This article was inspired by Max Gagliardi’s thread[1] on Twitter.
The Bitcoin community is one of the most passionate, idealistic and driven groups of people on the internet. Besides a love for Bitcoin’s capabilities and ethics, most Bitcoiners are overwhelmingly optimistic that it will eventually bloom to total fruition.
The enthusiasm is hardly unwarranted. Bitcoin’s price has roughly doubled every year since 2013. Major corporations are adding[2] the asset to their balance sheets in droves. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has seemingly dedicated[3] his life to it, and one country[4] has even made it an official national currency.
Yet Bitcoin doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are a host of global forces at play that would stand to see the protocol fail.
And while “failure” for Bitcoin can be defined in a range of ways, it’s only because there are a plethora of issues that humanity desperately needs Bitcoin to address. If it doesn’t successfully address the many issues plaguing humanity, there will likely never be a better technology for guaranteeing global rights and freedoms in our lifetime.
The best way to appreciate something is to know what we’d lose without it. In that respect, there are five crises we can expect the world to face in a future without Bitcoin.
What Happens If Bitcoin Dies?
1. Privacy Fails
Bitcoin is an open and neutral monetary network. Anybody can join, set up a public address and take advantage of its functionality — without permission and free of charge. As such, the network need not know nor store any information about its users. It does not discriminate between good and bad participants on the network. It simply executes.
Compare that to legacy social and financial networks on the
