The market keeps talking

The Market Keeps Talking

I used to hear Majamalu talk about what was happening in the Bitcoin-BTC forums: deleted posts and messages, systematic user bans, insults, etc. From his statements, I inferred that these spaces had turned into affiliates of some kind of cult. It was hard for me to 100% believe what he was telling me, until I decided to leave an opinion in a Facebook group: all I did was point out, without disrespecting anyone, the reasons why I thought Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is better than Bitcoin-BTC.

Majamalu had already warned me about what to expect, and I have to say he was right. I received a flood of responses, almost all of them containing mockery and insults. But not all. The only argument I was presented with was a striking one: “the market has already spoken.” They meant that, due to the large price difference between bitcoin-BTC and bitcoin-BCH, people had already decided in a free market which was better.

It’s true that in the world of cryptocurrencies there are no impositions and everyone can choose freely. That said, I think it’s worth clarifying something that blind BTC fans are determined to ignore. The vast majority of people are still trying to understand what cryptocurrencies are, how they work, how they’re issued, what advantages they have over alternatives, etc. They were created only a short time ago and, like any revolutionary innovation, generate skepticism and many, many questions.

But those who allow themselves to doubt and patiently investigate are usually the ones who, in the long run, reap the rewards, just as those who got involved from the beginning did. These pioneers were labeled naïve or delusional, if not criminals, while the “experts” predicted Bitcoin’s imminent extinction.

Those who mocked bitcoiners in the beginning—pointing to the low, transient value of the cryptocurrency or its dramatic price drops—are today the ones who mock those of us who criticize the negative changes that have occurred in BTC, and they use the same arguments once used by supporters of fiat money and central banks.

We used to defend BTC from attacks coming from all sides. We did so because we understood its advantages and believed this currency had the potential to compete with fiat money, not to prop it up as BTC supporters now propose. For us, the existence of a form of electronic peer-to-peer cash is essential to putting limits on the expansion of state power. That’s why we fought from the start.

However, it’s necessary to reiterate the question Majamalu asked in one episode of the podcast “No Hay Almuerzo Gratis”: Would BTC have taken off as a project if Satoshi Nakamoto’s proposal had been what BTC supporters now advocate? That is, if a cryptocurrency had been created with sky-high fees to force people to use it only as a store of value or for transactions of thousands or millions of dollars; or if it had been presented as an alternative for transactions as slow or slower than banking transactions; or if sending bitcoins at a lower cost required turning to intermediaries; or if its promoters invited us to keep using fiat money for almost all our transactions… What would have happened?

When entering today’s BTC world, you get the sense that many of its members arrived late to the crypto ecosystem and invested in BTC without really knowing what they were doing, and without basic knowledge of economics. And since the BTC price increase doesn’t exactly encourage reflection among this kind of investor, they react defensively to anything that might force them to reconsider their decisions, such as BCH, which still keeps Satoshi Nakamoto’s project alive.

Claiming that the market has “spoken” is nonsense. The market is speaking all the time; nothing is final for the market. Anyone who believes there’s no turning back, that nothing will change, either doesn’t understand how the economy works or is trying to make a (poor) defense of their investment.

This point can be illustrated by the competition between Whatsapp and other messaging apps. I remember years ago, when you could only send text messages with Whatsapp, other apps also offered voice messages and even video calls. But as they say, the early bird gets the worm. The market, which as I mentioned earlier is always speaking, could also have punished Whatsapp if it hadn’t moved forward, and that’s why the company improved its service. In fact, recently, the doubts about Whatsapp’s privacy were capitalized on by other companies in the sector, like Signal and Telegram, which achieved unimaginable visibility and a surprising increase in users in a very short time.

And consumer punishment could be even harsher in the future, since the market hasn’t finished speaking and never will. Whatsapp decided to address the issue, first improving its service and then offering explanations to try to clarify the privacy problem. The BTC developers do the exact opposite: they keep going down the same path with pride, assuring us that this is just the beginning; that fees will keep rising and that we should celebrate it.

Meanwhile, the market keeps talking, even if they want to silence it.