I really, really want to believe this but I don't think I can. Over the past several years there has been an unquantifiable but subjectively enormous shift in the atmosphere of the cryptocurrency world. At one point it shifted from being about paranoid hackers and techies trying to create a way of doing transactions that was free from trusted third parties to being essentially a space for grifters to shill shitcoins and idiots to buy them. Bitcoin went from being a thing with a radical, revolutionary purpose in the world to being "look, price graph goes up," and this fills me with a deep sense of foreboding.

It increasingly feels like we are in a time when anything with any potential to harm the Regime (such as web, bitcoin, etc) just gets defanged and absorbed into the system. In a few years, your web browser will probably transmit the details of your mandatory TPM chip to facebook, netflix, etc so they can uniquely identify all devices with complete precision and deny access to unapproved (user-controlled) computers. Microsoft already only allows users to install other OSes/bootloaders on new computers by their good grace. The keys are theirs, not yours.

With bitcoin we already have KYC/AML ruthlessly enforced at every onramp/offramp. It is already very hard to transact between fiat and crypto without presenting some form of government-issued identification, and it will only get harder as time goes on, I don't see how you could reverse this process. And that culture shift is important because the people whose voices are most dominant within the "crypto sphere" today don't seem to give a shit, really. The crypto people we have now seem to lack the deep, fundamental commitment to human freedom, privacy, and security that was the animating force behind the creation of bitcoin. I desperately want to believe that it still survives and I'm just not seeing it somehow. But I simply can't.