Topic: First they ignore you: Are we (the Bitcoin/crypto users) about to win? (Read 262 times)

I think there are still all of these stages going on simultaneously in different places and senses. Bitcoin is owned by less than 5% of the population, so I think it's safe to say that the vast majority are ignoring it. Then there are those who are laughing at it, and those who are fighting it. Aside from China fighting Bitcoin, I'd say that the US has also been a mixed country for Bitcoin, and there have been more restrictive suggestions lately, even if Bitcoin becoming an election's talking point is a win. I think we will continue winning more and more over the years, but it can still take several decades and other stages will still be somewhat present.

I guess it's because it motivates the people more to push their interest in BTC? But, there are also people who will be annoyed with it. The golden age of BTC is I think achieved already but it does not end there. We will have more because many people are still not here. Before it happens, make sure we already have enough BTC because it's going to be hard to obtain anymore later on due to increase price and many people won't also sell their coins easily.

If only that is how easy things work, no doubt we are now a millionaire or more than it by now. Those who discover BTC are lucky and cursed at the same time because they don't know what the future awaits for the coin. This causes them to worry and sell early.

Politicians are mostly liars in most of the cases, they are saying all what they are saying to win the heart of the masses and once they have gotten what they want, they will just forget about all their promises.
They are like power mongers, they try all possible means to get to power they want. Physically, emotionally and even spiritually to make sure they get the position they want

I believe that the conflict between governments and communities has shifted from a war against crypto as a challenge to the classical financial system, to a war against all decentralized applications that operate on blockchain, on the basis that they do not respond to the conditions for privacy control monopolized by the authorities, which in turn impose governance and oversight on the people. It was not easy for crypto to reach these results, but it later became clear that the war is against the privacy of individuals and not against any of the assets emerging as a new store of value.

Today we have two prominent examples of this trend:
The United Arab Emirates has taken giant steps to support companies active in crypto, but it still deals with everything related to privacy of use with caution.
The United States of America, which seems to be tired of continuing the war on crypto companies, and there has become a general trend among all parties of the authorities to regulate the sector and allow it according to conditions that do not conflict with the applicable laws.

I read an article somewhere recently that cryptocurrency users will be able to dictate terms for politicians and the government, especially if capital is concentrated in digital currency. Of course, I don’t believe in this, but if such conversations are already starting, then sooner or later we will not dream of recognizing crypto. But most importantly, we will have to take care of safety, because this will be relevant.

Politicians will forever remain politicians, they only want to take advantage of certain moments for their personal gain, the same is the case with politicians who side with Bitcoin in particular, if he is just someone who has just appeared and is raving about Bitcoin then we should be suspicious of him, there is little reason supporting bitcoin for the sake of adopting bitcoin, of course the aim is to increase its prestige in the election. Bitcoin has become an important commodity and asset in the world, the discussion is very sensitive, those who rejected Bitcoin at the beginning must be licking their own spit.

Bitcoin has come so far even since I started buying in 2015. I mean we are on Wall Street via the Spot ETFs & we even have a Nation State buying (one so far). Adoption & acceptance in mainstream finance increases every year. Bitcoin is going nowhere, it’s here to stay so hell yeah we are winning.

It's probably for the best that some people are mocking us, bitcoin investors, that way, we will still have all the time and we will still be at the golden age of bitcoin and so we can always get more bitcoin for ourselves, now imagine that we're the first here and we know that it will only go up from here, I think that we will be able to get the most profits because we're the ones that believed in bitcoin and those that were laughing at us for investing, they'll eventually change their minds, I'm pretty sure of that and then they regret it. Just keep your head down and keep on investing in bitcoin.

Thinking in a victim mindset is not going to be the thing that will get us higher. Bitcoin is not something that is attacked, sure individuals may, but the governments are all approving and regulating it, USA just published their ETF approval this year and we have ETF's from so many different companies already. I think it should be clear that we are going to be something bigger if we boast how great we are, not how we are attacked.

Thinking that we are already getting some backlash is the reason why we should keep saying that we are awesome and everyone knows we are awesome, keep doing that and people will want to join you. If you keep making it like a victim thing then you are going to eventually get attacked for sure.

Obviously, paying with physical cash is the highly privacy ensuring way and governments cannot do anything about that; similarly technical developments will find its own practices to protect our privacy over the time and no government can do anything with that. Government's recent stance on privacy thing will wake up new inventors to revolutionize this total industry. This may sound too speculative but time will prove its reality.

It there's also a saying that if you can't beat them then you'd have to join them unrelentingly. So for you to win you must be practically and theoretically ready for them in Logics.


