Topic: IS BITCOIN NOW IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION FROM ITS INITIAL GOAL? (Read 247 times)

Nothing seems to change rather its users are the one who are gradually discovering other things about bitcoin such as investment purpose which includes buy and holding, trading. I believe we all know that it is created as an alternative of payment methods to foster the payment system where there seems to be barrier in cash payment bitcoin would scale through without having to visit bank or any other third party to intrude. You can make payment in billions or trillions using bitcoin without any authority having to question your source of funds and reason for transactions, bitcoin serves as the easiest way for payment gateway which is used for all forms of payment.

If Bitcoin is not going to be an alternative means of payment then I'm out. I have no use for tokens, NFTs, Ordinals, Runes, and other forms of crap like that.

So is the direction really changing? No, because the people who are responsible for working on Bitcoin do not have their heads turned toward this type of stuff. If you know what I mean.


lol no

It does seem like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have evolved quite a bit from their original goals. Do you think this shift towards things like DeFi and NFTs is a natural progression, or has it strayed too far from the initial vision?

Thinking that Bitcoin was designed to fight against the government or banks is a deception. I also assume that this is the mindset of most governments. These politicians think that Bitcoin is fighting against them, this might be the reason why many countries are banning and restricting Bitcoin transactions. The government of my country sees cryptocurrencies as an enemy because they are worried that many citizens are dumping our currency and hodling Bitcoin.

But some set of bitcoiners especially miners don't see runes and ordinals as a spam attack on the Bitcoin system. Several miners see it as a lucrative revenue stream. However, the majority of people who operate in the Bitcoin space are against runes and ordinals because they cause high transaction fees.

LN is a good layer II scalability solution, even if it hasn't worked out as well as many people thought it would when it was implemented. However, things like runes, ordinals or tokens on the BTC network are not a part of BTC, better to call them attacks than implementations, and such spam attacks can only last for the short term, because you cannot deceive the people involved in it for a long time, they'll surely find out soon enough they they are gullible and have been deceived.

Satoshi Nakamoto did not design and launch Bitcoin blockchain to fight against banks.

It is a supplementary or optional method of payment, fund transfer for people to choose, if they don't want to use banks. An option is different than a tool to fight against something, you exaggerated this utility too much.

Banks with their stance is changing because of more regulations on Bitcoin market, have been starting to accept and integrate their system with new products for Bitcoin users. If they see Bitcoin is a competitor against their banks, they will not provide such Bitcoin-integrated products for bank users. Banks actually are viewing Bitcoin more and more friendly with time, this is different with your thinking.

I agree with Dunamisx that Bitcoin was meant as an alternative to banks rather than to fight banks. It was created shortly after the global economic crisis, so the reputation of banks suffered greatly at that point, but people had no choice but to use them (or rely solely on cash, which could be difficult even then in some countries). Bitcoin came in as a way to be your own bank, to manage your own funds which also happen to be independent of any authorities because Bitcoin isn't like fiat. Bitcoin still offers this alternative, even if a lot of people use it differently.

Over the years people have come up with their own imaginary goals for Bitcoin (like fighting banks or replacing fiat) and when they weren't reached they start thinking Bitcoin has failed or as you said "deviated from its goal".

The fact is you'll find no indication of such goals in the Bitcoin Whitepaper or anything Satoshi has ever said. Bitcoin has always been as it still is: a decentralized payment system. It is designed to be an alternative option for anybody who wants to adopt it and improve their financial sovereignty.

That is wrong as well.
Bitcoin protocol does not support creating tokens. However, there is an ongoing scam where they lie to people by telling them the arbitrary data they injected in a bitcoin transaction is a "token".
That doesn't mean Bitcoin has moved in that direction. That just means there is an attack on Bitcoin taking place by exploiting the protocol.

That's too broad a question to answer. Which cryptocurrency?
You see almost all cryptocurrencies aka altcoins had one goal: to get pumped and dumped. And they are useless. Which means they didn't really have a goal to change. They were created to be used as a way for "gamblers" to make a profit by playing the market and they did exactly that.

