We often encounter words of praise and immeasurable respect towards Satoshi Nakamoto, with BTC holders expressing devotion and eternal gratitude.
Given praise is deserved when examined from a technical point of view.
Regardless, the technological aspect is not the motivating factor for most BTC maximalists that praise Satoshi, all these years.
We acknowledge from our first days in cryptocurrency that technology is not on the front page of the mainstream agenda of BTC whales and community.
The life-changing wealth the early investors achieved is.
Of course, upon achieving such wealth, we would all be grateful and idolize the founder of Bitcoin for unexpectedly enriching us.
Certainly, it wasn’t this easy for the early Bitcoin adopters, still, the risk was not even close to the risk any investor has to undertake since 2017.
Although, life-changing wealth with crypto today demands either selling all your possessions and living in a trailer park, or putting a few thousand dollars in a dozen arbitrary tokens expecting one of them to become the next Shiba Inu.
Now that’s a pricey lottery ticket. Basically, don’t expect to find the new Shiba Inu since it is already designed in a way that you will only find it at an all-time high price.
You will only buy all those tokens that will not make it instead.
Then we encounter this moral obligation myth that looks more like a threat when anyone searches for Satoshi’s identity.
It has nothing to do with protecting the person or team of people behind the identity of Satoshi either.
It is all about Bitcoin ($BTC) and its price.
What did Satoshi do for you?
I have to express my thoughts on a discussion concerning a “moral obligation” to keep Satoshi’s identity secret, combined with the appreciation everyone describes for the founder of Bitcoin.
This moral obligation exists as a “vow of silence” inside the BTC cult.
Stop talking about adam is Satoshi.Currently people are going viral talking about the movement of the Bitcoin price so that people are competing to invest in Bitcoin, you are busy looking for Satoshi’s identity.
(Typical BTC maximalist on bitcointalk)
All the arguments lead to the price. Stop looking as it will crash the price!
Satoshi was also interested in BTC’s price and even gave a prediction about the price in euros.
Then we find all those messages predominantly declaring eternal gratitude just because their early involvement with BTC provided vast wealth and the few that made it as YouTubers and shilled their way to riches.
Well, this guy made it. As a YouTuber, though, selling referalls to shady derivative exchanges. Not with Bitcoin (BTC).
For the rest of us, FSatoshi
I am in it since early 2017, and only those joined until 2015–2016 increased their wealth so much to not mind anymore.
Even those that joined in 2015 probably more than half did not invest correctly, and didn’t manage to be as successful as those early in Bitcoin.
Still, perhaps all the “hodl rage” helped most investors understand how to avoid gambling and reasonably wait for an investment to mature.
How many Bitcoiners achieved life-changing wealth since 2017, though?From the retail investors: Zero.
It is profitable if someone trades (correctly) the “halvings” and the Tether pumps, but nothing similar to the early opportunities. The risk is too high to consider investing more than a small part of an investing portfolio, and the low risk the early Bitcoin investors were undertaking was not creating terms to financially suffer if their investment crashed.
BTC does not deliver an equal opportunity to the millions that followed between 2017–2022. The last ones with a chance to make it big, if they only managed to instantly develop tough skin and ignore volatility, were the 2015 investors.
It is five years already, since 2017. Yet those that risked the least and profited the most are the early adopters of the first five years and almost nobody else.
We profit only with peanuts all this time.
And it is already more than five years. So, should I be grateful to Satoshi?
I still have to start looking for a job and return to the daily life routine with a silly wage not meeting inflation and maybe manage to get by.
Nothing really changed as the profit for these five years was not substantial enough to make it change.
Instead, the aggressive price swings force many of us lose our sleep.
Crypto was supposed to help everyone dream, but was perhaps the approach of just using crypto platforms and opportunities to earn money online correct, and just liquidate everything “earned” into fiat immediately?
Should we keep bothering to invest a single euro, dollar, or peso in this market anymore?
Prices crash and BTC drags everything else even lower following the predetermined boom and bust cycles.
Cryptocurrencies with vast utility do not receive attention anymore.
We invest in a use case, yet we watch Venture Capitals pumping billions of dollars in vaporware and nonfunctional networks.
