As a Bitcoiner have you ever considered what would happen should Bitcoin fail? By "fail" I don't mean anything catastrophic happening to the base layer like the big blockers winning, but something more subtle like if Blackrock and the JP Morgue were to successfully neuter it via paper bitcoin, regulatory capture and thus permanently confining it to "digital asset" status without it being a medium of exchange.

The purpose of this inquiry is not to spread FUD or dish out black pills, but it's to peel back the layers of what Bitcoin truly represents, to each of us individually. Hopefully this little exercise in introspection will make some of us realize what it is we truly desire and the kind of life we would like to have.

The Collapse Has Already Happened

I recently wrote in a previous essay, that societal collapse due to monetary failure happens gradually, then all at once. The cataclysmic event eventually recorded in history books is always inevitable to those who understand the significance of preceding events; the seeds that, as the saying goes, always yield their harvest.

Based on my own assessment, nothing stops this train and it’s only a matter of time until we see everything come tumbling down like Humpty-Dumpty. If that is true, then the only rational thing to do is to build anew on a Bitcoin standard before the inevitable history defining monetary collapse eventually shows up.

This essay extends that argument from a different angle. Where my previous piece examined the inevitable collapse of everything fiat, this one asks: What's your plan if Bitcoin fails, or at minimum, if the hyperbitcoinization you've staked your hopes on doesn't materialize in your lifetime?

The Wrong Kind of Victory

We are always touting how Bitcoin has already won and how hyperbitcoinization is just around the corner. But what does that mean really to say Bitcoin has already won? Does it mean that something technically superior to fiat money is now in existence? The existence of technically superior money is not victory. Betamax was technically superior to VHS. The Dvorak keyboard is ergonomically superior to QWERTY. Superiority alone guarantees nothing in markets shaped by network effects, institutional capture, and human psychology.

Or does it mean a critical mass of people, a remnant, will start their own Bitcoin country? Perhaps. The uncomfortable truth is that Bitcoin hasn't won anything. Not yet anyway. Why do I say so? Well for starters, the vast majority of people still measure Bitcoin's value based on its fiat price, the very system it was designed to render obsolete. That alone is a contradiction so enormous that it borders on tragicomedy. It shows that while Bitcoin was designed to exist outside the fiat system, most Bitcoiners do not.

Living in Enemy Territory

The fiat financial system is controlled by central banks. It's their system. They own the pipes. You can't participate without their permission, usually granted via onerous licensing requirements.

Bitcoin was supposed to be the alternative to this permissioned system. Instead, it exists as a guest in the fiat ecosystem. As we've witnessed repeatedly, Bitcoin's price can be manipulated and suppressed by institutions like the JP Morgue. The reason is simple, while Bitcoin may be fully decentralized at the protocol level, the fiat on/off ramps remain at the mercy of the banksters.

That’s to say nothing of the fact that key economic inputs like energy, food etc., are still to be priced in Bitcoin. This might seem trivial, but stop and think about proof-of-work. PoW anchors a digitally created "commodity" to the physical world via energy expenditure during mining. In other words, PoW is a bridge between the physical and digital realms.

Without key economic inputs being priced in Bitcoin, price discovery is left at the mercy of the wolves of Wall Street and their trading algorithms. 

The Chokepoints We Normalized

Since the banksters control the on/off ramps, centralized exchanges became the dominant way most people acquire Bitcoin today, not peer-to-peer as originally envisioned. While this brought efficiency, it created a fatal chokepoint that allowed the legacy system to roll out licensing requirements, letting the KYC censorship vampire slowly sink its teeth into the orange coin. 

Pseudonymity was compromised the moment exchanges came into the picture and this spelled danger given the transparency of the blockchain. Compromised pseudonymity coupled with centralized chokepoints are a recipe for disaster. Wasn't the whole point to have a fully decentralized system through and through?

This isn't to say peer-to-peer methods don't exist, they do.; but it's pointing out the fatal financial chokepoint that exists especially when one's Bitcoin journey starts with taking a selfie, scanning your ID and providing your physical address. Aren't these the some of the same constraints that make fiat a permissioned system? If so, why did they become normalized?

How Bitcoin Actually Fails

This is why asking "What will you do should Bitcoin fail?" becomes critical, because our way of imagining failure is usually wrong. Most imagine that Bitcoin will fail with a great thud or a nuclear explosion. Not so. Bitcoin's failure (as well as success) will occur a day at a time, one bad decision at a time, one compromise at a time. Failure is a few errors in judgement repeated everyday. 

Failure looks like convenience. It looks like custodial services disguised as “innovation.” It looks like ETFs absorbing supply until Bitcoin becomes a zoo animal: admired, priced, but no longer free. I will not bother discussing how Coinbase has become one of the largest custodians for institutions thus creating another centralized chokepoint, the centralization of mining and mining pools, the core vs knots controversy, as well as the so-called strategic Bitcoin reserves (SBRs) that the suitcoiners are constantly touting. These are either growing pains or possibly symptoms of a much bigger problem.

