The public discussion around scaling in the last few years has become poisoned and captured by an incredibly toxic and defeatist attitude: “Why bother?”

“Why bother trying to scale? Basic napkin math shows it’s impossible no matter what we do for everyone to self custody.”

“Why bother trying to scale? People are stupid and lazy anyway, even if we did people would just use a custodian anyways.”

“Why bother trying to scale? I’ve got mine, I’ll be rich enough for self custody, who cares about the stupid and lazy plebs anyways?”

This attitude is permeating the entire space more and more as time goes on, with a plethora of different rationalizations and reasons for it depending on who you talk to. It is a completely defeatist, dystopian, and pessimistic view of the future. I say that as someone who is incredibly pessimistic about a large number of issues that I see in this ecosystem.

Talking yourself into losing is one of the fastest ways to wind up losing. Bitcoin as a distributed system depends on being dispersed enough, and having enough independent system participants, that it can resist the coercive or malicious influence of larger participants. This is critical to it continuing to function as a decentralized and censorship resistant system. If it cannot remain dispersed enough in its distribution then natural tendencies in networks will likely gravitate towards larger and more dense participants until they effectively have an outsized control over the whole network.

That will ultimately very likely spell the end for Bitcoin’s most important property: censorship resistance.

What is mind boggling to me is, even though we aren’t in a perfect place, we have made massive progress in the last decade. Ten years ago we had people screaming about raising the blocksize. Now we have the Lightning Network, Statechains, and now Ark. We have people experimenting with wildly improved federated custodial models using BitVM. We even have a vague inkling of ways to implement covenants without a softfork if some new cryptographic assumptions pan out and prove practical to implement in a usable way.

Even if we do bump into a ceiling eventually we can’t get around, every bit of ground we gain means room for more people to self custody. It means more room for more custodians, allowing more numerous small scale ones to enable people to custody with people they trust more than disconnected corporations, for that more numerous herd to impose greater competitive pressure for custodians in general. To maintain that wide dispersion of entities directly interacting with the network that it needs to maintain its decentralization.

Why are so many Bitcoiners willing to throw up their hands and give in to defeatist sentiment? Yes, we have more problems to solve than we did ten years ago, but we have also covered a massive amount of ground in expanding scalability in that ten years. This isn’t a binary situation, this isn’t a game where you win or lose with no middle ground. Every improvement to scalability we can make gives Bitcoin a higher chance of success. It entrenches and defends Bitcoin’s censorship resistance that much more.

I’m not saying that people should naively buy into every promised solution or hyped thing, there are definitely problems and limitations we should remain cognizant of. But that doesn’t mean throw in the towel and give up this early. There is so much potential here to actually reshape the world in a meaningful way, but that won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen at all if everyone just gives up and kicks back expecting to get rich and apathetically stops caring about it.

Blind pessimism and blind optimism are both poison, it’s time to start looking for a balance between the two rather than picking your drug of choice and sinking into delusion. 

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Bitcoin is its own network state, to borrow a term from Balaji Srinivasan. That is, while Bitcoin proponents aren’t bound to one geographical region (quite the opposite, actually) they have collective power and can enact change.

We just saw some version of this power exercised in the U.S. political sphere, as the Bitcoin (and crypto) lobby fiercely supported pro-Bitcoin candidates in the recent U.S. election cycle. Because this lobby was so strong, many pro-Bitcoin candidates were elected or re-elected into positions of power.

One could argue that Trump won the election because he embraced Bitcoin, while Harris could only seem to muster up the ability to make lukewarm, offbeat statements about being pro-crypto (statements that some at Bitcoin Magazine found inauthentic and even borderline offensive).

Now, there’s another opportunity for the Bitcoin community to rally behind a candidate. For the first time in the history, a country has a presidential nominee who’s running on the notion of putting her country on a bitcoin standard. That country is Suriname and that candidate is Maya Parbhoe.

