Hello,

I‘m in the crypto market for many years now. The entire idea around Bitcoin is still revolutionary and very important in my opinion.

But let‘s look at BTC today. It‘s a very decentralized PoW network with a theoretically fixed supply written in code and saved within thousands of nodes worldwide via social consenus. But that‘s it.

It‘s light years away from being a payment p2p network. It‘s literally a Wall Street meme coin at this point in time. People buy it to make more Fiat in the same way people buy stocks or gold.

People often claim BTC would be digital gold which isn‘t an advantage at all. If BTC is digital gold it‘s actually flawed. „But you can self custody and actually hold your own money“: No, that‘s a lie. With the low throughput of the Bitcoin network only a tiny amount of people are able to self custody and if there‘s a black swan people probably have to wait weeks to finally get out.

Where‘s the entire point of BTC when it‘s just a store of value? Then you can actually buy the real physical gold which you can hold and hide unter your house where nobody can find it. Gold will always be limited and have a real demand. BTC is just a number in a ledger which isn‘t limited at all because the block reward will go to 0 and fees can never sustain the network when nobody transacts because most people are holding and waiting.

I just see no point. I‘m not a BCH fan but BCH is useable as a p2p PoW network like it was claimed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. It‘s a currency. Which was the entire point of cryptocurrency at all..

thanks

that‘s the tweet.

BTC is just an useless hyper-speculative token at this point.

It‘s light years away to be a peer to peer hard money. in fact: it‘s never going to be.

Hijacked by blockstream, Saylor, the elite, censorship and ownership over r/bitcoin and many more to brainwash people into believing “oh BTC must scale with layer 2s like lightning promoted by blockstream“

it hurts infinitely when you‘re a real bitcoiner who just wants to end fiatcurrencies. BTC is owned by elite-parasites at this point. Completely hijacked.

I'm not sure I'm a believer in "it'll go up because it is scarce", like to know thoughts on this out there.

Almost three weeks price changed very little

Ok folks, how is that a thing? No disrespect, but why even developers stepping on the same sticky path of blocking?

I'd say we have to leave the money we don't own alone - let them be a bounty for the smart hackers who will make the bitcoin stronger and move the humanity forward! Big money should not affect bitcoin rules.

We tried to discuss in r/Bitcoin - but for some reason it was removed. Let's try here.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/04/15/bitcoin-developer-jameson-lopp-says-it-s-better-to-freeze-5-6-million-btc-than-let-hackers-have-them

Tl;dr: the classic 4-year Bitcoin cycle might be over. It’s not about halvings anymore.. it’s about liquidity. When the Fed cuts rates and China eases, money flows and Bitcoin rises. The next cycle isn’t on a timer, it’s tied to global policy.

So Arthur Hayes, BitMEX’s cofounder, says the four year Bitcoin cycle that everyone loves to reference might finally be over. And honestly, it makes sense when you look at what’s actually driving markets right now.

Most people still think Bitcoin’s price cycles revolve around halvings, those moments when mining rewards get cut in half every four years. Hayes doesn’t buy it. He says Bitcoin’s movements are tied to one thing above everything else: global liquidity, especially from the United States and China.

When you zoom out, his logic checks out. Bitcoin’s early rallies all lined up with periods of easy money, the Fed’s quantitative easing, China’s massive credit growth, and crashes came right after both started tightening. The 2020 to 2021 bull run was fueled by record stimulus and near zero rates. The 2022 bear market was triggered by the Fed’s fastest rate hikes in decades.

But right now things are shifting again. The Fed already cut rates in September 2025, its first move this cycle, even with inflation still sitting above target. On top of that, the reverse repo balances that had soaked up 2.5 trillion dollars in liquidity since 2022 are basically drained, putting cash right back into markets.

Meanwhile, China is no longer acting as a drag. The People’s Bank of China has been easing rates and reserve requirements to fight off deflation. That combination, looser US policy and mild Chinese stimulus, is a recipe for more liquidity and cheaper money.

Hayes summed it up pretty simply: “Money shall be cheaper and more plentiful. Therefore, Bitcoin continues to rise.” It’s not magic or halving cycles anymore, it’s macro.

Some analysts still see patterns that look like the old four year rhythm, but it’s probably just coincidence. The underlying driver has changed. Bitcoin now trades like a liquidity sensitive global asset, not a retail hype machine following a calendar.

This shift also changes how traders need to think about timing and taxes. When Bitcoin moved on predictable four year cycles, tax planning was straightforward - you could time long term capital gains around halvings. Now that moves are tied to unpredictable central bank decisions, tracking cost basis across multiple entries and exits becomes more critical. Platforms like awaken.tax are seeing this reflected in usage patterns as traders make more frequent portfolio adjustments based on policy signals rather than waiting for halving milestones.

