You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain
Never were truer words spoken than for Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who was once a crypto hero with his bullish stance on Bitcoin, before quickly devolving into the world's most followed shit-poster. Tesla's pro-environment narrative just doesn't fit with crypto's reliance on massive amounts of electricity, and Musk has unsuccessfully played both sides this year. (To be fair, both Tesla vehicles and Bitcoin miners are ultimately powered by coal, but I guess the former just has a better PR firm.) Last Friday, Musk flipflopped on Bitcoin hard, sending a fragile market into the red zone again. In one tweet, he implied that he was breaking up with #Bitcoin, and then in the same 24 hours he switched his profile photo to a Bitcoin anime cartoon. (He has since switched to an empty profile photo ... for now.) Honestly, the more thought you give this guy, the less he deserves.
The Bitcoin community is not the only group that has become progressively less enthused with Musk's shenanigans. On Friday, the hacker group Anonymous broadcast a message to Elon Musk, saying that his cavalier attitude was hurting the common man, and that the Anons were coming for him. Anonymous is a decentralized group with no (identifiable) leadership, so it's hard to tell how serious this threat actually is, although they've been involved in enough civic disruption in the past (Occupy Wall Street, for instance) that that threat level is probably NOT zero.
Musk isn't the only billionaire CEO that came under fire recently. At the #Bitcoin2021 conference in Miami, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was heckled while he was on stage with my friend and co-author Alex Gladstein. The heckler was none other than Laura Loomer, a far-right, anti-Muslim political activist who in 2018 had handcuffed herself to Twitter's NY headquarters. Her main allegation was that Dorsey's support of the censorship-resistant Bitcoin was "hypocritical" given that Twitter is quite proactive in its censorship. Dorsey calmly talked about Project @BlueSky, which is Twitter's own attempt at decentralizing itself. On a technical level it looks similar to the Mastodon protocol that got a lot of technorati excited 4 years ago but hasn't really managed to gain a foothold with the mainstream. https://twitter.com/NedHalawani/status/1400942366673018883?s=19
The following day, Strike founder Jack Mallers took the stage to introduce the president of El Salvador, who announced in a pre-recorded video that their country was going to be the first in the world to declare Bitcoin as legal tender. (Basically that means the government will recognize it as one of their official currencies.) You can read the coverage here, although there does not appear to be a whole lot of implementation details as of yet. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/el-salvador-to-declare-bitcoin-as-legal-tender
Is this a big deal? Well, let's break it down. The first thing you need to know is that El Salvador is a very small country of just 7M people. The second thing you need to know is that it doesn't have its own currency. It has used USD since 2001, in a desperate attempt to stabilize the economy and curtail devaluation. (https://ticotimes.net/2021/01/04/el-salvador-marks-20-years-of-dollarization-with-weak-economic-impulse) The results of that switch have been lukewarm, which is probably why I'm ALSO lukewarm about this news. I don't think using Bitcoin as a second currency will solve the on-the-ground problems of a troubled economy, especially during a time when the crypto markets are starting to look more and more bearish.
Think about how the average Salvadoran will feel when they buy their first $100 worth of $BTC next week, see it drop in value to $90 the following week, and then flounder in that range for the next 2 years. Assuming they hold it long enough, there's probably a good chance that they'll 5x their money EVENTUALLY, but time is a luxury that most people can't afford. From a practical standpoint, it's hard to imagine Bitcoin (with or without Lightning) working as more than a bankless time-deposit of unspecified duration and with an unknown rate of return. But ... maybe that's enough? At the very least, it'll give people a chance to protect themselves against the hyperinflation of the USD, and possibly hold their wealth without risk of seizure.
My first instinct upon reading the news was that this was "innovation theater", and indeed Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation refers to the Salvadoran president as a "narcissistic thug" on Twitter but I'll continue to follow this story closely. For now, it's not clear whether this will be truly beneficial to the country and its people, but of course, we are hopeful :)
Overall, a lot of ridiculous things happened at #Bitcoin2021 and there's not enough space to cover it all, but I would say that the on-stage highlights include (a) this disguised Dogecoin fanatic in breakaway pants https://twitter.com/wallstmemes/status/1401283546464010244 (b) Max Keiser repeatedly yelling "FUCK ELON" before introducing Michael Saylor https://twitter.com/titodurriz/status/1400997001861296129?s=20 and (c) this dope saying that if you are against Bitcoiners' toxicity then you are against freedom https://twitter.com/coffeencrypt0/status/1401278099522822146
Jesus, with panels like that I can only imagine what the after-party must have been like.
See you all tomorrow cryptofam, and don't be toxic to each other!