Michael Saylor And The Bank-Friendly Bitcoin
A Distorted Version Of The Whitepaper And P2P Electronic Cash.
We previously analyzed Microstrategy and CEO Michael Saylor, aiming to understand his motivation behind his present stance on Bitcoin (BTC).
Bitcoin (BTC) is no longer the decentralized P2P Electronic Cash it was between 2009–2015, and Saylor is not endorsing it as digital cash either.
BTC devolved into a digital asset controlled by a small group of developers under the payroll of a for-profit company funded by Bitcoin’s competitors like Mastercard and AXA (Blockstream).
Today, trusted third parties dominate Bitcoin (BTC), with Custodial Lightning (Blockstream’s scalability solution), rising in popularity.
Michael Saylor, a well-known BTC evangelist, emphasizes the significance of Bitcoin as a store of value and downplays its potential to revolutionize the traditional fiat-based monetary system.
What motivates Saylor to act as a Bitcoin evangelist? Let’s find out more.
Is Michael Saylor Afraid Of The Banks?
Unwittingly, Michael Saylor sheds light on the current state of Bitcoin post the takeover of developments by Blockstream in 2015.
At the end of the day, there will be KYC/AML, tax regulation, and some back and forth on what you can do.
If the use case is currency, that’s just intentionally inflammatory. Bankers are going to be upset about replacing the Euro and the Dollar.
You can leave Visa and Mastercard alone. We can agree to pay taxes.
These are some unbelievable quotes by Michael Saylor, but also consistent with Blockstream’s intentions.
Already integrated deeply into a centralized monetary system, Saylor supports the stagnation and strict regulation of Bitcoin.
Most in BTC today will prioritize anything that will increase the price, regardless of the potential consequences on the long-term viability of the network.
How The Banks Bought Bitcoin | Lightning Network
The whitepaper explains Bitcoin is a P2P electronic cash system.
During the blocksize debate, it was decided to keep the one-megabyte block and proceed with a second layer network. The Lightning Network is explained perfectly in this video.
The Lightning Network creates the need for hubs with massive amounts of liquidity that will be similar to financial third-party settlement organizations.
The Lightning hubs will be heavily regulated financial organizations subject to KYC/AML laws and reporting for tax regulations.
The big financial institutions (the trusted third parties that Bitcoin actually renders obsolete), are again becoming relevant with the Lightning Network.
The part that with Bitcoin you can be your own bank has slowly faded away and is no longer a theme for Bitcoin.
Everything Bitcoin offered (empowering the individual and giving access to finance to everyone that was excluded by the banking system) is slowly being removed, not discussed as Bitcoin was not allowed to scale to deliver financial freedom.
What is the use of an unreasonably high decentralization when a simple user needs a custodial (centralized and censorable) Lightning wallet to use Bitcoin?
BTC Maxis Engage in Misinformation on Decentralization’s Purpose
Decentralization secures a tamper-proof network and transactional censorship resistance.
Yet, with Bitcoin (BTC), censorship resistance becomes a luxury only a few can afford.
Why do BTC maximalists promote that everyone should run their own node while Satoshi never intended this?
The reason is to choke the network and make it unusable (with a low blocksize limit forcing high fees), aiming to reduce Bitcoin’s disruptive monetary potential.
Bitcoin in the BTC version is opposing financial freedom. Under Blockstream, Bitcoin submitted to the will of the banking system.
Saylor suggests that we should not upset the banks and BTC maximalists cheer.
How will Bitcoin not upset the banks? By rendering it unusable on a massive scale with bottlenecks like RBF, 1MB limit, and custodial mechanisms that strip Bitcoin from its revolutionary features.
Even if someone joins Bitcoin solely for investing purposes, we should still consider the ideals and ethics behind it.
The Lightning Network is One of the Biggest Pieces of Vaporware
Is it necessary to promote a second-layer system that could potentially allow trusted third parties to amass authority (Custodial Lightning)?
Furthermore, it has been eight years since the introduction of the Lightning Network, and progress has been extremely slow with just 5000 BTC locked in the network, eight years later.
LN doesn’t even work as it should, and instead of lightning-fast transactions, the risk of losing funds is still high.
The system also requires on-chain fees (currently $10 to $30) to open and close channels to transfer BTC between the sidechain. Supposedly these channels would only be paid once in a while by the user.
However, does this system make sense? Why users have to pay these enormous fees, anyway?
Satoshi on blocksize:
It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimitIt can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don’t have it are already obsolete.
When we’re near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.-Satoshi Nakamoto (bitcointalk)
Bitcoin Cash has already solved scalability with a reasonable increase in blocksize that follows the recent technological evolution of hardware. By simply following Moore’s Law, Bitcoin Cash succeeded.
Bitcoin Cash scales and offers near-instant transactions with low fees that the Internet age demands without requiring second-layer networks.
Lightning can run on Bitcoin Cash too, but it has no practical use case since Bitcoin Cash scales on-chain.
Bitcoin sidechains present a solution to a problem that never existed.
It is currently onboarding thousands of merchants each month and this while it is still suffering from censorship and extreme prejudice by the brainwashed Bitcoin community.
Sticking to 1MB blocks (~4MB with the Segwit hack) thirteen years later and declaring that this was the absolute limit is not just raising eyebrows but is clear evidence that certain participants did not want Bitcoin to develop and scale. These interested parties were always planning to develop and market sidechains like the Lightning and Liquid networks.
The decentralization concerns some Bitcoin advocates express are unfounded. Satoshi never intended 8 billion people to run a full node. That would be profoundly naive and impractical.
It is a terrible excuse to avoid Bitcoin development and scaling and promote the notion that second-layer networks are the only solution to scaling issues.
In Conclusion
(watch on X.com)
As a Wall Street affiliate, Michael Saylor supports KYC, AML, taxation, limitations, financial censorship, custodial wallets, custodian banks acting as intermediaries (in control of the coins), and a system of surveillance, control, and regulatory enforcement.
What Saylor advocates for is not Bitcoin but a distorted version of the whitepaper infused with a number-go-up (NGU) craze and extensive price speculation.
The capturing and taming of Bitcoin is complete, but only on the BTC side of the 2017 fork, the one with Segwit and the various bottlenecks that limited scale and potential.
For the rest of the world, Bitcoin Cash delivers a working and scaling version of Bitcoin.
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Part of this story was originally published on read.cash (as “Bankcoin”) in 2021 and rewritten.
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