Over the last 15 years of bitcoin’s existence, early adopters have witnessed its progression and permeation through society as a near-perfect reflection of these famous words:
“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”
Bitcoin began from nothing. It didn’t have famous and wealthy backers promoting it in the media. It didn’t have funding. It didn’t have anything or anyone demonstrating its value, other than an anonymous individual (or set of individuals) speculating on what it could be. A vision to decentralize control of the world’s economic engine. A movement to amplify the individual and suppress the controlled collective. An evolution of money that could finally spare the world from history’s most pernicious financial struggles.
And as the years pass, bitcoin is no longer just a “could be”. It’s realizing all of those wishful aspirations, and going far beyond them.
Naturally, there are some humans who don’t like the loss of control that Satoshi Nakamoto alluded to.
Breaking Down Bitcoin’s Four Stages Of Evolution
If you observe bitcoin’s perception in the public eye over a long-enough time period, you begin to understand the prescient wisdom of those aforementioned words. We’ve witnessed bitcoin being ignored for the first several years of its existence. After it continued to defy the logic of traditional finance and kept rising in value, naysayers came out of the woodworks to laugh, scoff, and mock its rise. Today, the fight is on. Bitcoin is facing active efforts to work against it, coming from all of the most powerful political entities in the world, whether that be the United States government, the European Central Bank, asset managers like BlackRock, and many others.
Don’t believe me? Let’s examine the evidence.
First They Ignore You
When bitcoin first launched in January 2009, virtually no one was interacting with it beyond its initial contributors. There were no payments being made in bitcoin. No social media influencers talking about it. No one was diving into its ideals and promises for the future of money.
It went a full year and five months after its launch before the first purchase with bitcoin took place in May 2010. A US citizen, Laszlo Henyecz, offered bitcoin to a British resident to purchase a pizza and deliver it to him. This moment marked the first point in history when one can truly say that bitcoin was no longer being outright ignored. People realized that bitcoin isn’t just some abstract digital organization of numbers – it was a tool that can facilitate trade entirely trustlessly.
And that’s when Silk Road took off.
Naturally, a tool like bitcoin could come in quite handy for people looking to exchange illegal goods over the internet. Up until this point, facilitating trade of illegal goods was impossible on an internet entirely captured by legacy payment rails. If you wanted to buy something online, you needed to give identification information to third party processors.
When people recognized that with bitcoin, you can finally transact online without doxxing your personal information, the transactions started taking off. Silk Road was essentially one of the first guerilla “marketing campaigns” for bitcoin:
Yes, drugs were some of the first goods widely exchanged on the Bitcoin network. And yes, pornography was one of the first forms of content distributed on the internet.
Now that bitcoin was picking up traction and could no longer be ignored, that’s when the laughs came.
Then They Laugh At You
If you’ve been around in the Bitcoin community online or have been outspoken about it in person over the past several years, you’re probably well aware of the overwhelming amount of ridicule that bitcoin receives.
Whether it be rolling eyes at the idea of a global reserve currency, or the promise to protect your wealth from deflating currencies around the globe, despite all time high after all time high. Many people simply do not want to deal with the reality of our inflationary economic policy, no matter what the personal consequences may be.
And it’s not just the average Joe thinking this either.
- The mainstream media historically and continually ridicules bitcoin. Take a listen to Bill Maher’s words from the 2021 bull run, associating bitcoin with the likes of dogecoin and…”cumrocket” coin.
- In 2017, the vice president of the European Central Bank was comparing bitcoin to the Dutch Tulip market bubble of the 17th century.
- In 2022, Bill Gates and Yahoo Finance attributed the value of the space to mere “Greater Fool theory”.
- Prominent economists and geopolitical strategists like Peter Zeihan smugly called for bitcoin to go negative in value…at the bottom of the 2022 bear market.
- Billionaire Mark Cuban used to say that bitcoin was less valuable than a baseball card (he now owns millions in bitcoin).
- Funny enough, Michael Saylor once said that “Bitcoin’s days are numbered. It seems like just a matter of time before it suffers the same fate as online gambling”…way back in 2013.
- In 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called bitcoin nothing more than an index of money laundering…yet today oversees the most successful spot ETF launch in history, all thanks to bitcoin.
- JP Morgan head Jamie Dimon repeatedly ridicules bitcoin, saying he doesn’t care about it at all, calling it fraud, and being outright confused and visibly frustrated when people bring it up to him (nevermind the fact that his bank is now actively buying it up).
- Online social forums have been built up entirely around the premise of bitcoin being a scam…Reddit’s r/Buttcoin has been attempting to smear bitcoin since its 2011 founding, when a single bitcoin cost ~$15.
These examples are but a small snippet of the endless mockery bitcoin has received over the years. To this day, the laughing continues. Even the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari – who notoriously told 60 Minutes about the infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve – still compares bitcoin to beanie babies.
However, while many of the uninformed keep laughing, smart money is starting to pay attention…but not exactly in a good way.
Then They Fight You
As the mocking becomes less and less effective the more that bitcoin rises, the active efforts to fight against it grow larger and larger.
As touched on in our article, “The War On Bitcoin Is Here”, governments around the world are colluding to create invasive chain analysis tools that essentially enforce KYC/AML restrictions that break down Bitcoin privacy.
- This year, the Department of Justice arrested Samourai’s co-founders, shut down Samourai Wallet, and blocked CoinJoin, a privacy-protection tool that allowed bitcoiners to prevent future tracking of previously KYC-linked bitcoin.
- After a long history of clamping down on bitcoin, in 2021, China decided to ban Bitcoin mining in the country after historically leading the world in hashpower output. The ban merely shifted that hashpower elsewhere, primarily to the US, which is now the #1 Bitcoin-mining nation in the world.