Parbhoe understands the transformative power of bitcoin and believes that making it legal tender can help get Suriname’s 600,000 citizens out of “survival mode,” as she puts it.

So, my question to you as a Bitcoin enthusiast is this: Do you want to watch as Parbhoe attempts to make history or do you want to play a role in helping her make it?

In other words, are you going to contribute to her campaign — as Bitcoin allows you to do from anywhere in the world permissionlessly — or are you going to be a spectator?

🚨 Corruption has no place in our future!

We can't keep trusting a system that deceives us.

It's time to act!

Verifying every action is the key to a Suriname free of corruption.

Your support is crucial. https://t.co/rBQxhqq7zm #maya2025 #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/hkXZislsAl

— Maya Parbhoe (@MayaPar25) November 23, 2024

(You can track how donations are spent here.)

You can also reach out to Parbhoe’s campaign via hello@maya2025.com to offer support in other ways if you feel so inclined.

The election takes place in May 2025, and Parbhoe and her team are currently gearing up for campaign season (including obtaining the funds to campaign). It’s hard to say just yet how much of a shot she has at winning, but she’ll likely have less of one without your support.

So, if you’d like to see the Bitcoin network state include another nation state, you have the opportunity here to play a part in potentially making that happen.

(Author’s note: Please keep in mind that this piece is not necessarily an endorsement of Parbhoe but a call to action for those who support her.)

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Today, MicroStrategy announced it purchased an additional 15,400 bitcoin for approximately $1.5 billion. This brings its total holdings to over 400,000 BTC, almost 2% of the entire bitcoin supply.

MicroStrategy now owns 402,100 #bitcoin worth $38 BILLION

They now own almost 2% of the total bitcoin supply 🤯 pic.twitter.com/lbEpHNer7T

— Nikolaus Hoffman (@NikolausHoff) December 2, 2024

In the month of November, bitcoin rose almost 40% while MicroStrategy bought over $12 billion in bitcoin. In total, MicroStrategy now owns over $38 billion in bitcoin.

Other companies are now starting to copy the Microstrategy play book and run their strategy of accumulating bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset. Saylor even presented to Microsoft’s CEO and board of directors on why they should adopt a bitcoin standard. Microsoft is the third largest company in the world by market cap, and is voting on whether or not they should add bitcoin to their balance sheet. Insane!

Publicly traded bitcoin miner MARA is also copying MicroStrategy’s playbook and announced today that they’re raising up to $805 million in debt to buy more bitcoin.

Do you get it yet?

This is not going to stop any time soon. We have officially entered a new era of bitcoin accumulation that is being led by these large corporations. Saylor, MicroStrategy, and other companies are going to scoop up every available coin they can get their hands on. And if they’re as convicted as MicroStrategy is — they’re not selling. That’s not even to mention the other big players now (BlackRock, Fidelity, ARK, etc) buying up coins for their ETFs. The amount of demand for bitcoin today is surreal.

Companies that adopted a Strategic #Bitcoin Reserve this month:

– Rumble
– LQR House
– Remixpoint
– Genius Group
– Cosmos Health
– Jiva Technologies
– Hoth Therapeutics
– Thumzup Media Corp
– Acurx Pharmaceuticals

And this is just the beginning 🚀 pic.twitter.com/6YW7D2DnRn

— Nikolaus Hoffman (@NikolausHoff) November 27, 2024

I think that everyone (this message is mainly for the newer Bitcoiners) should follow suit in adopting their own personal strategic bitcoin reserve for themselves and their families. I’m not saying or advising anyone to take on debt to buy bitcoin, but rather adopt it as your primary savings account and sit back and take in all the benefits of holding bitcoin — especially in regards to holding your own private keys.

The plan is simple: buy bitcoin, secure it safely, and hold it for the long term. If you sell, you will be selling directly into the hands of MicroStrategy and every other company running this playbook.

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.