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I've been doing some research on the biggest mistakes we Bitcoiners made as a community — and obviously we got very complacent over time. Instead of listening to podcast hopium and alienating people with "have fun staying poor" narratives, we should've focused on game theory and patched up at least some of the holes. It was always inevitable that Bitcoin was going to get attacked, and things like having close to 100% of nodes run on a single implementation was just silly in hindsight. People are doing more harm than good when posting charts of hashrate going vertical without the context that 2 pools (Foundry and Antpool) are close to 50% of hashrate and for more than 98% of cases, pools, not miners decide which transactions get added to the blockchain. You had most of the Bitcoin community cheering price over payment share; we welcomed ETFs as victory. Paper share rose, self-custody fell. The entire community also cheered Square's surveilled "Bitcoin payments" where every payment generates identity-linked transaction data: buyer, location, device, and amount. All transactions flow through Square/Cash App's KYC/AML perimeter, meaning both sides of the payment are verified. That data fuels risk scoring, fraud models, blacklist propagation, and targeted marketing. Exactly this surveillance value is Square's enduring moat, not the 1% fee. We just got too complacent. I'd say the 5 main mistakes we Bitcoiners made are: 1. Letting arbitrary data compete with money on the base layer (witness discount abetted it). For Medium-of-Exchange you need predictable fees; underpriced junk data is a Denial-of-Service subsidy. 2. Treating privacy as an "expert mode". That guarantees surveillance wins by default. Make privacy invisible and automatic. 3. Under-investing in operational safety (backups, recovery, liquidity UX). Normal users pick custodians when scared. 4. Relying on norms over policy. In a low Gross Consent Product world, policy beats culture. If your mempool policies are naïve, adversaries will price you out. 5. Ignoring perimeter levers (app stores, banks, clouds). If you don't plan redundant routes, the other side will plan your failure. The uncomfortable truth is that Bitcoin's defense can't be "hope users pick hard mode". Defaults decide outcomes. If Bitcoin wants to be mass Medium-of-Exchange, privacy, finality, recoverability, and predictability must be invisible and automatic — and the perimeter must be treated as hostile by default. Until then, paper wrappers will dominate, regulators will "clarify", and L1 will be priced as store-of-value with supervised access, not as everyday cash. The good news: all of that is fixable — but only if it's designed, not preached.

Replies (18)

Still waiting for your deep dive on Monero. It's still at a point where we can influence things in a positive way. You might not see it as such. But as a BItcoiner of 2010, some flaws became evident pretty fast. Monero is where OG Bitcoiner (speculatively including Satoshi) met to create a project based on the learnings of Bitcon's shortcomings. 2014 was the year Bitcoin capture took form via Blockstream that's nothing more than a front fir the Bilderberger banking group (LinkedIn/Microsoft, MasterCard, AXA as direct investors). 2014 was also the year Monero project started and after it's incredible run to $500 within 4 years it had been identified as the much larger threat than captured and limited and KYC'd Bitcoin ever could become. Fast forward enter half a decade of price suppression by a large number of CEX. Fractional reserving Monero was a thing that spread like wild fire as for CEX it would create bigger profit margins and for states it meant keeping it out of focus. Can't have Monero be a #4 coin by marketcap as in early 2018. You do that by guiding attention. Fractional reserving Monero Pumping memecoins with unbacked USDT Build up ETF hype Media blackout on privacy (only bring terrorist association to the front pages) Pump the intelligence communities projects and create the illusion of competition e.g. Zcash While at the same time creating extreme friction for normal people Attack the network nodes Create poisoned attacks Attack miner incentives DDOs attacks on community infrastructure Prosecute known devs creating an environment of fear Create fake/scam projects or CEX to steal and selling down Pull liquidity and create fear of a lock in effect through CEX delistings For the ecosystem Silently regulate and kill every legal MoE use Prosecute for AML KYC everything IOU everything (limit self-custody) Encourage paper coins, like ETF as they are much more easy to manipulate (they know how to do it for fiat) Make hardware wallet creators "backup/backdoor" keys e.g. Ledger Now enter the big delistings. Normally a price delisting spells doom and gloom over a niche project. At least that's what one would expect. In Monero's case it meant to x2 the price. Simply because the loss in liquidity was less impactful than the limitation of paper coins circulating. This is what BTC will find out now. That TradFi can extract money now from BTC keeping even USD stable against it. it took Monero almost 8 years to overcome this trend of price suppression and we are still fighting it. In my opinion Bitcoin is a project we should give up on. It won't serve us anymore. If anything I encourage Bitcoin maxis to start another privacy focused project with fair emission curve. If it's improving on Monero I'd buy it.
