Sunday Summary, NOV02
A week in review from the Editor
It’s a strange new moment in Bitcoin right now.
Everywhere you look, people are asking if this is the beginning of hyperbitcoinization, or contrarily, the beginning of an ongoing bear market and ensuing boredom. Is it already happening? Are we winning yet? The question itself betrays a kind of insecurity, a need for validation that doesn’t quite fit the spirit of Bitcoin.
In reality, winning means you don’t have to ask. When you’re asking, you’re still seeking permission. And Bitcoin was built so we’d never have to ask permission again.
Think back to Bitcoin’s earliest days, no one was asking whether it had “won.” There was nothing to compare it to, no price to obsess over, no corporate adoption milestones to measure. Satoshi didn’t publish the whitepaper to win an argument or to prove a point, he published it to solve a problem. The rest of us showed up later, each trying to fit Bitcoin into our worldviews: a new asset, a rebellion, a hedge, a bet. Somewhere along the way, the question changed from “How do I use this?” to “When does everyone else use it?”
That shift marks the beginning of what you might call the observer era, where we stand at the edge of the field, scoreboard in hand, tracking price and headlines instead of playing the game. But Bitcoin was never about observing. It was about opting out, quietly and decisively. The real measure of “winning” isn’t adoption curves or ETF flows; it’s whether you still need to ask someone for permission to transact, to save, to move your value freely.
Consider El Salvador. When the country adopted Bitcoin as legal tender, it triggered a global debate about whether that marked the start of hyperbitcoinization and nation state competition. But even there, the question misses the point. The victory isn’t in the proclamation, it is in the millions of people who, for the first time, can hold and send value without intermediaries.
That’s not a future tense scenario. That’s happening now, in places where the need is most acute and where the idea of “winning” looks very different from a green chart. By the time you realize Bitcoin has “won,” it will be because you’ve stopped asking if it has.
The most sage advice is often the easiest to forget or ignore, Odell’s simple credo, “Stay humble, stack Sats,“ is a reminder that the game is already in motion, and winning or losing shouldn’t be our worry.
Our concerns should be firmly rooted in how we wake up and behave every single day, if we can master that, the winning will come naturally.