Bitcoin Cash is a crypto that works a hundred times better than anything else, yet it remains price and news-suppressed and severely shorted while we watch vaporware experiencing glorious days.
I admire Satoshi for creating P2P Electronic Cash, no matter if this person is proven to be someone I despise.
Sometimes people change, and sometimes they don’t realize change is required, stuck in their former glory and unable to innovate.
Still, I don’t feel this urge to be appreciative of Satoshi.
My life did not change because of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency in particular.
We can find more opportunities, but at this stage, the risk we have to take is considerably higher than the risk investing between 2010–2012 or 2014–2016.
I didn’t discover Bitcoin in 2010–2012 to become an early adopter and achieve vast wealth within a few years or even months as others did. If I did, perhaps I would also be writing Satoshi rhymes today.
And I don’t accuse or feel envious of those early in Bitcoin.
In fact, I admire most of the early adopters. Maybe some think they got lucky, but I don’t think it was only luck.
Noone without an equivalent interest to what the whitepaper was presenting could accidentally find Bitcoin in the first two or three years.
Those that profited with life-changing wealth should be grateful if they want, and perhaps even write songs about Satoshi, as many already did so far.
The early investors from 2010–2012 and those that became “hodlers” in 2013–2014 spamming the “hodl” quote for three years until they “sodled” are grateful to Satoshi. The rest of us are not.
We struggle for five years and we are fighting whales to earn peanuts.
Bitcoin (BTC) advocates on Twitter and YouTube lure newcomers into trading with high leverage and lose their money. The market suffers as hundreds of billions in new money is exiting crypto and instantly entering the fiat bank accounts of the top exchanges.
No, we have no reason to express gratitude to Satoshi.
BTC didn’t accomplish a 20x in 2021 as it did in 2017, but just a lousy 3x instead and went back to where it started.
BTC didn’t perform a 100x between 2020 and 2021 as it did between 2016–2017 either.
Not going to mention the astronomical wealth Bitcoin produced for those early adopters from 2010 to 2012.
In the year the bull run was supposed to occur (2021), the bull was castrated.
We have no reason to write songs about Satoshi and no reason to protect his identity. Why should we care?
The early Bitcoiners need to start respecting the newcomers and explain that the wealth they amassed is not an example that can be repeated. Beginners don’t make life-changing wealth from BTC, and nobody can ask anyone to be grateful to Satoshi without radically changing their life first.
Since price and profit are what matter to the BTC maximalists, this is the bitter truth.
BTC, between 2016–2017 accomplished a 100x. From approximately $200 up to $20,000.
Lambos for all.
Satoshi didn’t change a lot for the rest of us that joined in 2017.
In fact, Vitalik managed to support the 2017–2020 adopters in more ways than Bitcoin (BTC) did.
These idealogical constraints, forced by the cult of BTC maximalists, do not apply to the tens of millions of newcomers joined since 2017.
It doesn’t apply to me either. I am not feeling grateful towards Satoshi, and considering how BTC develops as a network, I don’t see potential there anymore.
I feel no moral obligation or gratitude to Satoshi. Probably the few thousands of early investors that made vast wealth in the early days of this experiment should be grateful, but not the rest 99% that followed.
Bitcoin today is crippled as a network and stopped gazing at the future.
If Satoshi is the person I suspect, then the intentions after a certain point were not as pure or righteous as we are led to believe.
Possibly it was all opportunistic in nature instead right from the beginning.
In Conclusion
I admire the person or team behind Satoshi Nakamoto for their perspective, knowledge, and character, although, I have no reason to feel grateful as throughout the past five years the effect of cryptocurrencies on my living conditions was minimal.
Ideology matters, yet idealists also profited vastly in the past. It is not working today, asking for blind faith without the increased value distributed progressively.
Don’t expect anyone to be concerned about Satoshi’s privacy either. The millions of newcomers do not share these concerns.
I felt this parenthesis between my Satoshi series of articles was necessary to clear any misconceptions.
Cynical perhaps, but an honest representation of the outcome of a risk undertaken and the not-so-promising rewards in the end.
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