Today's market is a far cry from the Bitcoin glory days of two halvings past.
Back then, the talk was about self-sovereignty, breaking free from banks and state control — the core of the cypherpunk ethos.
Fast forward to 2025, and it feels like we’ve flipped the script. Now the crypto crowd celebrates when governments express interest or when asset managers accumulate billions in $BTC .
We’ve replaced “freedom from the system” with “adoption by the system.” This shift wasn’t caused by a $100k price tag.
It came as the market normalized Bitcoin into something familiar and non-threatening: a financial asset for institutions.
Michael Saylor’s version of Bitcoin — the digital gold thesis — dominates the narrative now.
Earlier this May, during a segment on Saudi Arabian state TV, Saylor was asked how many $BTC should be in their $930B sovereign wealth fund. His answer: “All of it.”
It's become a meme among maxis, but it also shows how far we’ve moved from Satoshi’s original vision.
Bitcoin has become a trophy asset, a hedge like gold or real estate — not the monetary alternative it was meant to be. In the eyes of Wall Street and nation-states, it's no longer a currency. It's a long-term hold.
Satoshi didn’t invent Bitcoin to be someone’s hedge.
The Bitcoin whitepaper is titled “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. Not “a decentralized gold reserve.”
The goal was clear: eliminate middlemen from payments, not create a new tool for wealth preservation. It was supposed to be a currency — fast, trustless, censorship-resistant.
But once transaction fees spiked and the chain couldn’t scale, the narrative changed. “Store of value” became a safer, more convenient branding — easier to sell to investors, easier to excuse technical stagnation.
So… was this evolution good or bad?
That depends on who you ask. Institutions love it. Boomers feel safe buying it. ETFs are raking in billions. But the radical promise of Bitcoin — trustless, stateless money — is now mostly a historical anecdote. It’s hard to imagine it going back.
Bitcoin has become an asset, not a weapon. Maybe that’s good for number-go-up. Maybe it’s bad for the future of financial sovereignty. But either way — the fork is behind us. There’s no U-turn.
What do you think — was this the inevitable path? Or did we miss something along the way?