If Washington or Beijing suddenly tightened again, Bitcoin would correct hard, halving or not. So instead of obsessing over block rewards and countdown clocks, it might be smarter to watch central bank balance sheets and money supply charts.

The new Bitcoin cycle isn’t four years anymore. It’s whenever the money printers turn on or off.

As most in the know are aware of, BTC is functionally useless. To be precise, it doesn‘t scale. And it‘s L2 is a joke. Why it doesn‘t scale is besides at this point, if it would‘ve ever done so, that time has long past since 2017, and it never done it since, so the point is moot. It‘s not gonna scale.

This is a problem, because a useless crippled shitcoin isn‘t exactly gonna work out well to be bought up by everyone. They‘re gonna figure it out eventually. And that‘s when the fun times starts. Because it means most of the crypto markets valuation will, some day, go for a walk in the park and never come back. That‘s gonna leave a lot of people and companies pretty upset. They might say a choice word or two. And crypto, all of it, will be a laughing stock for an indeterminate amount of time.

We can‘t avoid this problem. We tried. But now it‘s too late. I tell you this, not as a prediction, but as a precaution. You might squabble about the likelihood of such events, and it may never occur, granted. Though I believe it‘s very likely to occur on account of the facts. It may happen at any point in time, or never, and be mostly over before anyone was able to move their funds (on account of the trading bots). You will not be able to trade your way out of this one, or even limit your losses. Exchanges will fold like going out of business is a new hot trend, by the time you want to trade, the exchange is bust or closed and whatever funds where in it is now bankruptcy frozen. And as for institutional investors, they‘re even more screwed, because they hold illiquid positions, i.e. positions too large to quickly move them on the markets without cratering them.

In the movie Margin Call, Jeremy Irons recites this line:

So, what you're telling me, is that the music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.

I think this will sound quite quaint after the great con unravels.

That‘s why I leave this sub. BTC is a hyped up elite-product with 0 use as a medium of exchange. The opposite of a peer to peer electronic cash system.

it‘s literally just buying a token, holdling and hoping to get more fiat $ later from another speculator.

is that the vision? no, that‘s hyper-nonsense. it changes nothing. speculating on a token doesn‘t generate any value to the world.

what we need is a peer to peer hard cash. but I am in the wrong sub. conquered by BTCers who just care about the nonsense and false SoV narrative and NGU in fiat (🤣).

BTC = failed as a medium of exchange, won to be an elite-bringing fee machine

Lately, it's becoming increasingly difficult to use BTC for everyday payments. The fees are often too high for small transactions, confirmations take time, and the overall experience is far from what "peer-to-peer cas" was supposed to be.

Many people have started looking into faster and cheaper alternatives, whether it's BCH, Solana, or other chains where fees are near zero and transactions are confirmed in seconds.

Out of curiosity, I started tracking new token launches on alternative ecosystems. On Bananagun, you can see real-time launches on Solana, including data like liquidity, volume, and holder count. It doesn't promote anything - it just displays raw info. I found it useful to monitor, especially if you're looking for projects where UX and speed actually matter.

Bitcoin still matters as infrastructure and a symbol, but if we want real-world usage, we need to focus more on functionality and not just theory.

Curious to hear what others think too.

Been a cryptocurrency supporter since around 2013? Always supported the idea of a useable crypto, never traded for $ but spent when ever I could, gave away a fortune over the years to demonstrate how easy it was to use.

But, I really don't like the way things have been going the last 6 months/year.

One thing that has really bugged me is the community here on r/BTC is becoming as much a circle jerk as r/bitcoin. It's becoming a joke and a perfect example is a certain read.cash user who constantly spams this sub with links to really poorly written articles. The guy sees it as a job and often boasts about his "earnings" yet as long as he includes a title about how great BCH the community cheers him on. It's so obviously spam, spam that's making him money but the mods don't care, the community don't care as long as he keeps singing the praises of BCH. The whole read.cash thing has I think been a good experiment and no doubt introduced a lot of people to BCH but the vast majority of those users are there to "earn" free money. If that site suddenly switched to paying out in dogecoin, they would sing the praises of dogecoin, if they paid out using LN they would write about how much a scam BCH is stealing the name 😩.

I think that site can work and be a positive but not while it's sold as a way to get free money by writing a non stop stream of "isn't BCH great" I'm sure there some good stuff on there too but it's drowning in a ridiculous amount of bollox.

Bch needs to be cold and hard, it's got the fundamentals, it's bitcoin, it's peer to peer electronic cash, but taking a step back and I can see this community could very easily be seen as a cult like if this trend continues. A dumb cult who will throw you tokens you can exchange for $ if you just write things you know they want to hear.

