Has crypto delivered on any of its promises?: The Story
$69,000. Then $16,000. Then $73,000. Bitcoin’s price chart looks like a heart monitor for someone who should not still be alive — and the patient keeps getting out of bed.
The protocol that doesn’t care
The system Satoshi Nakamoto launched on January 3, 2009, has never gone down. Not for maintenance, not for a holiday, not when its most famous exchange turned out to be running a fraud so flagrant the bankruptcy examiner compared its bookkeeping to a lemonade stand. FTX collapsed on November 11, 2022. Thirty-two billion dollars vanished. Sam Bankman-Fried — congressional witness, political megadonor — was convicted on seven counts. During that week, Bitcoin’s network processed blocks on schedule. Every ten minutes. The cypherpunks saw the whole point made visible: the protocol is an artifact fusing cryptography and fixed monetary policy into something nobody can turn off.
The regulators watched the same collapse and saw a twenty-nine-year-old operating a multibillion-dollar exchange with no board, no audit, and no framework that could have caught the fraud. North Korean hackers stole $2 billion in crypto in 2025 — the single largest funding source for a nuclear weapons program.
The pipe that works on Wednesday
Meanwhile, in Manila, a construction worker sent $200 home. Ninety seconds. Eleven cents. Western Union would have charged $14 and taken three days. The pragmatists want the pipe. In Argentina, where the peso lost half its value in 2023, savers converted to stablecoins because the alternative was watching their money evaporate. The sound money advocates see something older in the Bitcoin protocol — a return to monetary discipline that central banks abandoned, a check on the inflation that quietly erodes savings the working class cannot move to equities.
El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021. Adoption among ordinary Salvadorans stayed low. But the country used its Bitcoin position to renegotiate IMF terms — a nation the size of Massachusetts leveraging a decentralized asset against the institution that traditionally dictates terms to developing countries. Someone who spent thousands of hours studying this made an asymmetric bet the conventional wisdom called insane. The bet is still running.
Whether crypto has delivered depends on which promise you were holding. The cypherpunks promised censorship-resistant money and got it. The regulators were promised responsible innovation and got the most expensive compliance vacuum in financial history. The pragmatists were not promised anything. They found a cheaper pipe and used it.
Perspectives:
- Cypherpunks
- Regulators
- Pragmatists
- Sound money advocates