Topic: Time to update "Visions of Bitcoin"? (Read 308 times)

I sent a Tweet to Nic Carter!


https://twitter.com/fillippone1/status/1375241532475867141?s=21

We will see what happens!

After the huge mega stimuli plan put in place by central banks I am still convinced that, economically and financially speaking, the worst is yet to come as we saw nothing yet! When this happens bitcoin will show the world whether it matured enough to fulfill many of those use cases once and for all.
My take, as I said, is the global reserve currency where nation states will become the new MSTR, TSLA...

Yes, partially.
Reserve currency is a currency that retains their real purchasing power.
Inflation hedge, is something that, whilst your base currency is losing purchasing power, allows you to properly hedge against this loss in value.
For example, while in the iper inflationary ‘70, probably T-Bills, ore even banking accounts, offered a good inflation hedge. Hence even if USD was losing purchasing power it was easy to hedge against it with basic financial knowledge.  Today it is very different, and even if the inflation erosion is slower, the ding with negative yields has become way more difficult.
This is where Bitcoin comes into play.

I don't know why but I'm thinking of Roger Ver saying this on my head hehe. I remember watching a clip of his interview and he kept saying that P2P digital cash.

It is. They could have chosen "private and pseudonymous currency" instead of using "darknet" which is often portrayed in mainstream as negative due to associations with illegal activities.

.....

I wish we could see an update of the article. It's puzzling how the vision of privacy [darknet currency as described by author] started dwindling from 2014. I bet there's a tiny fraction that cares about it now. Regulations are slowly accepted, centralized exchanges remains popular, institutions and custodial platforms driving up the price.

.....

fillippone, isn't reserve currency and inflation hedge correlated?

Bitcoin as digital gold still seems to be a big part of the current narrative about Bitcoin. And many consider it a financial asset which can be traded, but rather than being an uncorrelated one, it indeed seems to be joining traditional assets and is also considered more seriously than ever by traditional traders. At the same time, there's been some recent progress in seeing Bitcoin as money (Tesla's going to accept Bitcoin as payment; PayPal supporting Bitcoin), but not as a cheap network for transactions. It's more like Bitcoin is getting prestigious (or supporting it is becoming a thing) or something like this.

Being used in darknet is different than being the darknet currency specially since bitcoin is not anonymous and was mostly replaced by actual anon coins a while ago.

I see it more like the decentralized money that you can use for anything you like, whether it is as a store of value or for large payments oversees or tiny payments like buying a cup of coffee.
Imagine that everyday you go out of the house you fund your LN channel and pay for your coffee, pay the taxi driver, pay the bills, buy groceries,... and at the end of the day close it or top up the funds for next day.

Possibly. In my view they also show how we deviated from the correct path from time to time. For example in early years there was a lot of darknet usage even though bitcoin wasn't designed to help people commit crimes anonymously.

What if everything's moving, changing, evolving, or whatever organically? I mean, there's no intentional branding or forcing of certain narratives. It just happened along the way. Do these different narratives necessarily follow certain forms of branding, or are these narratives simply offshoots from the actual real-life use-cases which developed with Bitcoin?

Absolutely agree. Bitcoin is big enough for everyone, and I think it's a so big paradigm shift in human history, that there is plenty of use case, some of them might be conflicting at the first sight (Darknet Money vs Corporate Treasuries), but actually root in the same, original, purpose of Bitcoin, the one pooya87 stated here below.


A "digital peer to peer cash", where cash is not meant "something that you use to pay for your coffee", but a "decentralised, digital, trustless settlement system based on hard money".
A digital gold, with better qualities than the physical one. Hard money to build a new "Bitcoin Standard" upon. 

How exactly are those use cases mutually exclusive? One person uses it one way, other person uses it the other way, as long as no one wants to change the rules of the protocol, there's no friction here.

If you're telling other people about Bitcoin and want them get interested, you can just list all the popular use cases, instead of worrying about which one describes Bitcoin the best. That's kinda the point of Bitcoin - no one decides what it is, everyone decides for themselves.

Global reserve currency IMHO is the bitcoin trend for the future: if the mining keeps being competitive and institutional will hoard more and more eventually some nation state will start relying on BTC as a credible alternative to the dollar.
Companies are already doing that, so why not?

That chart is a piece of Art!
Very different type of visual analysis and very interesting to see what thought
processes Bitcoin and the community were creating.

Interesting to see Anonymous Darknet Currency and Programmable Shared Database
fading away.