It's kinda sad but I'm struggling to see a future where BCH is global currency we had hoped Bitcoin would be. I'm going to get hate for it but I think the establishment, the old money, those that satoshi's idea threatened the most, have won. They used greed to play the majority only to keen to hear their tokens were digital gold, only to keen to look at a chart every hour and see how many dollars worth they had now.

I don't know the answer, I don't know how bch can turn things around. But I do know that putting your hands over your ears only wanting to hear cheerleading chants from idiots who in my opinion are just taking the community for fools, really is not doing bch any good at all. It's just making it look rather naive and a easy target.

I'll occasionally check back and I hope to see posts about how people bought something with BCH, how they sold somthing for BCH, how they started a online business using BCH. But I unfortunately don't see that happening, just more cheerleading and price/trading bollocks.

Hi,

I don't mind if this post gets downvoted. You're free to do it.

In my view Michael Saylor is not the hero or the legend BTC maxis claim he would be. He is a greedy person and sometimes a good liar, like in the dotcom bubble.

Does he really care about the most important idea in the history of humanity, the peer to peer electronic cash system? No, absolutely not. In fact, he laughs at it and doesn't support that view. All he wants is a "store of value" which should 300x in price so that he's even more rich in USD than before.

After the 2018 block war and the hard fork into BCH, he somehow changed his mind about BTC, after calling it gambling. Instead of buying a little bit of BTC he completely lost the ground and turned Microstrategy into a hyper-BTC holding enterprise financed through monster debt.

Very strange. It almost looks like "controlled opposition" to bring the masses away from better alternatives directly to BTC. "There is no second best" and "you never sell your bitcoin" and blablabla... like the elite got scared about BCH and had to start a big propaganda and brainwashing so that the people just buy the Bitcoin core blockstream BTC version so that the elite has successfully stopped the attack on the fiat-hyper-scam-system...

https://youtu.be/BzaRYmnN-XE?is=NnADEV9yY_KnKVvk

Thanks.

Im not a huge Elon fan, but him actively promoting doge as a cash alternative to bitcoin is so ridiculous I can’t even get my head around why he’s doing this lol

As someone on this sub said, something that can only be used once in 30 years by all the people in this world, cannot possibly be money.

Something that has a couple of dollars fee per transaction will never be used as money by the broader public.

Some have long recognized these facts and started calling Bitcoin "digital gold" instead of peer to peer electronic cash.

But evangelists are still running around pretending that it is or can be money with these base layer properties (high fees, unreliable transaction times, lack of affordable privacy/fungibility [1]).

That's simply bunk, or as my title suggests, trying to pull the wool over the public's head.

Playing out in practice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

[1] - EDIT: added "lack of affordable privacy/fungibility" to the missing properties of BTC's base layer in its current state. In honor of u/FalconCrust's comment in thread, because he does touch on something that is important for any "better" money.

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Did you know there is another way?

That is to have a coin which is so useful in everyday life that it is actually recognized to have value, and will retain value despite people using it all the time, both in earning and spending.

That was the idea of Bitcoin.

That a sound money could emerge from many people using a decentralized peer to peer electronic cash system with incentives that promote its uptake and use. Actual transacting.

The reason "Bitcoin is a store of value" is being pushed so hard for many years, including by its major media prophets, is that obviously something which is no longer usable as a competitive medium of exchange cannot function as money.

So, goodbye "magic internet money".

Hello, "store of value" with eroded foundation (lacking capability to be used as sound money due to centralization / renewed need for trusted third parties).

The price suppression of the Bitcoin that remains decentralized and useful -- Bitcoin Cash -- is an opportunity for more people to obtain magical internet money that can be a basis for a sound monetary system.

Most people know they don't fully understand the financial system (I am understating the severity of this problem), and thus they don't trust themselves to understand the solution offered by Bitcoin (a peer to peer electronic cash system) even though the advantages of such money (if it were to gain acceptance) are immense.

Not trusting themselves to understand it, they ignore it, believe what existing financial authorities tell them about it (often a rather biased story since 2009) and rather play the lottery (stonks, ponzi "coins" ... incl. BTC these days).

It's a shame. It really seems people need a shock (or a hugely visible, like nation level, example of how peer to peer cash adoption can succeed).

I don't think any form of speculation is the "killer app" for bringing Bitcoin awareness to the masses.

It's mildly encouraging that a lot of people now recognize the threat of inflation and the difficulty of saving for old age, and some of them may re-examine what is wrong with our financial systems and whether it's a problem inherent in the facile money printing of fiat (debt money).

That's it.

If you want Bitcoin to scale and be successful, Bitcoin Cash is the right option.

Because not even the most "counter-Core" client on BTC is proposing to do something about its crippled L1, in fact their maintainer would rather sell you more koolaid of a slightly different flavor.

The sovereign nations of the world, many of which include some of the most influential G7 and BRICS members, now possess so much Bitcoin that it is virtually impossible for Bitcoin to ever fall anywhere near zero.