↩ replying to npub1ah3a...l76e
I do a little bit of Monero research almost every day. However, at this point, I am more bullish on small, circular economies than any of these projects. I'm buying much of my food locally, and will soon start to produce more of my own food, become more self-sufficient and just stay outside the system where possible. I'll probably keep doing Monero research, and focus more on AI as I see more inefficiencies and opportunities for fiat gains there. At this point, I'm pretty much done with my Bitcoin research.
Here you have an example of pure alpha over the Jacks (of Strike and Square) and the Darth and Cyphers (maxis) and the Peters (NSA) and Snowdens (CIA limited hang out) that guide you nowhere but to your own demise. Bitcoin was built on adversarial thinking. But intelligence community achieved their goals by undermining the community as early as ten years ago.
Control-Plane Capital's avatar Control-Plane Capital
I've been doing some research on the biggest mistakes we Bitcoiners made as a community — and obviously we got very complacent over time. Instead of listening to podcast hopium and alienating people with "have fun staying poor" narratives, we should've focused on game theory and patched up at least some of the holes. It was always inevitable that Bitcoin was going to get attacked, and things like having close to 100% of nodes run on a single implementation was just silly in hindsight. People are doing more harm than good when posting charts of hashrate going vertical without the context that 2 pools (Foundry and Antpool) are close to 50% of hashrate and for more than 98% of cases, pools, not miners decide which transactions get added to the blockchain. You had most of the Bitcoin community cheering price over payment share; we welcomed ETFs as victory. Paper share rose, self-custody fell. The entire community also cheered Square's surveilled "Bitcoin payments" where every payment generates identity-linked transaction data: buyer, location, device, and amount. All transactions flow through Square/Cash App's KYC/AML perimeter, meaning both sides of the payment are verified. That data fuels risk scoring, fraud models, blacklist propagation, and targeted marketing. Exactly this surveillance value is Square's enduring moat, not the 1% fee. We just got too complacent. I'd say the 5 main mistakes we Bitcoiners made are: 1. Letting arbitrary data compete with money on the base layer (witness discount abetted it). For Medium-of-Exchange you need predictable fees; underpriced junk data is a Denial-of-Service subsidy. 2. Treating privacy as an "expert mode". That guarantees surveillance wins by default. Make privacy invisible and automatic. 3. Under-investing in operational safety (backups, recovery, liquidity UX). Normal users pick custodians when scared. 4. Relying on norms over policy. In a low Gross Consent Product world, policy beats culture. If your mempool policies are naïve, adversaries will price you out. 5. Ignoring perimeter levers (app stores, banks, clouds). If you don't plan redundant routes, the other side will plan your failure. The uncomfortable truth is that Bitcoin's defense can't be "hope users pick hard mode". Defaults decide outcomes. If Bitcoin wants to be mass Medium-of-Exchange, privacy, finality, recoverability, and predictability must be invisible and automatic — and the perimeter must be treated as hostile by default. Until then, paper wrappers will dominate, regulators will "clarify", and L1 will be priced as store-of-value with supervised access, not as everyday cash. The good news: all of that is fixable — but only if it's designed, not preached.
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I completely agree with your analysis. Most of these problems didn't arise from malicious intent, but rather because, as a community, we assumed that people would naturally choose the difficult, private, and sovereign path… when in reality, most prefer convenience, control, and "social validation" over freedom. The uncomfortable truth is that for many people, Bitcoin was never a tool for emancipation, but rather an asset for getting rich. As long as that remains the dominant narrative, custodial solutions, KYC integrations, and monitored payments will continue to be the default option, not because they are better, but because they require zero effort and zero responsibility. Many still don't understand its true potential: privacy, censorship resistance, sovereignty. And without a design that makes it accessible by default, we will continue to repeat the same mistakes.