Something has fundamentally changed in this ecosystem. A big shift in the core ethos of things. Regardless of what you think about politics in the wider world, Bitcoin itself as a network and protocol was something explicitly designed to function in a hostile environment, in an environment where politics and governments are actively antagonistic towards it.

The core value proposition of Bitcoin itself is that, as a system, it can continue functioning despite such antagonism in a hostile environment. It can be a foundation for us to build upon, with everything built upon it inheriting that resilience to some degree in the face of a well equipped antagonist.

It seems like faith in that core value proposition has almost completely evaporated in this ecosystem. Determination to build upon that foundation, and to protect its soundness at all costs, seems to have evaporated. In its place we now have cheerleading politicians, favor trading for selectively beneficial regulation, and prioritization of short term financial gain over the preservation of what makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place.

People are less concerned with the creeping web of business relationships in the mining ecosystem, which is the bedrock of Bitcoin’s foundation of openness and censorship resistance, and more concerned with whether President Trump is going to just pump our bags, or pump the bags of shitcoiners too.

We are counting our chickens before they hatched.

Bitcoin has issues regarding mining centralization, and that part of the ecosystem’s vulnerability to regulatory attacks and mandates from governments that could put at risk the ability of people to openly use the network without fear of censorship. It has issues in terms of scalability, and the ability to support enough users using the network self-custodially to actually be a viable means of protests and opting out at a large enough scale to matter to governments. The custodians people otherwise will have to use are just as regulatorily vulnerable as miners are becoming. It also has a serious privacy issue, which opens users themselves to regulatory pressure forcing them into self censorship.

Bitcoin has all of these problems, and rather than focusing on solving them so that Bitcoin can remain the resilient system that made it valuable in the first place, people are more concerned with currying political favor with the current US Presidential Administration for token policy wins and short term financial gain at the cost of major concessions that very well could seriously damage Bitcoin’s foundation.

So where did we take a wrong turn? And frankly, what the fuck is wrong with everyone? 

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

Everyone has their own unique sense of style, but if you are wearing Bitcoin merch like the shirt in the X post below out in public — you should probably stop doing so.

This Bitcoin shirt is cringe as fuck.

Have fun getting 7 dollar wrench attacked. pic.twitter.com/zRlT2CFrIg

— Breadman (@BTCBreadMan) January 11, 2025

I agree with this post in that this shirt is cringe as fuck and will only bring unwanted attention.

Most people don’t understand Bitcoin and the lingo adjacent to it. If you’re wearing this out in public, the majority of people are not even going to understand it and will move on with their day, completely forgetting about it. So if you’re wearing the shirt, you’re not really flexing as hard as you think.

But some who will see you wearing it will know what it means, and this may lead to bad consequences.

Wearing a shirt that broadcasts to everyone that you own a full bitcoin (or basically $100,000, at the time of writing, in the form of a bearer asset) will likely just put a target on your back.

Don’t believe me?

This past November, the CEO of the Canadian company WonderFi was kidnapped and held for ransom. And more recently, a Pakistani crypto trader was kidnapped and forced to pay $340,000 to the kidnappers from his Binance account.

I’m not trying to scare anyone, but these things can happen, and you should at least avoid putting yourself in such a situation.

These criminals may or may not know how Bitcoin works, and it’s probably worse if they don’t. Because they might think you have it all on one exchange, or that you have your private keys located in one place that is easy to obtain, therefore thinking you are probably an easy target. And if you tell them you physically cannot give up your coins, and they don’t believe you, things could get ugly quick.

I’m not saying to never talk to anyone about Bitcoin ever or to be 100% secretive about it — I mean, I’m a public figure in this space and have thought through how to best limit the chances of something bad like this happening to me. The security of your bitcoin is important, but also is your personal security. Luckily for me, I am an American and have my second amendment rights. Protecting my Bitcoin from a potential $5 wrench attack is a lot easier with a firearm.

Upgraded my bitcoin security today by buying a Glock 19

— Nikolaus (@nikcantmine) December 26, 2020

If you are a proud owner of one full bitcoin, it’s fine to celebrate it, as that is a feat that most people on the planet will never be able to achieve.

My advice to you, though, is to celebrate it in a way that is more private, like with no one more than your family and very close friends that you trust. You can post online on X or Reddit anonymously about it if you really want to have a deeper conversation about it or to get the dopamine from all the other anons congratulating you on the accomplishment.

Don’t tell people how much bitcoin you own, and definitely don’t wear shirts that disclose it. Just stay humble and stack more bitcoin.

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

One of the secondary benefits of how the Lightning Network works as a scaling solution is privacy. It’s by no means perfect or undefeatable privacy, but it is a better than naive use of the base layer blockchain itself. It’s also not perfectly balanced. The sender learns a good many details about the receiver, but the receiver learns nothing about the sender.

For casual payments it is a big improvement for consumers over on-chain payments. It does have one big problem though, something not unique to Lightning, but a problem for all onion routed systems.

Global Passive Adversaries. That means an actor who is able to passively monitor all the internet connections between everyone involved in a network like Lightning, or Tor. When a message crosses the network, the adversary can see a message move from one node to a second node, and also see that a message went from the second node to a third right after it received one from the first.

If a global adversary exists, then while they cannot see the specific details of a message across the network, they can see where it originated from and where it arrived. That is plenty enough information to deanonymize a payment system like Lightning, where the chief matter of importance is after all who is paying who.

This is the true fundamental shortcoming, Lightning can be very private for senders from their merchants, and soon with coming improvements for receivers from the person paying them, but it is very weak against a truly powerful global adversary.

This can be mitigated however. Payments stand out to a global adversary because that is the majority of traffic nodes will send, and the timing relationship from A to B to C to D, etc. These heuristics can be broken by nodes sending fake traffic to each other regularly.

Fake traffic could take the form of a constant barrage of fake packets, simply replacing fake ones with real messages when payments are routed. This would make it impossible to correlate anything. Other options would be to add decoy messages that continue on after the completion of a payment, or opportunistically make payments when such decoy messages reach you.

Different strategies would have different degrees of success in creating privacy, but something needs to be done. Multiple improvements have been made, or are coming down the pipeline, in the form of BOLT 12 and blinded path invoices, but the larger picture is still the same as it was: totally transparent to a powerful adversary.

Given the scale of importance Bitcoin has rapidly grown to, maybe it’s time to reconsider the larger picture of privacy and not just incremental local improvements. 

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