The so-called Bitcoin Standard, as described by Saifedean Ammous, is a perversion of Bitcoin’s original intent—a retreat into the fetters that Bitcoin was explicitly designed to shatter. His vision of BTC as “digital gold” misses the essence of Bitcoin, twisting it into a passive asset meant to sit idly under the guard of trusted third parties, accumulating dust instead of fulfilling its destiny as a medium of exchange. In the true spirit of digital cash, Bitcoin was meant to liberate individuals from the bondage of intermediaries, enabling direct, immediate transactions without a central overseer. But Ammous seeks to chain it, to relegate it to the dark vaults of custodial control, abandoning the notion of Bitcoin as an active force in daily commerce.

Consider the original purpose outlined in Bitcoin's white paper: to allow for direct, peer-to-peer transactions, to eliminate the need for any “trusted third party” in every casual exchange, from the smallest to the grandest. This is a vision of autonomy, of freedom—not from money itself but from the parasitic hands that skim from every transaction, from the walls that prevent value from moving freely. Bitcoin, as cash, was meant to live and breathe, moving through countless transactions, empowering the individual by replacing trust with verifiable, transparent cryptographic proof.

Yet Ammous would take this creation and cage it. He presents BTC not as an instrument of freedom, but as a relic, to be stored and hoarded, removed from circulation, stripped of its practical utility. His “Bitcoin Standard” encourages people to lock their BTC away in third-party exchanges—bucket shops that hold it on their behalf, for a fee, under rules they neither control nor truly understand. This is not freedom; it is abdication. Rather than being held by individuals, BTC under the Bitcoin Standard is trapped in institutional custody, vulnerable to seizure, regulation, and corruption by the very systems Bitcoin was designed to circumvent.

This system demands trust in those who hold the keys, who oversee the accounts, who act as gatekeepers to an asset that, by its design, should never require a gatekeeper. Instead of being used as cash, BTC becomes a speculative asset, controlled by intermediaries who wield power over users and whose interest lies in profit, not in individual empowerment. Under Ammous’s vision, BTC cannot be transacted freely or fluidly; it is bound by the whims of those intermediaries and the limitations they impose, making it inaccessible and unusable in the very manner that would make it digital cash.

The Bitcoin Standard renders BTC inert, frozen in speculation, divorced from its potential as a functioning medium of exchange. What Ammous promotes is not a currency, not digital cash, but a commodity locked in stasis, passive and dependent. He denies the fluidity that cash demands, transforming BTC into a fetish of wealth preservation, an asset meant to be held and admired from afar, but never touched, never used. In his world, BTC is not a tool of the individual; it is an artifact under institutional control, returned to the grasp of custodians who serve themselves before all others.

Ammous’s vision is a betrayal of Bitcoin’s purpose, a submission to the very forces it was designed to escape. He would have us believe that this passive, frozen asset is the culmination of Bitcoin’s promise. But in reality, it is a retreat—a cowardly acquiescence to the intermediaries and institutions that Bitcoin’s creator sought to render obsolete. BTC, as Ammous envisions it, is a prison, not a liberation. It is the antithesis of digital cash, a mockery of autonomy, a system designed not to free the individual, but to entangle them further in chains of institutional dependency.

S. Tominaga AKA CSW
Nov 3, 2024
https://x.com/CsTominaga/status/1852927894550728819?t=da9C16a1YH2EwgdTExVkAg&s=19

https://t.me/S_Tominaga/1802