The Paradox, Absurdity, Lies and Myths of Bitcoin
They say it’s an “asset”… but it has zero assets.
They say it’s decentralized… but the large majority of all transactions go through trading platforms.
They say it’s digital gold… but it has none of the physical attributes gold derives its value.
They say it’s immune to censorship… but countries like the US and China manage to be the largest holders without buying any Bitcoin.
They say it’s scarce… but there are 2.1 quadrillion Satoshi units that act exactly like a Bitcoin unit.
They say it’s a store of value… but it has witnessed several -50% to -80% drawdowns in its short history.
They say it derives its value from energy… but energy is a massive cost that someone has to pay!
BTC/USD Chart Since 2015 as of 30 July 2026
The Bitcoin protocol was introduced as a new monetary system: decentralized, censorship-resistant, scarce, transparent, secure, and independent of governments and financial intermediaries. It promised to eliminate the need for trusted third parties and replace institutional trust with a code.
However, more than fifteen years later, Bitcoin has failed on all those fake promises…
Today, the Bitcoin ecosystem is increasingly dependent on centralized exchanges, custodians, mining companies, stablecoin issuers, institutional investors, and financial intermediaries. The supposedly revolutionary monetary asset has become deeply intertwined with the very financial infrastructure it was designed to bypass.
And beneath everything lies an uncomfortable economic reality: the Bitcoin mining industry must continuously spend real resources (electricity, capital, land, labor, and massive equipment that becomes obsolete very quickly) to generate a virtual token that is distributed randomly… with the reward being halved by design every four years! What business model can survive such a flawed system where revenues are distributed randomly and halved every four years while costs increase constantly with adoption? It is the exact opposite of an economy of scale. The more successful your product is, the deeper your losses are! Even Fried Thiel, MARA’s CEO, ended up admitting that Bitcoin mining is a “zero sum game”! With miners doomed to fail economically, Bitcoin’s network security is destined to failure.
1. The Decentralization Paradox
The word “decentralized” is perhaps the most important word in the Bitcoin vocabulary.
In practice, it is far from being the case. Most Bitcoin transactions go through exchanges, custodians, brokers, or institutional funds (ETFs). Even miners store their mined bitcoins with custodians like Coinbase.
Today, the entire ecosystem relies on the solvency of companies like Coinbase, Binance, Tether, Strategy… all of which are in a critical financial situation. Should any of them collapse, the whole house of cards will fall down.
The irony is striking. Bitcoin was designed to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries. Yet Bitcoin users increasingly trust intermediaries to hold their Bitcoins. Even miners do! How absurd is that?
2. The 21 Million Fake Limit
The most used argument for Bitcoin is that there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins.
But the statement requires closer examination too. A bitcoin is divisible into 100 million Satoshis. Each Satoshi has exactly the same “shape,” the same function, and the same attributes as a Bitcoin! Dividing something into exact copies of itself acts like a multiplier! That means the real supply is 2.1 quadrillion units (call them Satoshis or Bitcoins, it doesn’t matter).
The immediate response from Bitcoin supporters is that this is no different from saying that one dollar consists of 100 cents… but the dollar was never designed to have an absolute monetary cap.
The question then becomes whether the 21 million cap creates meaningful economic scarcity or simply a narrative of scarcity for marketing purposes. Anyway, the scarcity of something useless doesn’t make it useful…
The “21 million limit” becomes even more absurd when we consider the enormous number of other cryptocurrencies and tokens that exist. If scarcity itself is the central source of value, why should Bitcoin’s scarcity be uniquely valuable? The crypto ecosystem has demonstrated that creating a new digital asset is technically easy. Anyone can create a token with a fixed supply. If we create another digital token with a 10 million limit, much lower than Bitcoin’s 21 million limit, would it be worth more than Bitcoin because it would be considered scarcer? How can something be considered scarce if it can be replicated indefinitely with exactly the same “unique” attributes?
3. The “Digital Gold” Absurdity
They say Bitcoin is digital gold. Yet gold has physical properties that have made it valuable for thousands of years: durability, divisibility, portability, resistance to corrosion, and usefulness in jewelry and industry. Bitcoin has none of those unique physical attributes. Take away those physical attributes from gold, and it loses all its value. Since Bitcoin is gold without its physical attributes, it is therefore worth nothing! It’s as if we created a virtual token and called it “digital water,” pretending it’s “liquid” and “essential to life.” Still, if we can’t drink it or wash with it, what value would it have? Not only does Bitcoin have no intrinsic value, but it also requires continued investment in heavy infrastructure and massive electricity consumption to stay alive. It is like having a car parked in a garage, continuously consuming gas to remain “alive,” while you pretend it has value because it is unique! Once gold is mined, it costs nothing to continue existing. When Bitcoin is mined, the network needs to keep running on heavy electricity consumption for the Bitcoin to remain “alive.”
4. The “Censorship Proof” Lie
Governments around the world have acquired Bitcoin through seizures, confiscations, enforcement actions, bankruptcies, and other means. That’s how a digital coin created as a challenge to government monetary authority ended up in government-controlled wallets.
Governments do not need to control the blockchain to influence the market. They can shut down crypto platforms and seize their assets. What happened to the promise of monetary freedom?
5. The Myth of Low-Cost Bitcoin
Bitcoin is sometimes described as a cheap way to transfer money. The comparison can be attractive. There is no need for a traditional bank to approve a transaction. The network operates continuously.
But the cost of the system is not simply the transaction fee paid by the user. There is also the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. Bitcoin mining consumes enormous amounts of electricity and requires heavy equipment that becomes rapidly obsolete. The economic cost of maintaining the network is simply unsustainable. All listed miners show constant negative cash flow with massive dilution of shareholders and collapsing stock prices. It is not a coincidence. It is simply a sign that Bitcoin mining is economically unsustainable. It is a fundamentally losing business that is doomed to fail. When most miners inevitably capitulate, they will sell their Bitcoin reserves and provoke a massive collapse in the price. With less than 5% remaining to be mined over the next 100 years, there will be zero incentive for miners to start all over again. Bitcoin is doomed to fail from within.
If Bitcoin were truly revolutionary, all large technology companies, like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, would have jumped in to get their market share (as they did for AI)… instead we have empty shells with no business model, like Strategy, Nakamoto Inc, and Metaplanet, turning into “Bitcoin treasury” companies while incurring heavy losses and permanent negative cash flow.
Bitcoin was designed as an alternative to financial intermediaries. Now collapsing “treasury companies” and unsecured crypto platforms control the ecosystem. We shifted the risk from banks like JPMorgan, Citi, or Morgan Stanley, supported by the US central bank, to entities like Coinbase, Tether, and Binance… some of which aren’t even audited! And all without any support from a central authority.
The user may distrust banks, but he is asked to trust an exchange. The user may distrust central banks, but he is asked to trust a stablecoin issuer. The system has not eliminated trust. It has redistributed it to a much weaker ecosystem!
Bitcoin will be remembered as the greatest bubble of all time and the largest misallocation of capital and resources in human history.