Bitcoin is more like ham radio than the early internet
There&#x27;s a pretty key quote in here and an attendant logical fallacy:<p>&quot;If five years from now everyone in the world has become a bitcoin user, that could only be because something very very bad has happened to the regular monetary system ... Surely no bitcoiner would actually want such a dark future.&quot;<p>That statement is absolutely true, as a conditional.  But the logical fallacy it represents is &quot;If X happens, that would be unthinkably bad.  Therefore, X will not happen.&quot;  (Similar thinking is behind coronavirus-denial and climate-change denial.)<p>I think that most hardcore Bitcoin aficionados (the group that&#x27;s still in it, even now that the bubble has burst and you can&#x27;t get rich off of it) would accept the above premise.  If Bitcoin becomes successful, something seriously bad has happened to the monetary system.<p>The difference is that most hardcore Bitcoin investors also accept the premise that <i>something seriously bad is going to happen to the monetary system</i>.  There&#x27;s a very heavy overlap between folks who hodl Bitcoin and folks who believe that the Fed is going to continue to debase the dollar, we&#x27;ll get hyperinflation, the government will collapse, and we&#x27;ll all end up pledging allegiance to a variety of crypto-anarchist communes that conduct commerce through cryptocurrency.  Many of them also include guns, stockpiles, and bug-out bunkers in their contingency planning.  If you accept that premise, the goal is not &quot;How do I get rich?&quot;, it&#x27;s &quot;How do I minimize the impact of this collapse to myself and give myself a leg up in the post-collapse world?&quot;