//Bitcoin Culture is Dead: How Institutional Capture Killed the Revolution
I discovered Bitcoin in 2013, and it felt like witnessing the birth of something genuinely revolutionary. Here was a tool that could enable truly free markets, permissionless exchange, and economic sovereignty outside state control. The promise wasn't just digital gold—it was the foundation for an entire ecosystem of voluntary exchange.
By the time I registered with BitShares and later MakerDAO in 2017, I saw the natural evolution: programmable money, decentralized stablecoins, synthetic assets—all the financial instruments people actually need to participate in global markets. These weren't betrayals of Bitcoin's vision; they were its fulfillment. They offered people practical tools for economic freedom, not just a store of value to HODL.
//The Betrayal
But Bitcoin culture chose a different path. Instead of celebrating these innovations as expansions of unregulated markets, the community turned hostile. Those who once championed permissionless innovation began gatekeeping what counted as "real" cryptocurrency. They built walls where there should have been bridges.
I watched this transformation personally within the Czech crypto community between 2020-22. The pretense of caring about broader crypto culture evaporated. What emerged was pure tribalism—Bitcoin good, everything else scam. The community finally stopped pretending they cared about freedom and went full orthodoxy.
//The Philosophical Failure
Bitcoiners had the opportunity to be moral and cultural guides—to help people navigate new financial tools while maintaining principles of sovereignty and decentralization. They could have been amplifiers of unregulated markets, celebrating every innovation that gave people more tools for economic freedom.
Instead, they chose the path of the ostrich. Heads buried in sand, fingers in ears, chanting "Bitcoin fixes this" at every challenge. When DeFi offered people access to financial instruments previously gatekept by traditional finance, Bitcoiners called it a scam. When stablecoins gave people in unstable economies a practical tool for daily use, Bitcoiners dismissed them as shitcoins.
They stopped asking what people actually need. They stopped caring whether their solutions addressed real problems. The only question became: "Does it serve Bitcoin?" Everything else—utility, adoption, solving actual use cases—became secondary to narrative maintenance and price performance.
The irony cuts deep: a community that once embodied cypherpunk principles of individual sovereignty now demands ideological conformity. A movement built on questioning authority now has its own orthodoxy, complete with heresy trials for anyone who builds on other protocols.
//What Remains
Bitcoin the technology may continue. Bitcoin the cultural movement—the one that inspired me in 2013, that promised liberation through technology—that's dead. It died when curiosity became heresy, when innovation became competition, and when serving people became less important than serving the protocol's price.
Yes, philosophical depth still exists in Bitcoin—there are still cypherpunks in the margins asking hard questions and building for freedom rather than number-go-up. But here's the tragedy: when those people need visibility, funding, conference stages, or development resources, they have to interface with the institutions that actually control Bitcoin's trajectory.
And those institutions—the conferences, the media platforms, the development funding—are completely captured by the commercial/institutional layer. Money and power concentrate around figures who explicitly represent institutional capture, people like Saylor who literally advocate for Bitcoin's integration into the existing power structure.
So you get this bifurcation: rich philosophical discourse happening in the margins while the money and power concentrate around institutional capture. What remains is a cargo cult, worshipping the form while abandoning the substance. Then when it's time to "represent Bitcoin" to the world, which layer gets amplified? The Longreads philosophers or the BTC Prague conference keynotes?
The answer reveals everything. The revolution didn't fail—it was captured. The cypherpunks are still there, but they're not the ones with the megaphone. And most Bitcoiners can't tell the difference.
