats. I just streamed 5 sats w o r d s. One sat per letter!!
Imagine if stacker.news could pay and spend sats per letter. Or per paragraph instead of per post. Imagine if every second watched on youtube would be 1 or 2 sats. If you watch 30 seconds you pay 30 sats!!
That is what I think would be possible in a generation or maybe earlier.
Information = sats. 1 second of video is one sat. 1 letter is one sat!!
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This is an opportunity. When less then 1% of the world - eg 8 million people and 88-100 M accounts has a precious asset like bitcoin I see opportunity.
Why? It means that 99% of the world is still sleeping. They don’t know what is happening with fiat money.
You and I know, otherwise you would not be stacking sats.
I believe that, when, not if, they wake up, the sats will be worth more fiat money than ever!!!
They will all be running through one door 99 of them. And you will be sitting in the other room and they all woukd want your sats. Because their fiat money is losing value fast.
You would be able to buy their houses, cars, businesses for free.
It would not be great to see these people awakening and begging for sats. It would be quite a bloody film to see. But that’s what normally happens during great wealth transfers.
Bitcoin is an exponential network. It doesn’t grow like linear. It grows exponential.
When the shit hits the fan with a bank run, or when a Bitcoin ETF of Blackrock, Fidelity etc gets approved it could go in days, weeks months.
Just try an exercise to double 1 dollar to get to a million dollars. Keep doubling and see how fast you get there. Or check the story of the rice of the Chinese person who created the chess board and you see the power of exponential growth.
The 88-100 million of accounts/people could double suddenly to 200, 400, 800, 1,6 bil, 3,2 bill, and then we are there.
Ask yourself this: there was a time when only 100 million people had access to the internet. And look at us now.
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"Bitcoin is an exponential network."
Please expound on this idea.
Agree. Along similar lines, I'm also surprised that only 1 million addresses hold 1 or more btc. Blows my mind less than 1 million people would be invested "significantly" by now. Thats like less than 0.3% of the US population has been willing to invest between $200 and $69k to have an entire bitcoin over the last 14 years, depending on when they bought. I'd expect this to be much higher, even if all whole coiners bought the top.
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Because people follow good opsec and don't reuse addresses. And withdraw from exchanges way before they reach 1 BTC.
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what does Bitcoin's needed evolution look like to you?
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Simply put:
. Replace "trading" and "investing" by "using". As long as most people see Bitcoin as a martingale to get rich, Bitcoin will fail. Omnipresent charts and price analysis in cryptomedia is pure madness. Bitcoiners (and the media) need to get rid of the price obsession and focus on usage and benefits (only Bitcoin Magazine understood that so far).
. Get rid of the "hodl" narrative. You will never convince billions of people of the utility of something by telling them to buy this thing and keep it locked in a safe (and for how long?).
. Convince more merchants to adopt and promote Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a currency and a payment solution above anything else. Success will come from users spending BTC as they do with fiat. We need more merchants accepting BTC and developing incentives (ie "10% discount if paid in BTC", etc.).
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I agree, in general we need to be leading by example - using BTC as currency just like anything else.
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Worst case scenario is people adopt CBDCs without any resistance, we get a worldwide CCP style surveillance state/social credit system. Bitcoin becomes a dark market only asset and we live in tyranny.
That's the worst case. The saddest case is we don't keep our eye on the ball, get complacent as price goes up, stop focusing on growing adoption and educating and instead spend time infighting over shit that doesn't really matter for another 20 years like security budget and a centralized shitcoin like ethereum goes full on centralization partnering with big banks and big tech gets in the hands of billions and manages to fool them that they are the newer, better, more innovative bitcoin (all the shit the shitcoiners have been peddling for years but with big bank and big tech support because it is PoS and they control the protocol). That would be sad.
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CBDCs may be the burn people need to feel to jump ship to BTC. Sad but probably true.
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Hopefully they jump shit before the ship docks at digital guantanamo bay.
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Government continues seizing BTC from whales and hackers to gain full supply control, thereby eradicating decentralized futures.
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how will they get the BTC from whales...at gunpoint?
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Consider the Silk Road approach, or even Razzlekhan. Binance is the most recent target.
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That it is corrupted from within. A combination of user apathy and miner and dev collusion with centralizing forces.
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How can you economically incentivize miners to collude?
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I could see big players like Black Rock giving nice sponsorships to core devs and/or hiring their own to be core contributors as a way to exert influence.
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Oh, you asked about miners. Well the same big players could become miners themselves and then support regulatory capture to get favorable treatment by government. Then a cartel forms, transactions start getting censored, joining forces to gain more influence. Basically imagine the block size war again but with much more power and capital and political connections because instead of Jihan Wu we are up against Black Rock.
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The same way it always has been done.
Lead or Gold.
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I think the worse case scenario for Bitcoin is that it never transitions to an everyday spending currency.