But if we define that goal as creating payment systems then yes, altcoins deviated from that path from early days (that is 14 to 15 years ago) and nobody has innovated anything worthy of the name cryptocurrency.

First, we need to distinguish between Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies aka altcoins.

It's true Bitcoin was created to fight against banks, but cryptocurrencies aka altcoins weren't created to fight against banks, actually most of them are centralized and there's a coin created to working with banks i.e. XRP.

Second, most of Bitcoiners didn't use Bitcoin as a commodity project like DEFI, NFT etc. It just a small part of Bitcoiners, most Bitcoiners use Bitcoin as an investment or trading since they hold their coins in CEX.

Bitcoin was not invented to fight with banks. Go ahead and read the white paper. The inventor of Bitcoin created it as a peer to peer electronic cash system. I don't see it has deviated from that path! Yes a lot of people also use it as an investment because of its historical price Trend. Bitcoin has out performed every single investment asset out there in the world. So a lot of people prefer Bitcoin to keep as an investment rather than using it as a cash system.

That is the beauty of a free market. An asset based on the free market analogy, can become whatever the market decides for it. It is still a cash system if you are willing to use it as one.

I don't think, Bitcoin has changed from the purpose it was created by Satoshi Nakamoto, because it has eliminated delay in transactions and it has reduced unemployment from the world which are the major goal of Bitcoin which countries has testified about the goal of Bitcoin. Some countries of the world has made it legal tender in their countries, because the transaction is fast and safe and it has attract many countries in the world to use it in their industries for people to purchase goods and services and pay with Bitcoin. Bitcoin still remain decentralized currency, which government cannot control the price of Bitcoin and it can only be control by demand and supply.

I don't think bitcoin's goals and objectives have changed from its initial purpose. It's just that more people are coming up with alternative ways to utilize bitcoin. it's the people who changed or rather evolved in time, but bitcoin has remained the same mostly. It is still used as an alternative from centralized institutions.

Do you think that Bitcoin was created to compete with the banks or governments of countries around the world? Of course the answer is no; maybe it won't have a high value if that was the purpose of Satoshi Nakamoto's creation.

In fact, there are some banks that recognize Bitcoin or include it in their business because of the pros it can contribute to their business concept. It's just that there are others who, when they start looking at Bitcoin in an ugly way, everyone's image will be ugly, even though there are really good benefits to be gained from it.

You get all wrong here. Bitcoin's initial goal was not to fight banks but to provide solution to the drawback in the banking and monetary system create by the Fed.

Bitcoin has not moved towards the commodity movement but the spot ETF which was approved and a lot of crypto enthusiasts were happy about the cash inflow it will inject into the market is a platwork that will treat BTC, and other accepted ETFs as fungible tokens. However, this can be correct if more people from the community choose self-custodial investment holding over spot ETF.

All these attributes that you've just mentioned are not practiced by financial institutions such as banks, which has given Bitcoin an upper hand to earning the trust of the people. We should understand that so many people are after transparency especially where their money is. I think this is why the OP thinks Bitcoin was introduced to fight banks, which is not true. But due to the difference in their attributes you've mentioned, financial institutions (banks) are now feeling less important. I guess that should be the right word (less important).


Very true. When Satoshi introduced it at first, I think it was just for payment purposes. But now that the community is now incharge, we've seen things that are beneficial and also not beneficial to Bitcoin that were introduced by the Bitcoin community. Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20 Tokens, LN, etc have been introduced aside what Satoshi implemented. Not everyone enjoys some of this things I just mentioned.

The original purpose of creating BTC wasn't for it to 'fight' banks, BTC was created to be an alternative currency to fiat, but one that is censorship resistant, permissionless and decentralized.
Kind of, but it was expected, BTC does not have one use case, so people will decide how they want to use their BTC, and neither you or i has the right to tell them what to do with their coins. BTC has really developed, and there was no way it was going to stay exactly as Satoshi created it, there have been a lot of improvements and people will use it how they like.

