Oddbean

bitcoin going up against fiat doesn't mean that the network scales better, that the fungibility issue has been fixed, or that the user experience has been improved. bitcoin today is not much different than it was 3 years ago. it's technically worse, due to the lightning network becoming more centralized & less liquid, while the liquid federation has even fewer users. the improvements are marginal and are due to developers figuring out workarounds to compromise on the fact that there's no new soft fork update. there is some progress in the field of custodial solutions (ecash, federations, etfs), but that's not really bitcoin. it's something else that bitcoin was supposed to replace. what bitcoin does have is a new wave of institutional investors who pulled some strings to remove some mainstream media fud in order to make it easier for them to dump on retail. don't fool yourselves: these companies don't report their earnings in btc. they are not here for a new monetary standard and don't hope to one day move into citadels. once the opportunity arises, they will dump their reserves on the newcomers and cause the next bear market. and when we finally see the hopium get smoked, once everyone is done pointing fingers to find the heretics who didn't do as they said, the builders will have to step in and pick up the pieces in order to provide new technological legitimacy to the project. we only have a few months left, and then i hope we return to making bitcoin work much better – not banks, not federations, not ecash mints. bitcoin as peer to peer electronic cash.