Yes.
All critics of
@saylor should read this.
Notwithstanding our not perfectly aligned discussion on exponential vs power law that I described in a recent article, I really appreciate his role and contribution to the Bitcoin network. His critics miss the point.
Some of Bitcoin’s earliest supporters, including people like Hal Finney, did not necessarily see the traditional financial system as something that had to be destroyed outright.
Their vision was more subtle and, in many ways, more powerful. Bitcoin would not simply exist outside the financial system as an isolated alternative. Over time, it could force the existing financial system to adapt to Bitcoin’s rules.
In that sense, Bitcoin does not need to “defeat” banks, markets, or institutions in a dramatic final battle. It can bend them toward itself. This is the power of network systems.
The traditional system may continue to exist, but increasingly it would have to settle, price, account, and store value in relation to Bitcoin. Its incentives would gradually be redirected. Its weaknesses would be exposed. Its inflationary assumptions would be challenged. Its trust-based structure would be pressured by a system built on verification, fixed money supply, transparency, and final settlement.
This is an important point. Bitcoin’s ultimate fate may not be the disappearance of finance, but the transformation of finance.
The old system is not necessarily the enemy in itself. The enemy is arbitrary monetary power, debasement, opacity, and forced trust.
Bitcoin offers a different gravitational center. As it grows, the financial system may not vanish, but orbit around it.
Hal Finney basically described the STRC endgame in 2010.
Bitcoin becomes high-powered money.
Financial institutions issue credit and digital cash on top of it.
Bitcoin settles the base layer.
The market prices different issuers by reserve quality, risk, and redemption confidence.
That is not a betrayal of Bitcoin.
That is Bitcoin eating banking from underneath.