You've spoken well d5000. And to think that was a basic terminology for bitcoin and crypto owners to think they're actually in for us but that shouldn't be the bone of contentions for the crypto holders. ETF approvals isn't the most ultimate in need, we need freed exercises of utilizing our cryptocurrencies.
If any government isn't going to officially adopt it to be legal tender then they should allow everyone of its holders to utilize it as they wanted. Afterall bitcoin in the first place wasn't a particularly projected to be government official tendered but of a p2p which individuals are found comfortable with.
The restrictions of bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies as a whole has seem so much of being an illegal financial technology.
The crypto adoptors needs a free world of legal holding and trading of their crypto assets and not the so ETH of those politicians coming to give promises and implementing what wouldn't Optimize the wider range of crypto adoptions due to the governments rules.

      Lucky are the bitcoin holders whose governments support bitcoin or blockchain technology; the adoptions will for sure happen quickly, just like what El Slavador did, where they even made bitcoin legal tender.

     It is true that you say that in the beginning we are not believed; we are laughed at and thought of poorly, but when we succeed in what we believe in bitcoin, they will be silent and their mistake will be realized.

It doesn't just feel right to me no matter What they do or say,one minute they're against bitcoin,the next minute they're trying to support bitcoin...for what exactly.There a big possibility that these politicians are up to something really huge without our knowledge and they just want to go ahead with thier plans and decisions.
The level of support and orderliness that the cryptocurreny community needs or deserves is been traded for their personal satisfaction.The earlier the better for these realization..

I dispute that a bit. Two years ago for example in the EU there was a proposed law or regulation to make it illegal to exchange Bitcoin and other PoW currencies on regulated European exchanges. It was at the same time that the European Central Bank also issued some statements about the harm Bitcoin could do, and of course this "Bitcoin obituary" article which is - imo - a really embarassing opinion piece for such a prestigious institution.

The fact that this regulation didn't go through and a pro-Bitcoin movement was forming in the European Parliament was for me the first sign that something was changing with respect to politicians' attitude.

Another example was the bill proposed by Elizabeth Warren and others in the US which would have made miners money transmitters. It's not long ago, but it also seems not to have any chance in the current, a bit more pro-crypto world.

But as I wrote already in the OP, I have the impression that many countries only embrace Bitcoin as a financial asset like many others, being instead afraid or openly hostile about the privacy and censorship resistance aspect. Monero will be probably de facto banned on European regulated exchanges from 2027 on according to AMLD6, even if it is an important tool for Russian dissidents persecuted by the Putin government for example. So there's still a way to go to really "win" if we think Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general) not only as a tool to get rich and speculate but also as a tool to improve freedom, privacy and independence of big institutions in the financial world.

Well to be fair bitcoin world didn't really happen like this, it was a bit different. First a lot of people ignored bitcoin (which was when bitcoin was very small, pre-2013 times). Then a lot of people laughed at bitcoin because it looked not serious at all (this was until 2017 when we reached 20k when people started to take it seriously). But then they joined, that is it and we didn't had any fighting or "winning" since there was no war going on against bitcoin.

Sure there could be a few nations here and there that doesn't like it, but the reality is that a lot of bigger nations (and certainly many smaller ones) liked bitcoin and never had any bad laws about it, and that allowed us to grow even bigger, just look at ETF this year.

Trump is just for memes. i don't think he really can do what he is saying. once he is already a president, he may not really be doing what was promised. all those are forgotten. maybe not all but the government is up to regulate crypto and that is always the case.

one good thing that Trump is doing is making Bitcoin known to everyone through his gatherings. the funny part is that every time he promises something about crypto, there is a crowd shouting yay! it's choreographed.

This is true if you only take into account the sub-group "Bitcoin users concerned about privacy".

But on one hand, pro-privacy groups are often quite large. For example in several European countries there is a big "pro-cash" movement rejecting credit cards, CDBCs and cash restrictions. They do often not care about BTC, but this is a often much bigger group the pro-privacy Bitcoin group could unite forces with. There are also all these groups against Internet surveillance (e.g. NSA), which have scored several political victories in the past, even if their battles are far from over.

On the other hand, of the Bitcoin users there's a constant trickle-in into pro-privacy ideas. For example, if we take Bitcointalk, I think most people come here for "personal profit" reasons (bounties, investment advice ...), but then the probability that they'll stumble upon pro-privacy content is quite high. The percentage may be lower on other platforms but imo it's never zero - because eventually people read about the word *censorship resistance* and what it means for Bitcoin's potential success. In other words: If you start to think about "why I'm really investing in BTC?" then you're often on the right path.

Politicians only are pro-Bitcoin when there are elections close? Yes, this is indeed a danger. But politicians promising and never delivering are very likely to be voted off. There are several examples of this. It's a process that can take years and even decades, I'm aware of that of course.

