Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin
Back in 2009 when I was getting into bitcoin, it was widely described as a &quot;stateless currency&quot; and not just an alternative to Visa or credit cards. Having a background in economics, bitcoin looked to me like a truly revolutionary technology and if it was adopted en masse would change politics forever.<p>The problem however is that a nation&#x27;s currency is arguably the primary source of it&#x27;s sovereignty. Whomever controls the currency primarily used in a nation, controls the nation. So it&#x27;s safe to say that no nation is going to let bitcoin or any other currency take hold for widespread commercial use in lieu of it&#x27;s sovereign currency - that&#x27;s a hallmark of a failed state.<p>In fact that&#x27;s why when regulators declared bitcoin as a commodity it was such a big deal. The US doesn&#x27;t really care because we haven&#x27;t had commodity money since the 1970s, but the idea that if enough people decided that they wanted commodity money, they would arguably have a medium with which to do it with that wasn&#x27;t tied to any state.<p>So as with every product, unless a massive number of people decide to stop using their home currency and start using bitcoin, then bitcoin will &quot;fail.&quot;<p>Whether it pivots to some kind of credit system or not is largely immaterial because of the potential it had.<p>It&#x27;s like if we created Artificial General Intelligence and it decided to just write movie reviews forever.