He's quietly changing the argument.
The original claim was not:
"Some people buy BTC."
Nor was it:
"BTC has existed for a long time."
Nor was it:
"Speculators, miners, exchanges, lenders and traders participate in an ecosystem."
All of those are trivially true.
The claim being pushed was that BTC had somehow won.
Won what, exactly?
As a payment system? Transaction volume is tiny compared with global payment networks.
As money? Almost nobody prices goods, wages, contracts, invoices, taxes, leases, bonds, equities, or trade settlements in it.
As a unit of account? Not even its most devoted supporters use it that way.
As a medium of exchange? Most activity remains speculation and trading.
As an economic network? The overwhelming majority of discussion is still about price.
Notice how he starts with "Bitcoin won" and then, when pressed, retreats to "millions of people buy it."
Those are not the same statement.
Millions of people bought Beanie Babies.
Millions bought dot-com stocks.
Millions bought houses in 2006.
Millions bought NFTs.
Participation is not proof of success.
Price appreciation is not proof of utility.
Speculation is not proof of adoption.
And the "nearly two decades" argument is particularly silly.
Two decades is nothing in monetary history.
Gold has been used for millennia.
The pound has existed for centuries.
The dollar has existed for centuries.
The question is not whether something survives for twenty years. The question is whether it becomes embedded in productive economic activity.
What always makes me laugh is the phrase:
"When are we allowed to acknowledge success?"
Whenever you define success.
If success means attracting speculators and generating price appreciation, then congratulations.
If success means becoming the world's monetary system, then you're nowhere close.
He keeps swapping definitions mid-argument and hoping nobody notices.
That's not analysis. That's a shell game. Every time one claim fails, he slides a different claim under the cup and shouts, "Look! Bitcoin won!" while hoping nobody remembers what he was arguing thirty seconds earlier.
I’m starting to lose track.
A few tweets ago Bitcoin wasn’t valuable because people don’t transact in it and it’s not money.
Now Bitcoin isn’t a success because “markets don’t choose.”
Okay.
Millions of people voluntarily buying, holding, transacting, mining, securing, building on, lending against, borrowing against, and allocating capital to an asset for nearly two decades isn’t a market preference.
It’s apparently just a very elaborate accident.
At what point are we allowed to acknowledge success?
30 years?
50 years?
A century?
How long does Bitcoin have to continue growing, surviving, appreciating, attracting capital, and absorbing adoption before we’re allowed to say it won?
Or will the answer always be not yet?