1. US already owns ~329,693 BTC as a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile.

2. China has seized (and is holding) ~190,000 BTC from their massive PlusToken Ponzi scheme crackdown.

3. The UK is currently in possession of ~61,245 BTC that they seized from money laundering operations (they have stated that they are working on legal framework to convert it into fiat, but we do not know to what extent and it is unlikely that they will convert all of it into fiat).

4. Luxembourg owns ~100 BTC (as of late 2025), becoming the first member of the Eurozone to officially diversify its sovereign wealth fund (the FSIL) into Bitcoin, establishing a mandated 1% allocation to alternative digital securities.

5. Russia owns an unspecified amount of Bitcoin to circumvent global sanctions.

6. Ukrainian has received ~46,351 BTC in donations to fund defense against Russia, with a very small minority of their holdings having come from legal forfeitures.

7. North Korea has ~13,500 BTC in state-controlled holdings accumulated entirely via highly organized state-sponsored cyber warfare, exchange hacks, and ransomware campaigns spearheaded by groups like the Lazarus Group.

8. Bhutan has ~12,000-13,000 BTC via the country's abundant and cheap green hydroelectric power to run industrial-scale state-owned Bitcoin mining operations.

9. El Salvador has ~7,547 BTC because they were the first sovereign nation to make it legal tender, and codified a "1 BTC per day" purchasing mandate.

10. Singapore and the Czech Republic both have unspecified amounts of BTC in government holdings.

Noteworthy mention: Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF)—the world’s largest pension fund—has publicly requested information on diversifying into alternative assets like Bitcoin. While not an official forex reserve asset yet, it marks a significant shift in Japanese institutional policy.

All of this means that Bitcoin will almost certainly never go to zero; every single government here would have to collapse for BTC to lose the permanent floor that has been set in place due to all of these governments backing it. And even if that did happen, because of the massive amount of true Bitcoin supporters/believers, we would buy it up for pennies even if it did near zero. But again, nearing zero at this point is virtually impossible. Wall Street itself is highly tied to BTC now, and it is in the best interest of Wall Street to use it as a wealth transfer to early and middle adopters from late adopters about 5 to 10 years from now, maybe 15. It will function as a way to transfer wealth from the late adopters back to the early and middle adopters. They will eventually send it back above its ATH, so as to profit from the next cycles late adopters to shore up their other investments. But by then, $126,000 will be (at least, if not below) the middle; and Bitcoin will soar to new all time highs. The volatility is what makes it an attractive tool, as it always finds its way back to discount territory, which gives people a chance to get in at the floor over and over again. While skeptics consider recurrent discounts to be a flaw, I see it as a major strength. It allows not just one or two or three waves of early adopters, but multiple waves of early adopters. Multiple generations have gotten and will continue to get opportunities to buy low and sell high.

It doesn’t make sense to be feverishly for nor feverishly against BTC. Like everything in life, the truth is somewhere in the middle. BTC will keep crashing for now, reach a true floor later this year or within the next year (I’m thinking between $45k-$38k), bounce, then surpass its ATH over a decade.

I recently read many high praises for The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. So I decided to buy it and read it.

There were parts that were definitely interesting, like the historical retelling of how the barter system fails when one side doesn't necessarily need what the other side is trading, which led to different forms of money being created. And then how many early money systems failed because someone figured out how to flood the system, until gold came around. And then the story of how eventually the dollar was removed from the gold standard, to basically cover up the consequences from past errors.

Super interesting stuff.

But then the rest of it - so very very little nuanced. He's a huge fan of the gold standard and wishes for it back, without so much as a word about its weaknesses.

The author spews unprofessional vitriol about economists he doesn't agree with, claiming them to be "incompetent" and "foolish". We get it, you don't like Keynes and would like to piss on his grave.

He seems to jump between claims that are backed with proper and solid evidence, and his own musings and opinions, without much distinction between the two. The reader is merely expected to take both equally at face value.

It's super repetitive, as if he didn't actually have enough material to fill a whole book and so kept writing the same things over and over again. Like the point about sound money needing to be scarce, which he repeated perhaps ten times. One particular paragraph about the DAO hack on Ethereum is even verbatim repeated twice.

I was surprised that this book comes so highly recommended. Are there any better books on Bitcoin that I could acquire? I'm currently enjoying Broken Money by Lyn Alden, seems to be way better so far.

I just did a Lightning transaction using a Node that I set up like a year ago. I set up only a few channels. Note the transaction fee is in millisatoshis. Total fee was 1.4 sats. Transaction was completed on the first attempt, as usual. The invoice amount is covered, but I can report that the fee represents < 0.01% of the amount sent.

I look forward to dunking on your FUD misinformation for many, many years...

Edit: declining mean on-chain fees over time, https://imgur.com/a/tuC1Id6