I think the part that you said about bitcoin fighting the banks, I think that is not a goal of bitcoin, there are no specific goal or what bitcoin has, it will only be answered by the creator itself nakamoto, but what I think the main purpose or goal bitcoin is to provide new technology and currency that will someday in the future be widely used and possibly replace all currency, not necessarily fighting banks because we all know abolishing banks in the world will be far impossible as all money circulating in a country or in the whole world are happening in banks, without banks it will be difficult for us financially, and bitcoin can manage to have the ability to catch all the problem related to money then that is the main goal of bitcoin, to become the most powerful and know currency of all, and we are witnessing that bitcoin is reaching out to those achivements and that's also thanks to us the investors. Projects such as DeFi, NFT and many more are just another way of helping other people's lives it only proves that bitcoin technology can be implemented in various kinds of earning.

If you look at several altcoin-based cryptocurrency projects, they may not have led to their initial goals, but Bitcoin itself is of course still with its original goals and has never changed, maybe that's all I know

It's not so much that Bitcoin has changed, but the community definitely has, which was inevitable.
Some still disagree, but it's pretty evident that Bitcoin and crypto have become mainstream. Some reports claim that even 93 million Americans now own cryptocurrencies, which is around 40% of all US adults. This is insane and is way more than anyone in the early years would expect.
Sadly, the vast majority of all those investors are in it only for profit and often don't have a basic understanding of the technology and their activity is limited to transacting on centralised exchanges. They also don't tend to care too much about anything other than the price, so there's not much discussion about making Bitcoin more usable etc.

It is a supply capped decentralized p2p currency open to everyone. It is still that.

Not sure why you think it is mostly DeFi and NFTs, as that is Ethereum's focus, not Bitcoin's. Very few of the tens of millions of bitcoin owners use it for those other things.

Yes, absolutely.

Bitcoin's goal from the beginning was to create a means of online transacting for people who could not use an ordinary bank. Before Bitcoin there were credit cards, wire transfers, PayPal, and so forth. Bitcoin was not designed to replace those things, as it's design is necessarily more expensive, slower, and more cumbersome to use.

Instead Bitcoin was design for the very specific need of allowing transactions that could not be subpoenaed by a government, and/or modified or intercepted by a government.

That's it. That's all Bitcoin--and the blockchain architecture--was originally designed to solve.

Subsequently, people did three things:

1. They imagined Bitcoin would be used for other things, e.g. replacing mainstream transactions, which it has not and cannot.

2. They used Bitcoin as an investment instrument, which today is the primary use of Bitcoin.

3. They learned that Bitcoin by itself is a poor system for evading the government because of it's public ledger, and follow-on products like Monera have now filled that role.

Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptos will remain investment instruments, and the technology works perfectly fine for that.

Centralized, non-blockchain-based digital currencies will be the future of mainstream transactions, as this architecture will actually scale to the level necessary to replace worldwide everyday transactions.

Whatever the initial goal is pretty much doesn't matter — Satoshi Nakamoto released the initial version, and now that Bitcoin is decentralized, the people will decide how it will go forward with its protocol updates and stuff.

Also, DeFi/NFTs/etc are mostly not in Bitcoin, but in other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Solana.

That is a wrong perception in which you are having, bitcoin is never targetted in fighting against banks or governemtn, instead it was discovered to serve as an alternative menas of making payment from the use of fiat currencies, if you think about having privacy and control over your financial economy, then think of bitcoin.


Do you really have to compare a decentralized digital currency to centralized altcoins and projects, i think you have to read on PoW and PoS.


Nothing has change, you are to read better and make more findings about many things that remains unclear to you concerning bitcoin and the crypto networks.

This may be a question that bothers me in my heart and mind who thinks that Bitcoin as part of cryptocurrency has deviated from its initial goal which was intended to fight banks and I think it has now moved towards a commodity project for example (DeFi, NFT and etc) rather than being a legal alternative means of payment, from that question I want to get enlightenment from all members about whether bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have changed from their original goals? Hopefully this will be material for constructive and enlightening discussion