While I agree that “everything is good for bitcoin” is mostly true, I don’t think it pertains just to attacks that don’t kill or meaningfully cripple bitcoin.
Shitcoins are the prime example here. They aren’t able to outcompete bitcoin in the marketplace, but they have been wildly successful at poisoning public sentiment. People see the grifting and associate it with bitcoin…they aren’t particularly discerning with their hatred.
Even otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people, like Cory Doctorow, can’t seem to disentangle bitcoin from “crypto”. It’s all just a VC and tech bro con.
This reputational damage has proven to be fairly durable, which I think is why we haven’t seen much retail interest in bitcoin this cycle (even though the we’ve 6x’d since the 2022 lows).
Anecdotally, I have many casual friends, who were previously at least open to bitcoin and are now ideologically opposed to it.
To give an example: a couple days ago I was having my annual fantasy football draft zoom with 11 guys I went to high school with, and the topic of bitcoin came up. One of the guys is a professional videographer. He was talking about having just been hired to film Eric Trump at the Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong a week ago, and apparently had been re-hired to do another shoot during Eric’s travels in Japan.
The body language and derisive comments from guys on the call, not towards Trump but rather bitcoin itself, made me think that there is literally no price bitcoin can go to where these guys will ever purchase any. They will only hate it more as it grows.
I can’t say how exactly it will manifest, but this will hurt bitcoin at some point. It certainly won’t kill it, but there are going to be political backlashes in a lot of countries where politicians tap into this animosity.
I know npub1n3sjlzmhpu8rl56umtptc4lua6zkretq2p82yhytnmlcuq639vlqd0te5l and others have done great work showing how bitcoin is widely owned by people across the political spectrum. What I would be curious to see, though, is how prevalent extremely negative sentiment towards bitcoin is amongst the population, how rigid those beliefs are, and where those people lie politically.
