Bitcoin is more like ham radio than the early internet
There's a pretty key quote in here and an attendant logical fallacy:<p>"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."<p>That statement is absolutely true, as a conditional.  But the logical fallacy it represents is "If X happens, that would be unthinkably bad.  Therefore, X will not happen."  (Similar thinking is behind coronavirus-denial and climate-change denial.)<p>I think that most hardcore Bitcoin aficionados (the group that's still in it, even now that the bubble has burst and you can'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'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'll get hyperinflation, the government will collapse, and we'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 "How do I get rich?", it's "How do I minimize the impact of this collapse to myself and give myself a leg up in the post-collapse world?"