The Bitcoin ETF is waking a lot of crypto enthusiasts from their stupor. People are mad about it. Why is that? It's because we were all told that crypto was going to "disrupt" the legacy system. And of course we all took that to mean that it would utterly destroy central banking, traditional forms of finance, and even governments themselves. Now that Blackrock and Fidelity are adopting Bitcoin and even creating derivatives from it many more citizens of the internet are starting to wake up to the cold hard reality of the situation.
The 1990's comparison of the Internet to crypto is dangerous. We projected our own false reality based on things that have already happened. When the internet was gaining adoption back then it was a massively destructive force. It ate the lunch of all the things being made digital. Many businesses were disrupted, and in this case disrupted meant being utterly destroyed because they didn't have the wherewithal to pivot into this superior system. The change was just too big.
Crypto isn't like that at all. When the Internet said, join us or die, all of those too-big-to-fail industries just laughed at it and said no thanks. With crypto we see exactly the opposite. Crypto is like, "join us or die," and the legacy system is like hm yes I've seen this before I think I'll take you up on that deal.
At the end of the day the transition to crypto is just not as difficult as the transition to the internet. In a lot of ways this makes sense. What's harder? Taking a physical hand-written ledger and digitizing it for your business's inventory, or taking an already digital asset like stocks/securities and wrapping it with web3? Crypto does not have to bridge that chasm from the physical world to the digital world like the internet did. It's all been digitized in that first wave back in the 1990's and early 2000's
Bitcoin doesn't fix these things. Imagine saying public infrastructure can't be used for warfare. "This road can't be used to fight a war." That's a dumb statement. If the road gets used to transport the military it just got allocated to the war effort. The expectation that public and neutral infrastructure is going to stop something like that from happening is rooted in complete delusion.
With the adoption of Blackrock and Fidelity this truth is more obvious now than ever before. Grandma's retirement fund is going to get a Bitcoin allocation and she's not even going to know about it. That allocation is going to turn a profit, and that profit is going to be taxed. To assume that these tax dollars will not be syphoned into the war machine is again completely delusional.
Of course the rebuttals to these obvious facts will be nothing short of more delusion because these people have simply decided what the 'truth' is in advance. They'll say things like, "Well ETF Bitcoin isn't real Bitcoin," and, "Bitcoin isn't forcing people to pay their taxes, the government is!" Yeah that is next level cope. These people cannot be saved from their own bad takes. My only question is can I somehow profit from such ignorance and delusion. Maybe one day that opportunity presents itself.
It's honestly a very surreal experience to watch the realization happing in real time. These people who thought that crypto was going to destroy their enemies are seeing those same enemies adopt it. And what do they want to do about it? Mostly complain, but some of these hypocrites want to ban them from using it. Yeah, you know what we call that? A permissioned system that's no better than the thing being replaced. Oops. Not how it works, friends.
Disruption is not destruction. If you can't beat them, join them. Much like FTX, the only thing that can bring down these institutions is their own incompetence and greed. As long as they don't leverage fake paper Bitcoin derivatives to print money that doesn't exist it's hard to see how they are going to bankrupt themselves by a move like this.
Regardless of all that, we should not be rooting for the destruction of legacy infrastructure under any circumstances. Billions of people rely on it for everything. Praying that it all implodes instantly in a bout of uncontrollable systemic failure is beyond greedy and ignorant. We need a slow and controlled demolition to occur over decades to achieve real success. Is crypto up to the task? Maybe if it works as intended it doesn't even need to happen this way. All that matters is that the rules are harder to break for those who have the most power to bend them.
Like any tool, public infrastructure can be used for good or bad. Law abiding citizens and criminals have the same access to both neutral architecture and privacy. This is by design and the best possible outcome, as centralizing infrastructure to a permissioned system causes more damage than giving bad-actors access to it. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater has never, and will never, be an option. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
