A Manual Guide to Killing Bitcoin: The Eternal Return

By Finance News On Aug 27, 2024

This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Halving Issue”. Click here to get your copy.

Every morning at 6am, in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the cynic weatherman Phil Connors wakes up to experience the same day over and over and over again. Stuck in a time loop, Connors tries everything to get his life back to normal – he gets stabbed, shot, burned, frozen and electrocuted, only to wake up again the next day as if nothing had happened. Connors quickly comes to the only plausible conclusion: he must be a god.

Thinking ourselves to be undefeatable has never been a particularly smart strategy, in times of war or otherwise. If we believe in cosmology, from Nietzsche to Hinduism, time is a loop, and there is a finite realm of possibilities which infinitely repeat – the only thing that we can really do is change how we react. Unless we learn from our mistakes, we are doomed to experience the same things over and over again.

Though often priding ourselves in exceptional intellect – I’ve found Bitcoin early, I must be very smart – it seems that learning from mistakes comes hard even for the most seasoned ‘Bitcoin advocates’. Public discourse seems to have shifted from the discussion of technological challenges and limitations to Deutsche Bank afterwork chats – Anything is possible, we’ll just need returns to remain on track.

When Bitcoin was first discussed in German Parliament back in 2014, ‘experts’ highlighted the ease with which bitcoin payments could be deanonymized via network analysis, speaking to the risks of widespread bitcoin adoption to lead towards total financial surveillance. Today, ten years later, as Bitcoin has returned to German parliament, ‘experts’ have been exchanged for influencers proposing Bitcoin as CBDC alternatives. Current ‘Bitcoin political debates’ cannot help but remind us of Bart Simpson running in circles banging a pan on his head.

As we continue to close in on the opportunist’s echo chamber, we have successfully swapped academic debate for cheerleading squads. Things will go great so long as you’re willing to take your tits out. ‘We’re winning!’ has long become the prevalent meme – Between ETF approvals, stablecoin issuances, and possible nation state adoption we are so confident in Bitcoin’s success that we seem incapable of realizing that this is precisely how you lose. Arrogance comes before most declines, and its exploitation has always been by design. By sowing manic delusions of invincibility, even the most trained commander will lead their sheep to slaughter.

Groundhog Day

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far away, we plugged our computers into landlines to access the three great W’s. For anyone who didn’t live alone, this practice was often doomed to reap a fair amount of havoc – Get off the computer, mom is waiting for a phone call.

So…