- The battle against proof-of-work mining is ramping up, with lobbyists like GreenPeace, US senators like Elizabeth Warren and Brad Sherman, and plenty of cryptocurrency apologists like Ripple or the Ethereum Foundation spouting endless propaganda to distract and divert from bitcoin’s efforts to make the world more efficient, equitable, and environmentally-friendly.
- For the past several years, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has repeatedly tried to suppress bitcoin. The SEC’s SAB 121 essentially prevents financial institutions from acting as Bitcoin custodians, all in the name of “safeguarding” investors. After Congress proposed new legislation to overturn this ruling, President Biden vetoed the bill. This is why watching politicians’ actions matters much more than listening to what they say. These efforts demonstrate the hostile legal environment the current US government wishes to uphold to stifle bitcoin’s growth in the nation.
- In the past month, the European Central Bank outright claimed that early Bitcoin adopters are effectively stealing from latecomers and no-coiners. They use this projective excuse as a means to warrant legislation aimed to prevent bitcoin’s price from rising further. Not only do these statements demonstrate their authoritarian motives, but also show how they simply do not understand what bitcoin is or how it works. And remember Neel Kashkari? His bank came out to rally behind the ECB’s words, and advocated for legal prohibition and harsh taxation on bitcoin. Most notably, the bank suggested that without having to contend with bitcoin, they can uphold permanent, unlimited deficits. At least they admit that they want to spend with impunity and increase the debt forever.
From multiple different angles and agendas, there is a coalition of people working against bitcoin, not because they think they have a better solution, but because they want to maintain control. Their efforts to fight against it are evidence of how powerful bitcoin must truly be. Many are not prepared to deal with bitcoin’s decentralizing effect on the world, and many demonstrate their own misunderstanding by trying to centralize it through legislation and prosecution.
Despite all the attacks, bitcoin continues to work exactly as designed, producing block after block every ten minutes.
The logical deduction, based on this trend, is that victory comes next. But the fight certainly won’t be easy.
Then You Win
One of the greatest evidences of bitcoin’s impending success that you can observe today is seen in its trending popularity (or notoriety, depending on who’s looking at it).
Bitcoin began from basically nothing, only being espoused by an anonymous online forum user. Today, both sides of the political aisle are actively seeking out votes from the Bitcoin community. As inflation becomes increasingly important to the everyday person, politicians are realizing the important role bitcoin plays in combating it.
When you look at where bitcoin came from, to seeing the people who are talking about it today, it’s clear that bitcoin isn’t going anywhere. If anything, the trend suggests it will only become more integral to everyday life.
Besides this high-view observation, the anecdotal evidence of bitcoin’s success is stacking up day after day. This is how bitcoin wins.
- Pennsylvania, a key swing state historically, recently passed the “Bitcoin Rights” bill, which embraces bitcoin at the state level, setting into law the right to self custody bitcoin and use it as payment (if vendors so choose).
- One of the largest stories of 2024, after BlackRock’s $IBIT ETF went live in January, it not only shattered historical records of success, but also signified a greater sign of approval for bitcoin in the mainstream financial world. Nevermind the custody issues that arise with ETFs, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s change of tune towards bitcoin sends a message around the world for other financial giants to get on board or get left behind.
- In 2021, El Salvador became the first nation in the world to make bitcoin legal tender in the country. You can spend it on Starbucks and groceries, just like any other currency. When talking about the trend of success that bitcoin is on, it’s the events like these that should ring loudest. Again, bitcoin started in someone’s basement. Now it’s a legal form of currency in one of the most rapidly developing countries in the world. Who’s to say it won’t start being legalized elsewhere?
- Suriname is proving that last point to be true. Presidential candidate Maya Parbhoe announced that she would also make bitcoin legal tender on day one if elected.
Of course, US presidential candidate Donald Trump is speaking up about bitcoin as well. While he hasn’t talked about ending the Federal Reserve and making bitcoin the de facto currency of the world, his presence at the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin conference speaks volumes to the positive trajectory that bitcoin is on.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
If you look to the mainstream media to take note of the trend being discussed here, you’ll get nothing but radio silence. While media outlets report on all of these individual successes, the voices speaking up about bitcoin’s rise to overturn our fiat-based financial system are far and few between. Bitcoiners online are gaining a louder and louder voice, but governments and federal institutions are still doing all they can to keep the public distracted and turned away from the story unfolding in front of us. Bitcoin’s success is growing by the day, but it won’t be realized until there’s no incentives left for fiat proponents. Unfortunately, the fiat-financialized world is reaping economic devastation for itself, and the time that reaping comes to sow remains unknown.
As the money printer speeds up and the deficit continues to grow, now is the time to leave fiat behind and seek refuge in bitcoin. Just as the internet grew to become a digital nation state of its own, uplifting freedom of speech with its own rules, its own voice, and its own set of citizens, so too is the Bitcoin network uplifting economic empowerment for the world.
Final Thoughts
Remember that the mere fact that people are out there attacking bitcoin at all is evidence of the positive path it’s on. The fact that it came from nothing, to now being something actively debated on among US presidential candidates, legal tender in one country and proposals coming from others, and the general positive shift in mainstream coverage tells you everything you need to know.
Bitcoin’s design doesn’t enable any one person or political entity to talk down an idea that supercedes government entirely. It’s a new rule of law outside of any one government, akin to the laws of physics or mathematics. We don’t get to decide policy on those things. Policy arises based on those fundamental realities.
Don’t rely on political authorities to tell you what bitcoin is and how it will interact with the world. See the evidence for yourself and adapt to the world you want to see for yourself and future generations.
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