ps: Lately, I've been focusing on making videos, and the content is written in a script style for those videos. Many of them haven't been posted as articles here, but I'll start sharing the longer ones on this public account from now on.
In yesterday's video, I talked about how the world is essentially a storytelling contest. Since everyone feels anxious about future uncertainties, there's a natural need for "prophets" to tell stories about what's to come. In the past, it might have been shamans or astrologers telling emperors about the future; today, it's entrepreneurs and capitalists telling the public.
The key issue is that these stories aren't usually fabricated out of thin air—they're often grounded in strong real-world evidence, with many future narratives being reasonable extrapolations of current trends. Moreover, the storytellers themselves are often successful entrepreneurs and renowned investors, who naturally carry a halo effect. If the audience lacks a certain level of skepticism, they can easily be brainwashed by these storytellers and end up willingly paying for the story.
Personally, I've always had a strong sense of skepticism since childhood, and my experiences—earning a PhD at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and working as a tech lead at a major tech company—have thoroughly demystified successful entrepreneurs and scientists for me. So, I'm relatively hard to brainwash with such stories.
That's why I want to start a series where I share my critical thoughts on hot topics like Bitcoin, the metaverse, commercial spaceflight, humanoid robots, and AI.
Today, let's start with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin plummeted from $120,000 last December to around $60,000—a complete halving—but recently, it's surged continuously due to Trump pushing for legislative recognition of Bitcoin and ongoing U.S. debt issues. Many people might be feeling hopeful again.
However, in my view, the Bitcoin story has some serious problems.
First, the most appealing part of the Bitcoin story isn't really its decentralization or distributed nature—it's its deflationary property. With a fixed total supply of 21 million coins, decreasing production over time, and rising acquisition costs, prices naturally tend to go up, which led to it being dubbed "digital gold." But the biggest issue is that gold's scarcity is absolute, while Bitcoin's scarcity is only relative. Bitcoin's supply is fixed, but besides Bitcoin, there are countless other digital currencies—Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Trump Coin, and more—that can be used for transactions. Bitcoin isn't inherently superior to other cryptocurrencies; it just happened to be the first. Gold became a natural currency across all civilizations because it's rare enough, extremely stable, easy to verify authenticity, and easy to divide. All these properties together make it a uniquely suited monetary metal. Imagine if hundreds of metals had the same properties as gold—would people still form a consensus? Could gold still be the ultimate currency?
The second problem is that its distribution mechanism wasn't designed with the long term in mind. Early participants in the Bitcoin game, who may represent only 1% of the world's population, have already taken 95% of the coins—essentially cleaning out the pot. If the remaining 99% embrace Bitcoin, they'd be directly accepting that the top 1% are the big winners of the future Bitcoin era, while they themselves might work their entire lives and never catch up to even a ten-thousandth of the wealth held by ancient crypto whales. Unless someone is a fool, no one would want to play a wealth game where the leaderboard is already locked in. That's why you'll notice it's getting harder and harder for Bitcoin to attract new participants. Young people won't be willing to spend their hard-earned money to bail out the old-timers in the crypto world; they'd rather design a new game altogether, one that doesn't include the old guard.
The third problem is that Bitcoin's narrative of decentralization and being unregulatable was shattered last year. First, in 2024, Binance's Changpeng Zhao was arrested in the U.S. and eventually settled with a $4.3 billion fine. Then, last year, Cambodia's Prince Group's Chen Zhi had 127,000 Bitcoins confiscated by the U.S. government. So you see, while your coins and transactions may be anonymous, people are still physically living somewhere in the world. If a person can't completely disappear, hiding your money securely is just burying your head in the sand.
Finally, the emergence of stablecoins has already replaced Bitcoin's transactional use case. Over the past decade or so, Bitcoin's real value as a currency has been in black markets, gray markets, and money laundering. But since stablecoins came along, offering the same anonymous online transactions and instant global transfers with more price stability, they've naturally taken over Bitcoin's transactional role. So even if Bitcoin were to lose all recognition and usage tomorrow, it wouldn't really matter.
You see, the Bitcoin narrative itself has significant flaws, many of which are quite obvious. But in previous years, when its price was continuously rising, the upward trend could suppress all dissenting voices, and what reached your ears was likely mostly pro-Bitcoin viewpoints. So, as ordinary people, we really need to cultivate more skepticism to resist these pervasive brainwashing stories and protect the wealth we've worked so hard to earn.
If you found this helpful, feel free to like and subscribe. See you in the next one.