Editor's Note: This article comes fromMengyan Finance (ID: Meng-eyes), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Mengyan Finance (ID: Meng-eyes)
Mengyan Finance (ID: Meng-eyes)
Every four years or so, Bitcoin's seemingly cyclical nature reappears and another bull run begins. Mainstream media headlines will boast about Bitcoin's price action, and hordes of people will start coming out declaring that they've been bullish on Bitcoin for years! Yet at the same time, a sinister recurring event inevitably emerges out of the water. The seemingly irresistible allure of knockoff cryptocurrencies will tug at the hearts and wallets of those looking to recapture the achievements of Bitcoin.
People who think they've missed out on Bitcoin, start looking for the next opportunity to make it up, because they're haunted by a mindset that they've "missed out" on Bitcoin in some way. Many of these dubious cryptoassets claim to replace Bitcoin. They might claim to make transactions faster and cheaper, or that they enable more complex applications. There are thousands of such coins, but none of them have been able to overthrow the 12-year king.
The truth is, none of them come close to Bitcoin. When you dig deeper into these tokens, they are all illiquid, insecure, centralized copycats fueled by inflated marketing budgets looking for fools with big bucks in their pockets. They chase the wrong metrics and create flawed incentive structures. remember! Don't be fooled by the siren's song. The reality is that there is only one “investment grade” digital asset — Bitcoin.“Of the conversations I’ve had recently with investors seriously looking to allocate, let’s say over $50 million, 100 out of 100 were about Bitcoin and none of the conversations were about other cryptoassets.” – Robert Gutmann, CEO of NYDIG
Plagiarism will continue to failStartups in Silicon Valley go to bed at night dreaming of building something that will capture the huge rewards that Bitcoin will bring. It only took 12 years for Bitcoin to go from an idea with a value of $0 in a white paper to a market value of $700 billion. And all of this without funding. There is no CEO and no marketing team. Only with the right set of economic incentives embodied in a robust protocol that grows and adapts against all odds. What Silicon Valley tech folks don't realize is that this isn't just a competition over who has the best technology or marketing strategy. Bitcoin is the first creation of true digital scarcity, and it's built in such a way that once its first version is released, it never changes.But that's the exact opposite of what you'd do if you wanted to underpin a $700 billion financial network with software. What their efforts fail to realize is that it is these dry, slow, and immutable properties of Bitcoin that make it so great. At its core, a base layer protocol designed to be the foundation of an entire financial system should be exactly that. Rigorous, slow, precise, and immutable.true decentralization
Crypto projects everywhere are trying to lure investors with marketing, business partnerships and buzzwords like "blockchain technology." Their marketing budgets may be big, but their words are eerily hollow.
Many crypto projects like to plaster the word “decentralized” all over their websites and marketing materials, as if it gives their coins an air of legitimacy. Here’s the bad news: If a cryptocurrency has a website, a writing platform, a marketing budget, an HR department, and finally a CEO who can take down Congress, then it’s not decentralized, is it?
Bitcoin's code base is maintained by a dispersal of developers around the world, and its network is made up of tens of thousands of individuals who freely choose to run its open-source software. For Bitcoin, there is no marketing budget. In fact, there is no marketing department, leadership, CEO, or human resources department at all. Bitcoin does not have payroll for employees. Instead, Bitcoin regulates human actions through an elegantly balanced set of economic incentives."It's decentralized. No corporation controls it, no government regulates it. It runs on thousands of decentralized nodes, and it's clearly an investment-grade safe haven for reserve assets." - Michael Saylor , Founder and CEO of MicroStrategy.
In the Bitcoin system, buyers have the motivation to hold, miners have the motivation to be honest actors, developers have the motivation to invest in code, and network participants have the motivation to enforce the consensus rules of the network.
not just technology
At its core, Bitcoin is code. It is a software program that runs widely on individual computers. But don't be fooled by this into thinking it's just a matter of technology. Bitcoin's success is also rooted in monetary and social revolutions. It is the antithesis of our debt-based monetary system today. Its network effects push it beyond the reach of any competitor for a number of reasons. Chief among these is its ability to incentivize humans to enforce the rules of the protocol through social consensus.“The social layer and its rules are at the core of Bitcoin. But the protocol layer makes it enforceable for the first time, while also making the social contract more credible to the outside world.” — Hasu, “Understanding Bitcoin’s Social Contract”Consolidation of the regulatory sector: Over the past few years, there has been significant consolidation by investors and regulators. On the regulatory front, the following people will hold important positions in the new government:1) Gary Gensler, director of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Has taught cryptocurrency courses at MIT.2) Chris Brummer, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (to be confirmed). Author of "Crypto-Assets: A Legal, Regulatory, and Monetary Perspective"3) Brian Brooks, Acting Comptroller of the Currency. Former Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase, a leading US cryptocurrency exchange.