I acknowledge the fact that Bitcoin is still in its early phases and a lot of these issues can be overcome, however the window is slowly closing to remove these centralized chokepoints and vulnerabilities. Especially given that the fiat collapse has already happened.

When Money Dies, Virtue Dies With It

Adam Fergusson’s When Money Dies is often misread as a technical history of Weimar hyperinflation. In truth, it is a study of moral disintegration that follows when money collapses. Fergusson shows that when money loses its integrity, society loses its sense of proportion. Signals invert. Prudence is punished. Speculation is rewarded.

That inversion is no longer confined to history books. The New York Post recently ran a story about actress Milana Vayntrub launching a wildfire relief initiative called Only Philanthropy. Donations were solicited through “flirty and tastefully risqué” content inspired by the OnlyFans model, raising over $500,000 for victims of the Los Angeles wildfires.

At first glance, it appears innovative. Benevolent, even. On closer inspection, it is neither a solution nor progress, it is a symptom. When disaster relief must be mediated through eroticized attention markets, the problem is not creativity. The problem is that core institutions have failed so completely that charity must now borrow the incentive structures of soft pornography to function.

The Pornification of Value

The OnlyFans model exists in large part because attention, particularly sexual attention,  can be monetized, often more lucratively than traditional professions. Today, some content creators on these platforms reportedly earn income that rivals, or even exceeds, what many engineers, doctors, and elite athletes make. For example, collectively, OF creators amassed $6.6 billion in 2023 alone, surpassing the NBA's total payroll of $4.9 billion, with some models outpacing LeBron James' earnings through non-nude content.

The modern attention economy already rewards intimacy more than craftsmanship, virality more than virtue, spectacle more than service. This is not prudish moralizing but it is an economic signal. When eroticized content consistently outcompetes sustained skill and long-term contribution in income generation, the incentive structure has inverted. When money dies, virtues follow. OF's rise isn't liberation; it's a symptom of this rot, where bodies become currency in a system where actual currency falters. 

The Only Philanthropy model intensifies this inversion. Imagine that to direct capital to wildfire victims, tragedy became a marketing hook, a cultural logic rooted in eroticized exchange. Disaster relief has now become a side effect of fetishized attention markets. Relief is contingent on titillation. For the victims, the implicit message is devastating:

Your pain was not enough. It required sexualized attention to be noticed.

In other words ‘Only Philanthropy’ is not just a fundraising story but a revelation of a decaying society in which traditional institutions no longer fulfill their moral obligations and economic rewards accrue to attention markets divorced from long-term societal value. When victims of catastrophe must compete in the attention economy, the problem is not innovation, the problem is that money is dying, and with it, the moral compass of those who depend on it.

This twisted society where sex work is the dominant industry isn’t the world i imagine most of us want to leave for our children.

The Real Question: What Are You Building For?

So with this in mind, I ask again; What would you do if Bitcoin fails? Would your entire world shatter? Would you literally lose everything?

If the answer is yes, you've misunderstood Bitcoin entirely. You've merely treated it as number go up technology (NgU) and a get-rich-quick scheme, a speculative asset, a ticket to Lambos and moon. You've confused the signal for the noise.

Bitcoin isn't about NgU. Bitcoin is about freedom.

It's a freedom transfer protocol disguised as money. It's a tool for opting out of a system that steals your energy through inflation, surveils your transactions, and controls your economic participation through permissioned access. It's the ability to save in something that can't be debased, transact with someone without asking permission, and preserve purchasing power across time and space.

If Bitcoin "fails" in the sense that it never becomes the global reserve currency, but you've used it to build a parallel economy, establish peer-to-peer trade relationships, develop skills outside the system, and construct a life less dependent on institutions designed to extract from you, then Bitcoin succeeded. For you. In the way that matters.

The question isn't whether Bitcoin wins some abstract victory over central banks. The question is whether you're using Bitcoin to build the kind of life you want to live, regardless of what the broader world does.

Freedom as First Principle

Bitcoin is fundamentally a freedom transfer protocol. Its technical properties; decentralization, permissionlessness, censorship resistance, fixed supply, are not ends in themselves but means to a more profound end: individual sovereignty and freedom of economic action.

This reframing changes everything. If Bitcoin is primarily a freedom protocol, then its "success" cannot be measured in fiat price appreciation or institutional adoption. Such metrics represent category errors, attempting to measure revolutionary potential using the yardstick of the system being overthrown. Bitcoin's success is not measurable in dollars.

Instead, success must be evaluated by freedom metrics. How many people can transact without permission? How many have escaped financial surveillance? How many have achieved genuine monetary sovereignty? How robust are peer-to-peer networks? How resistant is the system to coercion and capture?

