Sunday Summary, FEB08
A week in review from the Editor
Supported by Proto and Bitkey - a part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
Meet the ‘Portfolio Bitcoiners’
There’s a new class of investors in town, and they’ve never heard of your favorite cypherpunk.
Over the last decade Bitcoin’s culture has changed in a fundamental way. We started with the ideologues, the zealots, the programmers, and the cypherpunks, a grassroots group of dreamers and doers who took an insane bet on an insane idea—freedom money.
And then we started winning.
Technically, the protocol hardened, mining exploded and diversified geographically, a new cohort of developers and entrepreneurs flooded into the space, comfortable enough that Bitcoin was the real deal for them to dedicate their life and work to a protocol.
There’s been a veritable Cambrian explosion of innovation.
Then traditional finance started poking around. The ETF applications flooded in. Portfolios started to reflect real allocations. The smart money started to pay attention to us.
So did the politicians. They started attending the meet-ups, conferences. They started speaking. Then they started pushing policy that actually supported our work?!
Over the last few years we really have had fun playing with our Bitcoins.
But something else was happening, too.
An entirely new group of people were experiencing Bitcoin for the first time, and for better or for worse they weren’t experiencing it like those with a few halving cycles under their belts.
For the builders, the entrepreneurs, and the early developers, Bitcoin is a special kind of thing. By submitting your first transaction to the mempool, reading through and submitting BIPs, or even plugging in your first miner—in some small way you’ve actually touched the Bitcoin protocol.
To those in this industry a decade plus, these transformational experiences are now banal, yet for the newest entrants into Bitcoin those moments may never happen.
Easy come easy go.
In four clicks the Portfolio Bitcoiner acquires bitcoin. Transfer money from a checking account. It goes to Fidelity. Click on the ETF. And there: They have Bitcoin.
To the portfolio Bitcoiner, bitcoin is an asset only.
It lives on the broker’s website with a nice little chart showing the ups and downs. They see when they bought it; they see when they sold it. It’s just another thing, like Amazon or Exxon or those utility bonds they bought a couple of years ago.
This, of course, is a bit of a bummer.
It would be easy to gnash our teeth and complain, to say the Portfolio Bitcoiners aren’t real Bitcoiners, but the truth is that this is just another day in the world of Bitcoin adoption.
There were surely early miners and node runners who hated seeing exchanges emerge because it would result in fewer individuals knowing how to mine or run nodes (they were even partially vindicated with the implosion of Mt. Gox!).
There were undoubtedly a group of early self-custody advocates who railed against collaborative custody and all non-custodial solutions. (They were even vindicated with every data breach and doxxing!).
So the cycle goes on and on ad infinitum. The expansion of new tools, the expansion of Bitcoin accessibility, then the horrible realization that we have forgotten what makes Bitcoin special.
The Paradox of Success
Technology will always move faster than education (see the current state of AI tooling for an example!). Yet, with ever better technology, we have ever more opportunities to better educate.
The ‘Portfolio Bitcoiner’ is not a character to be hated or rejected.
They are neither the hero of Bitcoin growth, nor the cause of our destruction.
They’re simply a new player to the game, and one who we should continue to invest our time and energy in both building for and, most importantly, educating.