Bitcoin is the biggest lie in crypto today. That's right, I said it, and I know I'm way over the line for a lot of people. I'm going to say it plainly: in my view, Bitcoin is going to zero, and I can't stand Bitcoin anymore. I know some of you's first reaction is going to be, "Oh, I hate this." But stick with me, because if you're holding Bitcoin, you really need to listen to this, think it through, and not be a zombie about it.
I actually asked ChatGPT about this, and I'm going to expand on what it said, but you can literally ask ChatGPT yourself and look at what it tells you. People get so mad when I say Bitcoin is not decentralized. The majority of Bitcoin's hash rate is controlled by a handful of mining pools. I showed this in a previous discussion using a hash rate index. You can look any of this up yourself. ChatGPT is pulling from the same kind of information it crawled.
The core components are not decentralized
The development of Bitcoin is centralized. The Bitcoin Core team has a handful of people who hold the real power over it, and Microsoft owns GitHub, where it lives. The third point is arguably even more important: the Bitcoin supply, as I've shown in a bunch of previous discussions, is extremely centralized, with about 0.28% of wallets holding roughly 80% of the Bitcoin today.
I'll show this one again, because I know some of y'all aren't going to look it up. Pull up the Bitcoin rich list. When you're talking about how decentralized Bitcoin is, and how this is supposedly better than regular money, no, it's not. About 0.28% of the Bitcoin addresses hold a collective 82% of the supply. That is not an improvement on what we're already doing.
So all the core components of Bitcoin are not decentralized at all. The mining is centralized too. I know I keep coming back to this, but it matters, because most people holding Bitcoin have never actually looked at it. If you look at the Bitcoin hash rate and the pools, you can see it for yourself. Foundry USA controls about a third on its own, and then two more pools together hold over half. That's two-thirds in just a few hands. This is obscene. That is not decentralization.
It is not a peer-to-peer currency anymore
Bitcoin is not a peer-to-peer currency in practice. The transactions are slow, around 10 minutes a block, and hours if you really want a confirmed transaction. You can't use Bitcoin for everyday purchases. That's why people are building on layer twos now, and those layer twos end up being centralized themselves. You end up with all this Bitcoin sitting in centralized wallets, and then people steal it, which has happened over and over again.
This stops merchants from actually adopting it, which kills the very thing I got excited about when I got into Bitcoin. You had countries like El Salvador making it legal tender. Companies that once accepted Bitcoin have largely stopped, because it's volatile and inefficient. That's the truth, and I don't think a lot of people can handle the truth.
Bitcoin became a Wall Street asset
Even worse today, Bitcoin is a Wall Street asset. This was not the case when I got in back in 2014. But now they can manipulate the prices, they're taking transaction fees off of all these people, and it has become a tool for institutional investors. All the current hype has people so confused. They're hyping up ETFs, showing all these videos of Trump and Elon and Jerome Powell and whoever else. To me, those are useless. You're hyping up that institutional money is flowing into it, but that means institutions then have control over it.
This is the part where I think they're setting you up. Governments get you to buy Bitcoin and then hold the Bitcoin for you in all these ETFs, and at that point they have total control. They could even take away your ability to self-custody it. Do you see that coming?
It is not the best store of value
Number four, Bitcoin is not the best store of value. In 2023 and 2024 Bitcoin had a few rough years and went down a lot, and gold has outperformed Bitcoin at certain times. On top of that, gold has real-world utility. You can buy gold chains, or you can put gold in electronics. Gold has all kinds of real uses. Bitcoin does not. At this point it's like a meme coin to me.
Even though people talk about the fixed supply, there's still Bitcoin being unlocked through mining, and the higher the price goes, the higher that effectively makes the inflation. People are so stuck on this supply argument, but it's not going to be sustainable through the halvings either unless the price keeps going higher. And in my opinion it has all these other issues that will prevent the price from going that much higher anyway.
Better alternatives already exist
And I didn't tell ChatGPT to say this, I promise I didn't tell it to say this, it just knows it. To me, this is the number one issue: better alternatives exist. My websites are fully on-chain on the blockchain. My open chat community is like a Discord or a Telegram, except it runs directly on the blockchain. That lets me do things like run hundreds of giveaways to the community.
Better alternatives like ICP, the Internet Computer, let you easily self-custody without a third-party wallet. You can build entire applications like open chat where you can easily send money. I've sent money to a thousand people at a time in open chat. The tech for this is crazy.
So any of you holding Bitcoin, in my view you are pumping whales' bags. You're pumping up Wall Street's bags. You're counting on Wall Street and governments and ETFs to bail out your Bitcoin bags. Meanwhile, you're not investing in real innovation like the Internet Computer, which is valued at a few billion dollars instead of trillions. Today you can get something like 13,000 ICP for one Bitcoin. Bitcoin is valued hundreds of times more than ICP, but in my opinion ICP has the best tech in crypto.
That's what's called opportunity cost. To me, everyone holding Bitcoin instead of holding ICP is essentially wasting their investment money. You're not doing the world any good, you're just making rich people richer. Whereas buying ICP, in my belief, supports the most innovative, most useful, most powerful technology in crypto, and the only thing that can deliver real Web3.
The narrative keeps changing
Number five, Bitcoin's narrative keeps changing. First it's digital cash, then it's digital gold, and now it's an institutional asset. How is Bitcoin an institutional asset that governments should hold? To me, this is like the ultimate Ponzi scheme. If you can get the taxpayers to dump money into your Ponzi scheme to bail it out, which has certainly been done in the stock market, then that's nothing like any of the reasons I got into Bitcoin.
These narratives don't hold up. Bitcoin is not digital gold. Gold is a metal used in a lot of things on earth that people also like wearing around their neck. The digital cash story has clearly failed. And this institutional asset narrative is ridiculous. The truth, in my opinion, is that Bitcoin today is whatever benefits the whales and institutions controlling it.
Nobody is going to seriously debate you that Bitcoin's technology is outdated. Ethereum, Solana, and ICP have smart contracts. You can do so much more than just send transactions. There are a bunch of copies of Bitcoin too, like Litecoin and Dogecoin. And the energy inefficiency of Bitcoin is disgusting. ICP is more than a million times more energy efficient. Look at the amount of energy and computing power wasted on centralized Bitcoin mining. It would be one thing if it were truly distributed, but why are we wasting so much energy when a handful of miners already control the whole pool? There's been basically no innovation in the Bitcoin protocol besides adding stuff to the block.
A trap, not a movement
This is what I see, and this is what I believe a lot of you are falling into. In my opinion, governments are using Bitcoin to trap you. CBDCs could easily be paired with a Bitcoin ETF to transition you into a digital, controlled system. Once governments approve these ETFs, they could easily ban self-custody. And the more the price spikes, the more inefficient self-custody becomes anyway.
Bitcoin started as an anti-establishment movement, but to me it isn't one anymore. I've come to believe it's a false hope for decentralization, and it's just popular to talk positive about Bitcoin today. But look at it honestly and tell me Bitcoin is the top crypto. In my opinion, Bitcoin is the worst crypto at this point. It can't go up that much higher given how high it already is, and there are so many reasons it could go to zero. If the CIA is sitting on those early coins, they could take this thing to zero at any time. If anyone ever guesses a private key, there are so many ways this goes to zero. If you want to keep going deeper on how I think about all of this, you can dig into my Money playlist. I hope this was useful for you.