By these measures, Bitcoin may already be failing. not despite its rising fiat price, but partially because of it. High prices attracted institutional capital, which demanded institutional infrastructure, which required regulatory compliance, which necessitated surveillance and control. The very success we celebrated may have contained the seeds of capture.

The Choice Before Us

When you truly understand Bitcoin as a freedom protocol, then the relevant question is not "when Lambo?" but "how free?" Your decisions, daily and cumulatively, determine the answer.

Will you acquire bitcoin peer-to-peer despite inconvenience? Will you run your own node despite technical barriers? Will you measure your wealth in bitcoin terms rather than fiat proxies? Will you accept bitcoin for your labour and goods? These are not trivial questions. They represent the difference between genuine revolution and mere asset class diversification. They separate freedom-seekers from number-seekers. They distinguish those building parallel systems from those merely seeking better returns within the existing system.

More fundamentally, they reveal your time preference and time preference is civilization's bedrock.  Contrast this with the high time preference of speculators waiting for NgU. They want wealth without work, freedom without sacrifice, revolution without risk. They treat Bitcoin as a lottery ticket rather than a foundation for building. If Bitcoin becomes merely another vehicle for high time preference behavior, it will have failed at its deepest level, regardless of its fiat price.

The uncomfortable truth: you cannot build a low time preference civilization on high time preference behaviour. You cannot achieve freedom through convenience. You cannot create parallel systems by taking the path of least resistance through KYC'd institutions. Every shortcut is a compromise. Every compromise is a step toward capture

The Remnant and The Path Forward

History suggests revolutions succeed not through majority adoption but through committed minorities, what Albert Jay Nock called "the Remnant." These individuals remain uncompromised by expedience, unbowed by institutional pressure, unwilling to trade principle for convenience. They understand that freedom is not granted but seized, not negotiated but exercised, not purchased but practiced.

If Bitcoin fails, it will fail because we chose convenience over sovereignty, because we measured success in fiat terms, because we normalized the very surveillance and control mechanisms Bitcoin was designed to obsolete, because we forgot that freedom; real freedom demands sacrifice, vigilance, and uncompromising principles.

Build Anyway

What I've learned is that the people most worried about Bitcoin "failing" in the technical sense are those who've invested nothing but capital. They bought an asset. They're waiting for a return. They've built nothing, changed nothing, learnt nothing new.

The people least worried about Bitcoin failing are those who've used it to fundamentally restructure their relationship with money, work, and freedom. They've:

• Learned to run a node, verifying rules rather than trusting institutions

• Established peer-to-peer trade relationships outside KYC'd rails

• Developed skills that create value independent of fiat employment

• Built businesses that accept Bitcoin and pay employees in Bitcoin

• Created local circular economies where Bitcoin flows without touching fiat

• Taught others what they've learned, expanding the remnant

These people understand something crucial: The victory isn't Bitcoin replacing the dollar. The victory is building a life where it doesn't matter if it does.

This is why the question "What will you do if Bitcoin fails?" is so clarifying. It reveals whether you're building on Bitcoin or simply betting on it. Whether you see it as a freedom protocol or just another speculative asset. Whether you're part of the remnant or just another tourist waiting for NgU.

The Remnant Builds in the Dark

The fiat system will not go gentle into that good night. It will fight. It will try to co-opt. It will regulate, capture, and neuter every threat it can. Paper bitcoin, ETF wrappers, KYC requirements, mining restrictions, node criminalization, every tool will be deployed.

Bitcoin might "lose" in the sense that it never overthrows the fiat regime. The central banks might successfully contain it. Hyperbitcoinization might not happen in our lifetimes. Even if Bitcoin were to cease existing today, the genie is not going back in the bottle. There is now verifiable proof that decentralized money can exist without the blessing of the state, and whatever replaces it will be even better, in the same way that Bitcoin was a better invention than previous attempts at digital money.

That said, the remnant will persist; because they're not building for hyperbitcoinization. They're building because the alternative, remaining fully captured by a system designed to extract and control, is unacceptable. They're building because money is dying, institutions are failing, and someone needs to construct something worth inheriting.

They're building because freedom isn't something you wait for permission to have. It's something you take, one transaction at a time, one node at a time, one relationship at a time.

So ask yourself: If Bitcoin "fails," what will you have built? What skills will you have developed? What relationships will you have established? What freedom will you have claimed?

If the answer is "nothing", if your entire Bitcoin strategy is "buy and hold until moon", then you're not a Bitcoiner. You're a speculator cosplaying as a revolutionary, and should the system co-opt Bitcoin, you'll move on to the next thing, having learned nothing and built nothing.

But if you've used Bitcoin to fundamentally restructure your life, to build parallel systems, to establish sovereignty over your own economic participation, then Bitcoin has already won. For you. In the only way that matters.

The collapse has already happened. The question is: What are you building in the ruins? Build peer-to-peer. Build without permission. Build like your freedom depends on it, because it does.