The blessing of Bitcoin (that it can't be easily confiscated and no more can be made) would also be its curse in that case. Imagine an asset like Bitcoin that grows forever in value, generally, but instead of having to spend it to use it, you just take loans out against it forever. This will effectively turn Bitcoin into a digital fiefdom. Elites and early adopters could sit on their huge Bitcoin stacks forever, taking out loans against it in USD and paying them off by taking out another loan. Because Bitcoin can't be confiscated, there's no bloody revolution that can save you.
This is why I hate the sentiment that Bitcoin as a savings account is "good enough." No, it's not. If Bitcoin doesn't become true money, then it will just become something that benefits a very tiny few and no one else will ever have a chance to get it.
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IMO, the worst case scenario is that the price of Bitcoin doesn't rise faster than fiat inflation for 5+ years, which would make mining for most unprofitable. The less efficient miners would sell their hardware for cheap, would provide an opportunity for nation-states to buy enough hardware to begin 51% attacks.
The world is going into an economic depression, during which a lot of people will sell a lot of cryptocurrency in order to pay for basic necessities. Bitcoin will be hit by that wave of sell-offs. It will be a great time to buy more BTC, if you are frugal enough or have a fiat job that can keep you afloat for a while. But for everyone else, they will be expending their savings just to survive. If the price of Bitcoin does not rise fast enough, then a lot of people will run out of Bitcoin before the depression is over.
All that being said, I am betting that Bitcoin will rise faster than fiat inflation, because all other bets (gold, holding cash, investments, etc) are guaranteed to be losing bets during the upcoming depression. Bitcoin is the only thing that has any possibility of being a winning bet.
If Bitcoin fails, so does the global economy; there is nothing else that can save the international devision of labor. The fiat monetary regime has squandered a lot of the global supply of resources on useless projects. Only Bitcoin has any change of rebuilding after a century of escalating waste.
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I don't think that Bitcoin will ever go to zero. I think it will always have some value. If Weimar Marks still have a little value now due to its collector and historical value, Bitcoin will have have a nonzero value.
Almost every comment I've read so far seems to agree that the worst case scenario is stagnation and irrelevance. I'm inclined to agree.
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I agree, counterintuitively the Fed will never let BTC go to zero -- they'll expand credit into oblivion rather than let assets collapse
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ha i see what you did there
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Frankly I think the whole craze of the past year or two was probably one of the worst scenarios for BTC, making BTC more and more centralized as if it were a get-rich-quick scheme for tech bros rather than a decentralized storage of value.
I think that hype has started to die down a bit so hopefully folks can actually focus on the tech rather than seeing it as a way to make a quick buck.
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how did bitcoin become more centralized?
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it's probably better to say that centralized entities became interested in BTC as an asset and started treating it more of an investment opportunity instead of BTC becoming centralized itself, hope that makes sense.
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yeah paper bitcoin is a real problem...not sure how it'll play out over time
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The scenario that could send Bitcoin to 0 is the one that kept me from getting into it for so long. Someone creates a new coin that has convincingly better properties than Bitcoin and drives it from the market. That's still a great scenario for human well being, but it is bad for Bitcoin.
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Been literally thousands of new shitcoins. Same thing happens to all of them. I don't think you've anything to fear.
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Neither do I, which is why I'm here, but that was my hurdle to get over and it's probably not a metaphysical impossibility that a better currency is designed at some point.
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Mainstream bitcoin adoption is a massive threat for bitcoin, if done wrong. Adoption at all cost is a terrible idea and could lead to a dark path where only very few people hold their own keys and verify transactions.
Today, most people hold paper bitcoin, which are IOUs on exchanges and custodians. And soon ETF shares, maybe? This has the potential to drastically increase the popularity of the "Bitcoin" brand, and perhaps its market cap, but defeats the purpose of bitcoin itself: censorship-resistance and sovereignty. How much paper bitcoin it out there right now? Not sure, but probably way more than 21 million units. Almost impossible to verify.
Paper bitcoin can not only suppress spot price for many years (creating fake supply), but also fracture bitcoin usage. On one hand, you may have a network of regulated financial institutions providing custodial bitcoin financial services (brokers, exchanges, lenders, etc.). Currently, they are being referred to as DASPs, VASPs or CASPs. Self-custody for clients of these businesses may gradually be removed for fully custodial services like we are seeing with proposals in the MiCA regulation in the EU. Considering most people care about price exposure, push back may be minor. Also businesses may feel incentivized to profit from fractional reserve banking, even if it is a very risky proposition on bitcoin. But if people cannot redeem bitcoin IOUs on most regulated businesses, then the risk of bank runs could be mitigated. At least, that would be the narrative.
On the other hand, you will have P2P black market usage of bitcoin with people running their own nodes, doing coinjoins and holding their own keys. Fracturing bitcoin could be a worst case scenario where the "regulated way" of using bitcoin may not allow bitcoiners to use the most popular on/off ramps, marginalizing true bitcoin holders who control their keys and run the full nodes.
