Bitcoin is becoming “degentrified”: reversing Bitcoin’s gentrified culture with degenerate behavior.
Context: The past half decade, Bitcoiners have watched countless other blockchains come and go, tokens rise and fall, and stablecoin APYs that sound like batting averages. These Bitcoiners have also largely missed out on these dizzying gains and catastrophic losses.
As these Bitcoiners saw that the majority of new user growth happened outside of Bitcoin, they found themselves turning into “Bitcoin NIMBYs” (“Not In My Bitcoin, Y’all”). With an increasingly narrow window of socially acceptable things to build on Bitcoin, custodial solutions ironically began to be normalized — even celebrated. The culmination of this trend has been the Bitcoin ETF launches, the most successful ETF launch in history. Mission Accomplished.
Meanwhile, on-chain activity on Bitcoin was next to dead. The 2 main types of transactions, when they happened, were DCA withdrawals and exchanges cleaning up the UTXOs of those DCAs.
Which way, Western Man? The answer is nowhere. Bitcoin’s future lies in the East.
The real Bitcoin adoption story is happening in Asia. It’s actually happening everywhere but bear with me — I have a point to make.
For the first time in 2 halvings, a Bitcoin-only wallet has broken into the top 20 most popular crypto wallets by userbase. Unisat clocked over 1 million active users this past Spring. That puts it in position #19 across the whole ecosystem.
Ah! But Unisat isn’t Bitcoin Only! It has shitcoins on it! ← This is your brain on Bitcoin NIMBYism. If you reject Ordinal Theory & Rune Theory, then those wallets simply have Bitcoin in them. They don’t have any smart contracts, it’s just coin controlled UTXOs all the way down.
The average Ordinals enjoyer transacts entirely in Bitcoin, has 90%+ of their assets in self-custody, and natively denominates in Bitcoin. Each one of those is still a core adoption battle for many long time Bitcoin NIMBYs. Ordinals degens do it naturally.
Thus, we have the Degens in direct cultural competition to the Bitcoin ETFs. The Degens, with their fast and loose leverage, are in the driver’s seat for what happens on Bitcoin right now. The ETFs & their “UTXO Elite” cannot prevent degens from erecting their horrid houses which violate every carefully constructed HOA rule — that’s the beauty of a permissionless blockchain and the death of Bitcoin NIMBYism.