I think "forgetting" is dangerous because the situation could become even worse, and some day you wake up and are in a 1984-like scenario. Could you then still "live your life on your own"? China for example is already close to this. I'm not saying every Bitcoiner has to become politically active, but at least trying to educate other, new users about privacy and surveillance risks is not a bad idea. (Addition: Anarchism is also an option, i.e. working towards independence from governments.)

I totally agree that we're still not there - that's why I added the question mark and the second part of the post. But something is starting in recent years. Politicians, or at least the agencies they work with (I don't really think Trump himself is a diehard crypto supporter, for example) are considering crypto users as an important voter group. It's a start of a phase which could lead to a victory.

About your other concern - that privacy-aware bitcoin users are a minority, and many are treating it like any other financial asset - see my answer to @uneng.

I think this "first phase" of "supposed politic support to crypto" we're living today will be directed to the traditional CEX user who doesn't care about KYC, and the support from tech firms is an important issue. So the movement has to happen inside the crypto community, i.e. more people inside the crypto user group have to become privacy aware for that to change, see above.

I'd say yes and no to that trend. There is a danger of course, but on the other hand there are examples like Monero. Monero has been delisted from several major exchanges, and now they are needing to move towards increased decentralization, after having partly embraced the traditional CEX/profit culture in the recent past. This is an experiment, of course, and we don't know if they'll succeed, but until now it seems they could hold the price and even recover a bit (current price is $143, after the Binance delisting they were close to $100).

Again for most of the remaining of your post I point to the answer I gave to @uneng - I believe the effort inside the Bitcoin community to educate newer users about the importance of censorship resistance is crucial (perhaps even more important than "becoming politically active").

This is an important point. However, I think this division isn't as deep as it is sometimes affirmed. If a "no-coiner" meets a "NFT investor" and a "Bitcoin maximalist" (which should be on the opposite end of the Bitcoin/crypto user spectrum) and attacks cryptocurrency with the usual arguments like "only for criminals", "environmentally harmful", "ponzi" etc., then I believe even those opposed groups will group together. And the "trickling in into the no-KYC/pro-privacy camp" is probably also true for these groups. At least I see often threads of people asking how they can cash out their NFT/altcoin trading profits without having to demonstrate an origin of funds or so, and this is an excellent opportunity to educate them about the benefits of decentralization.

I also think you underestimate the number of active crypto users. Imo it's at least 100 million (even in a small country like Argentina there are about 5-10 million). Some (e.g. a Singapore agency called Triple-A doing crypto user research) say that India alone has almost 100 million, although of course, most of them could be NFT and stablecoin users, but they're still inside the spectrum I'd mentioned in the last paragraph.

You're talking about maximalists, maximalists are clearly lose here, only crypto users are win.

The number of Bitcoin maximalist is really low, the proof is majority of people choose to hold their coins in centralized exchange over non custodial wallet. Even all the maximalists hate the politician and didn't want to vote him, there's a big chance he will win considering a lot people don't care with privacy and self custodial.

I think maximalist will never win since year by year the government want to destroy privacy in Bitcoin.

Besides the copium aspect of this post I have nothing against it.

The thing is that regardless of if whether the people around you ridicule you for being a cryptobro or not, the right course of action is to always continue to hold and accumulate your coins. Their sentiments of support/discouragement isn't gonna grow your portfolio, although the former is always appreciated and welcome. Plus it's not like they have a stake at what you have right now, so why let these people get into your skin in the first place? The people that are most unshaken in this industry, regardless of what happens internally or externally are the ones that will bag the most out of everyone. After all, the biggest playing factors in this industry no matter how you look at it is FOMO.

We're looking at a really bright crypto bull season this year, and besides that I do not need any more support/motivation to keep investing and putting in more money. Long as my money's getting longer and the coins in my portfolio continue to get fatter, I'm all good.

I highly agree with your opinion, the politicians often try their best to lie in order to win more votes but we have no other option available and that's why we should give them some chance to see if they are lying or they're sincere about their promises.

Donald Trump can be a good politicians who may support the narrative of cryptocurrencies and may reduce the strict actions against the crypto community and at the same time he may make it easier for American citizens to hold crypto currencies. I believe he's better than Biden when it comes to crypto support, however, no one is fully aware about his real intentions.

I don't blame some people on their reactions once they heard about bitcoin, the next thing that comes their mind is scam, because they don't know and were not willing to know anything about this digital currency, that is why some may not have to express themself to others on what they do and instead, they make it private to avoid related issues like this, nevertheless, the government as well are not helping in the situation on what is happening, we don't have to look on all these than to face what we want with bitcoin.