Introduction
A few years ago, I went through a “Bitcoin phase”.
In fact, my passion for Bitcoin, crypto, and its potential to do good things in the world kickstarted my writing journey in 2020. I suppose giving unsolicited mini-lectures to friends, family, work colleagues, and random people about the value of Bitcoin was no longer enough to satisfy my curiosity and passion. Therefore, I went to the keyboard in the hopes of reaching a larger audience.
At the time I started writing online, the internet was packed with interesting takes about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, DeFi, NFTs, and Web 3. The space was buzzing with innovative energy. I certainly didn’t buy all of the hype, but I was much less skeptical compared to today. Below is a selection of some of my earlier pieces of writing on HackerNoon.
Keep in mind that these posts were written at a different time. It was a time when Futuristic Lawyer was still young and innocent, full of hopes and dreams about the future. Before the invisible weight of gravity smashed his idealism and ambition.
The Internet is Broken, But The Metaverse and Web 3.0 Could be the Solution
Explore the Problem of Digital Identities and the Impending Doom of the Dead Internet
Whether the Crypto Market Booms or Busts, I’m Investing in The Top Digital Currencies Longterm
How Information Technology & Web 3.0 Is Leveraged to Help Ukraine & Cancel Russia
True Meaning Of DAOs — Understanding A New, Emerging Phenomenon
True Meaning of DAOs - Bitcoin as Business
The True Meaning of DAOs — Uniswap & BAYC
Overall, my style of writing was more timid and academic-like back then. Certain parts are slightly cringe-worthy and nauseating to read. Still, I think most of my earlier analysis remains relevant and insightful for those who are interested (hence the Futuristic part of my pseudonym).
My most viral piece to date with 33,000+ views concerned the “Terra Luna crash” and a rising number of crypto scams I noticed on YouTube in conjunction with crashing crypto prices:
LUNA’s Crash and Scams in Desperate Times of Crypto
Then, one month later I became the victim of a scam. I lost access to nearly all of my crypto savings that were partly financed by student debt. I wrote about the “Celsius crash” and my initial experience here:
It Got Really Hot With Celsius
Even though the situation was rough, I remained hopeful:
“Personally, I’ll admit that I have placed a large portion of my crypto savings in Celsius. Not enough to ruin my financial future if I lose it, but it will surely hurt for a long time to come. However, I remain cautiously optimistic about seeing my funds again. If not, an expensive lesson has been learned. I turn the deaf ear to a loud minority of trolls and bots that spread toxicity, invented information, and FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) on social media. Many actual stakeholders in Celsius seem to be defaulting to emotionalism and doomerism at every turn and keep saying “that it’s all over”.
(..)
Despair and angst are of course understandable on behalf of anyone who has money at stake in Celsius right now. However, a true entrepreneurial spirit can rise from ashes and come back stronger. No matter what, life goes on. In the end, good relationships, and good health is more important than cold assets. So better focus on that for a while.”
Where did this young man go? I ask myself. So full of hope and optimism.
Anyway, lol.
It turned out that my cautious optimism was well-founded. Most of my frozen funds would later be recovered while Celsius founder and CEO, Alex Mashinsky, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The financial devastation caused by the bankruptcy of crypto exchanges like Celsius and FTX was brutal. Yet, I continued to have a flicker of hope in the value and philosophy underlying Bitcoin. Until recently.
Now, I am finally ready to agree with those naysayers who claimed from day one that the true value of Bitcoin is zero dollars. However, as a former believer, my perspective is qualitatively different from those who dismissed it from the start. The problem Bitcoin identified and tried to solve – eliminating the need for trust in intermediaries - is still relevant and important. Unfortunately, the technical solution Bitcoin provided did not manage to scale into a functional payment system. Now, it has become a vehicle for political and financial corruption, with a high environmental tax and no public utility.
The initial optimism I felt about Bitcoin, which pushed me towards online writing in the first place, is officially no longer present in my heart. Now, I don’t think it’s morally defensible to advocate for Bitcoin, or the adoption of it. Below is my obituary to Bitcoin and the part of myself that died with it.
The Death of Bitcoin
The original Bitcoin white paper by anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto remains a text for the history books. Like many others, I was initially fascinated by the description of the Bitcoin protocol, the system’s relative simplicity, but profound reimagination of money in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Bitcoin was a new kind of cash that was completely digital in nature, private, yet transparent, and was founded on a deep understanding of cryptography, monetary theory and game theory in a very innovative way. A financial asset with social value. A self-contained system with roots in cypherpunk culture that could replace banks with code as intermediaries in transactions of value between people.
