Our boy WumboLogic AKA StopAndDecrypt AKA The Angry Storm Trooper took to Twitter yesterday to drop some HEAT on us. What you see above is only the beginning of an incredible rant that compares Bitcoin upgrades to the upgrades that telecom giants have made to their protocols over decades, puts Bitcoin's progress into proper context, and explains why Bitcoin becomes harder and harder to change over time. Definitely check it out if you're sitting in your cube right now after a long holiday weekend, braindead from all of the food you've consumed over the past five days. This will get that brain back, thinking critically.

The most important thing to remember when attempting to measure Bitcoin's progress, as S&D points out, is that we are striving towards ideals. Bitcoin did not possess these ideals when the Genesis Block was mined, and still cannot claim these ideals today. The Genesis Block marked the first step on Bitcoin's journey towards becoming a store of value, becoming immutable, and becoming leaderless. Every day that passes and Bitcoin isn't crippled by a critical bug, destroyed by a Nation State attack, or doesn't collapse to $0 makes the case for Bitcoin stronger. Obviously, we are in the midst of a collapse of confidence in Bitcoin as evidenced by the plummeting price over the last couple of weeks, but so goes the nature of a new monetary good in the middle of its bootstrapping phase. Bitcoin is an alien technology that people are attempting to wrap their heads around at the moment. How does it work? Could it be the new reserve currency of the planet? Will it be usurped by a competing cryptocurrency? Is this all just a big ponzi?

As the public continues to sway back and forth between their confidence levels of the answers to the questions above, the price of Bitcoin reacts accordingly. I believe last year most of the market was focusing on the third question above and had come to the conclusion that the answer was "yes". The narrative that persisted last year was that Bitcoin is boring, slow, and rudimentary while ICOs are the wave of the future, and the mania around this hot toy + narrative drove prices into irrational levels. After all the hype was finished and people began to realize that ICOs brought practically zero value to the space other than moving money from retailers' pockets to token launchers and their Silicon Valley VC buddies' pockets, the market subsequently, and justifiably, collapsed. Dragging Bitcoin down with it. Now we sit here, befuddled by the range of emotions the market has experienced over the last 12-months, waiting for the dust to settle.

As has happened throughout Bitcoin's entire existence, I believe we are in the stage in which people who got hosed chasing pipe dreams are beginning to really question why they threw money at this stuff at all. Not everyone who lost money is doing this, but enough to help create the next floor from which we will ascend into another hype cycle to infect more minds. Bitcoin is empirically fairer, harder, and free than any other currency that has exisited on this rock. As more and more people begin to realize this, Bitcoin's price floors after blow-off tops continue to be higher than previous bubble cycles, creating a staircase that we'll continue to climb until we have a completely distributed, leaderless, immutable store of value.

I really strayed from the theme of the thread that sparked this train of thought, so make sure you check it out, as The Angry Storm Trooper is much smarter than I am.

Final thought...

Big time candle guy now. I don't know what that says about me, but I don't care. Give me all the good scents.