I wrote a bit on that for Bitcoin Magazine, so curious to hear critics of that view: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/regulations-and-two-tiered-bitcoin-economy
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It becomes digital gold
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You might like this post:
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Is there still massive overhead risk that we aren't factoring into the discussion enough?
Yes, a GIANT meteor.
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My only concern would be something technical, like a bug or something about the protocol not sustaining itself.
I'm not concerned about regulatory attacks. Any government that tries to ban it or regulate the crap out of it will regret it. Regulation will only strengthen it, because it will show it has a purpose. With the ever increasing national debt, CBDCs etc. people will flock to it eventually, there is no stopping it.
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By zero you mean a small number or literally 0.00? Because the latter will never happen, it's just a meme.
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just general collapse
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If bitcoin goes back to zero, that means I will own all of it 😁
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Governments can kill bitcoin, not by fighting or avoiding it, rather by competing with it
Just like how streaming services almost killed torrents/piracy by offering a better experience
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Like a really convenient and fair CBDC, but in order to compete with Bitcoin, governments and central banking would have to fix the economy and transition away from the Keynesian circus, and that, would never happen.
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What needs to happen for Bitcoin to go to 0 dollars and rest in peace and why that would be great for us all here?
  1. First the USA would need to pay its debt. 31 trillion usd. And fund all its unfunded future expenditures. And raise taxes. Decrease its debt to gdp ratio to say 60% from 128% currently. The USA citizens would need to cut all their credit cards and live by their means. No more debt. No more money printing out of thin air by the FED. No more helicopter money.
You consume what you earn and you save. Then Bitcoin could go to 0 dollars. And we would be in a better world. Not only USA but also Europe, Japan, China! Pay your debt back to a reasonable sustainable percentage.
Basically this would mean no more monetary inflation. It would actually mean deflation. Technology would make everything cheaper. And we when we work hard for money - that can not easily be printed no more for free - would see our fiat money INCREASE in value and we would save.
Banks would not be able to have 10% or 3% deposits and lend out 10-20-times the deposit.
  1. Countries need to find a way to trade and trust each other’s currency. In international trade if I want to send you a car I made I don’t trust you currency. I don’t trust your “shitty” paper. Because I know you can print it. So to stimulate international trade ALL countries have to promise never to print more money anymore. There needs to be a mechanism some digits that nobody can print. No government can print just to finance their secret local desires. We need to have global sound money created by the governments. If any politician breaks this rule, the got stiked down by a magical thunder out of air. Globally. When that happens we don’t need Bitcoin anymore. It can go to 0 $ and we live in a better place than today.
  2. No more free lunches and everybody works that can work Currently if you work and others don’t work you get taxed. The more people sitting at home and the harder you work the more taxes you pay. If you build a business and you got 4 villas you get taxed like property tax. Governments can tax your wealth away. When governments promise not to tax your wealth away on any country in the world there is no need to stack sats they cannot easily tax. Then Bitcoin can go to 0 $ and we are in a better place.
There might be more things that need to happen so Bitcoin can easily go to 0 $ and rest in peace and we would not need to. Let me know which one you think below.
If Bitcoin goes to 0$ and NONE of the above has been arranged and done we will be in a world that is worse than the one we are living in.
So untill then keep stacking sats.
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1, 2, and 3 would never happen 😅
So there’s a huge chance of Bitcoin succeeding then.
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Seriously, it feels like Bitcoin got past its worse case scenarios. We did even have state-actor attacks and genuine global scale scams.
However, all past troubles aren't dangerous. The real danger is always ahead of us, in the future.
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The scenario is btc btc hit by fednow
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Digital Gold.
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I hope it won't happen and pretty sure wouldn't happen for bitcoin. I am not maximalist but reallistic.
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The worst case WILL happen: the way of the tulips, if the last generation bitcoiners don't change. It will be deservedly go back to $0, as these bitcoiners have lost sight of what bitcoin was supposed to be: the best money mankind ever had.
They have set their inner eye on the ridiculous idea of "to the moon", on getting rich quick by buying a few measly sats and sitting on them till they grow a beard. That's not the way. Speculators like Black Rock get this type excited, not advances on the ascension to money.
It is telling that projects like Bitcredit Protocol – an effort I am involved in - which write code add to expand bitcoin capabilities and functionalities for the real economy – get support and contributions less from this "∞/21m" type bitcoiners but mostly from bankers who are sick and tired of the fiat system going dystopic and increasingly out of control. That's the people who are willing to put in the effort to put things right, not the "sat stackers".
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We should look at bitcoin as a disruptive technology, focusing on the usability of blockchain with its possible smart contracts to digitize traditional businesses and add value to supporters and local users. This promotes practical financial education, thus preventing the growth of corruption in the world. Long live bitcoin layer 2, which already provides this on a pilot scale.
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