Bitcoin removed the need for trusting intermediaries, because the system was sustained by a decentralized collective of nodes in a network that anyone who wanted to could participate in and observe. The system worked because participants were motivated to contribute positively, instead of trying to work against the system. “Miners” who sustained the network could harvest rewards in the form of bitcoins by verifying transactions. Bitcoin users could send and receive large amounts of capital pseudonymously to each other without having to deal with the substantial fees, delays, AML checks, and other complexities that are involved in international money transfers. Legitimate annoyances.
Today, the stereotypical Bitcoin hodler is traditional “finance bro” in a suit or a rich man from the boomer generation, who prefer to keep all his undeserved wealth to himself and closest family while a new generation is growing up to poverty and debt. In other words, the cryptocurrency industry has fully integrated with the same dysfunctional “TradFi” system it was supposed to disrupt. Now, Bitcoin is only another investment vehicle that rich people and institutions can try to make even more money from, without needing to care for or know about Bitcoin’s history, philosophy, potential, or original ambition to put banks out of business. The ideological substance of Bitcoin, which drew me and many other investors to it to begin with, is not just secondary to price movement, but left out of the conversation altogether.
Without a vision driving it, Bitcoin is just another memecoin. That is, sadly, what it has become. A memecoin with a present market cap of more than $2 trillion, used for insider-trading by some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. As documented in the video below by fraud investigator voidzilla, an account recently shorted BTC and ETH aggressively for millions of dollars right up until one minute before Trump announced a new round of 100% tariffs on Chinese imports. The president’s Truth Social post triggered a wide crypto sell-off, wiping $12,000 off Bitcoin’s price in a matter of minutes and $500 billion off the combined crypto market (Forbes). Meanwhile, the account holder got away with $190 million.
That is the kind of application Bitcoin has today. The recent “flash crash” also shows something else. Bitcoin’s reputation as a “store of value” similar to gold, a “doomsday currency” that people can rely on as a deflationary asset when inflation gets out of control, is not realistic. Bitcoin’s price is positively correlated with the stock market, and when things get really “tough out there”, it seems more than likely that investors will flock away from Bitcoin towards safer assets with tangible value and returns.
If not useful as a store of value, what is Bitcoin useful for? Not for making everyday payments, because the price is so volatile. Further, the Bitcoin network is painfully slow, costly, and easily congested. These issues could reportedly be solved by “second layer solutions” such as the Lightning Network, but they are technically sophisticated solutions, only used by a few nerds. In almost all instances, paying with cash or payment providers like PayPal or Stripe is a more convenient option.
Under what circumstances would paying with Bitcoin actually be the best solution? If privacy is very important to you, and/or if you want to transfer a large sum of money from one country to another without a bank record. There is a legitimate need for that. And even more so an illegitimate need in the form of criminal and shady activities. But why would you use something as volatile as Bitcoin ? Why not use stablecoins or possibly other forms of cryptocurrency that are completely anonymous and untraceable?
To sum up: Bitcoin today is a memecoin used for insider trading. It is not useful as a store of value and not useful as a currency for making everyday payments. What is it good for? While the original Bitcoin proposal and its origin story are fascinating, Bitcoin is now fully integrated with traditional finance, market manipulations, and political corruption. Most bitcoins in existence today are owned by the richest institutions and people in the world. When crypto prices go up, it will primarily benefit them. When prices go down, it will primarily harm ordinary bitcoin holders, while people with insider knowledge make short bets, major institutions dump their holdings, and the market crashes.
For all I care, Bitcoin is dead, even as the network lives on and mining operations and new transactions continue.
Without the Bitcoin paper of 2009 we wouldn't have Nvidia leading AI chips today. So now crypto miners are pivoting to HPC and renting gpus for AI workloads. We call them neo clouds. It's one of the best growth stock trends of the current AI boom and AI bull market.
A lot of them use green energy and hydropower up in Canada, and many of them have a treasure chest of many bitcoins. Because the demand for compute is so intense, they are starting to get contracts from the cloud players. This is diversifying the AI Cloud layer already in names like corweave and nebius. So in terms of AI sovereignty every country has these crypto miners pivoting to AI now. Dozens and dozens of neo clouds are ready to pounce in 2026.
Nvidia's gpus were for Bitcoin mining and gaming, now they hold 94 percent of the AI chip market and is the main Force driving the entire AI boom with tsmc their key supplier.
If you were sent back in time you would write the Bitcoin paper in 2009 to enable all that is happening today in AI infrastructure. Again all of this happens only because Bitcoin exists.