I originally wrote this as a comment on a Reddit post asking for the downsides to BTC. I don’t really know why that specific post made me think this, but I realized I and others often sugarcoat the problems with BTC to fit more with the dominant, manufactured narrative on crypto platforms. And while that may often be the only way to effectively to get through to people, it also in some ways misrepresents the situation and understates the true problems and corruption with BTC. So this time, instead of saying how BTC used to be a currency and now it’s a store of value, I say how it used to a currency and now the store of value narrative is bullshit.
While this isn’t directly about Bitcoin Cash, since I wrote it as a response to a question specifically about BTC, it ultimately ends up describing the fundamental reasons for the creation of BCH - the preservation of Bitcoin as money after BTC was taken over by people whose interests contradicted with its success.
My no-sugarcoating bear case for BTC:
BTC’s development and community are centralized around a company invested in its failure as money. The Core development team is effectively run by a company called Blockstream, which got venture capital on a proposition to sell side chains to Bitcoin users driven off of the main chain by high fees or slow confirmations (which have been seen often in the past few years). For most of Bitcoin’s history, it was something that could be used as money quickly and with low fees, a concept near universally supported in the Bitcoin community, but if fees are low side chains won’t sell. So once fees started getting high, Blockstream developers naturally opposed any changes that would help Bitcoin scale significantly.
That shouldn’t have been much of a problem, since BTC development is in theory decentralized and anyone from the community can participate, but the community is also under central control by people with and allegiance to Blockstream. One user, u/theymos, has at least partial ownership over r/bitcoin, bitcointalk, bitcoin.it, and bitcoin.org, and has publicly said that they would be willing to ban 95% of the community for disagreeing with them in order to prevent a proposal to scale Bitcoin. In 2015 started removing posts and banning people for supporting it and decided that any implementation of Bitcoin not supported by Blockstream’s dev team would be removed as an altcoin regardless of support by any users, businesses, or miners. Since then they and their r/bitcoin mod team have been enforcing the centralization of the project around this one company, which lacks any accountability to the community and in its Liquid sidechain has interests directly contrary to the success of Bitcoin as money.
Meanwhile the same people have continued promoting BTC to outsiders as a currency despite the high fees making it unviable as one - bitcoin.org still calls it money, and the title of r/bitcoin is “the currency of the internet.” Both pages also claim low fees, despite the fact that 1 sat/vB transactions, standard before the network became congested, have not been confirmed for months and often fees are higher than $10 for typical transactions. And when people realize it doesn’t work as money, they get told it’s not supposed to be, it’s just a store of value - something to buy so the price goes up. Ultimately it just relies on people buying expecting the price to go up because of others buying expecting the price to go up...
Not a very sustainable model. It relies on censorship and dedicated shilling to promote a deliberately broken product in order to get the next greater fool to buy for even more.
That's a really effective way of conveying what has been going on.