Bitcoin and cryptocurrency often trade on narratives, shifting to fit world events and play the role that is currently most required of them, or to offer hope for the future.
This is especially apparent when it comes to bitcoin itself, which has transitioned through several narrative phases, in each of which its most vocally touted utility altered with the global news outside.
Contrasting Bitcoin Stories
Bitcoin was forged from an era of financial crisis, launching in 2009 as the alternative to institutional ineptitude and excess. It may be true that not many were paying attention back then, but from the very beginning, bitcoin had a curious, bi-polar character. On the one hand, it represented (and it actually is) sound money and personal responsibility in the face of governmental and financial sector recklessness.
In this narrative, the gamblers and rip-off merchants are not dealing in cryptocurrency, but rather, they are the establishment institutions themselves, and it is bitcoin that, far from being a scam, embodies conservatism and stability, and will save its adopters from the broken, exploitative fiat system or enable adopters to save themselves.
Stacking sats to cold storage and holding your own keys became the adult, self-sufficient, robustly prudent lifestyle choices, but simultaneously, bitcoin took on, or had foisted upon it, a contradictory story.
In the contrasting tale, bitcoin is subversive and counter-cultural, an attempt at societal disruption, or a vehicle by which to drop out, brought into existence and disseminated by cypherpunks, anarchists and misfits who applied code and mathematics in unorthodox ways.
Is it possible to be both conservative and subversive at the same time? Bitcoin, somehow, has managed both, depending on who you ask.
What’s more, its utility has been presented sometimes as a store of value, and sometimes as a digital currency. And, when states become authoritarian, it is offered as a means of transacting freely, but when the subject of criminal activity is raised, it pointed out that blockchains are more transparent and readable than the movements of fiat through cash.
Bitcoin shifts. Or rather, the narrative shifts and can be adapted, while Bitcoin itself operates elegantly beneath, block after block, functioning and…