Pink, Uncorrelated Financial Asset is only making an appearance in 2014 and
makes a big move in 2017, expanding widely into 2018, i'm guessing Pink to command
quite a large space on that chart today 2021 along with an explosive entry of Inflation Hedge

It's not "versions of Bitcoin",it's "visions of Bitcoin".
I don't think that saying that Bitcoin is a darknet currency is FUD.Darkweb markets are still using BTC and Bitcoin mixers are still popular.
The way people are viewing Bitcoin has changed a lot.Nobody is talking about a cheap and fast payment network anymore.Bitcoin has turned into a pure investment asset,at least in the eyes of most Bitcoiners and  BTC haters,which is kinda sad.
Casino capitalism had won against Bitcoin,instead of Bitcoin becoming into an alternative of casino capitalism.
Anyways,this is a great chart.

What does this image exactly mean, in a layman's term, I don't have a clue with this one. We could say that censorship resistant e-gold has been here for a long time if we were to consider bitcoin mixers/tumblers. I do agree about the inflation hedge, since bitcoin has risen in prices these past few months.

I wouldn't call it "visions of bitcoin", it is more like branding bitcoin and forcing certain narratives, some of which are wrong (Reserve currency for crypto), some inaccurate (e-gold) and some are purely FUD (darknet).

And why do we need to re-invent the bitcoin brand and purpose anyways? There is already an excellent "brand" for bitcoin that was created by the creator (Satoshi Nakamoto) which is peer to peer digital cash. It is accurate and tells you everything you need to know about bitcoin.

First and foremost, they've made quite a chart right there. I don't think I have encountered a chart like that before. Does it even have a name yet? Well, they somehow called it "the changing narratives chart." That's indeed cool. And even cooler is the fact that they came up with it "through an analysis of BitcoinTalk posts." This forum's still a relevant gauge in terms of views and sentiments. As opposed to Bitcoin Twitter, for example, there's obviously a lot more open-mindedness here.

Anyway, I cannot seem to find a totally new narrative other than the ones already mentioned. You made mention of inflation hedge as a new tide. Can it be that it is actually within the e-gold narrative? I mean, a lot of investors are getting into gold or diversifying into it primarily because they want to avoid various risks associated with other investments, or because sitting on a lot of cash, which is by nature depreciating, is unsound.

What I probably want to add separately is the narrative that Bitcoin is a plain investment opportunity, one which makes more money to investors than any other. I don't think it could be placed under uncorrelated financial asset basically because Bitcoin's correlation to traditional market has gone higher very recently. Obviously, as indicated by the chart below, we've gone past negative to low correlation.^[1] While the entry of institutional investors are highly lauded, I'm still very much convinced that they are here primarily for the money, that their computation and prediction of Bitcoin's future price is the main, if not only, reason why they are here. And they could easily let go of their Bitcoin as easily as they got it.



[1] https://www.etftrends.com/tactical-allocation-channel/bitcoins-correlation-to-markets-hits-a-record-in-2020/

If I'm to put the images into perspectives and arrange then in order of how much space they take;
• Censorship resistant e-gold
• Cheap payment network
• E-cash proof of concept
• Anonymous darknet currency
• Reserve currency for crypto
• Programmable shared database
• Uncorrelated financial assets

---

I usually do not like the comparison of Bitcoin to gold, maybe 'censorship resistant digital currency', but the reason it took such a large chunk of space would be the key factor of resistant to control.
I would have expected cheaper payment network to be a bit thinner as it has been a recurring issue for a while now, especially involving smaller transaction amounts; but in a couple of years it would likely grow some more
The narrative that Bitcoin is used majorly on the darkweb is not as popular anymore and should fizzle out in a couple of years

The other factors could be easily interchangeable imo. With more time maybe one or two would stand out.

Always some good content from those two(add in 3AC's Su Zhu, while we're at it).

I also expect green and gold to be quite thicker, with pink thinning out a bit more due to bitcoin being somewhat decently(but not 100% of course) correlated to the S&P500 in the past few years(if anyone disagrees, look for previous threads with this topics as I'm tired debating this topic lol). While I'm totally happy with both of these going thicker though, 2019-2021 will most definitely have thinner red unfortunately, and I definitely want to see it thickening more in the coming years due to hopefully more adoption from Lightning.

As for the inflation hedge part, while I agree that I'd like to see that on the chart, I think there's some overlap with gold and pink.

A couple of years ago I read a beatutiful article by hasufl and Nic Carter:

Visions of Bitcoin



This article featured a very enlightening image:



Well, the article has been written in 2018.
How do you think those narratives evolved?
Which new narratives do you think emerged in these last two years?

My guesses:

• Rising Tides:
  
  • Reserve currency for crypto
  • Censorhip resistant e-gold

• New Tides:
  
  • Inflation hedge (corporate treasury)
  
  What do you think?
  
  If we come up with some decent brainstorming effect we could even try to tweet this to Nic Carter!