Is Bitcoin Going According to Plan? Gold, Saylor, Satoshi | Dan Held

**David** (0:03)
Bankless Nation, I'm here with Dan Held. Dan is probably one of the most OG Bitcoiners that we've had on the show in the past. Dan, welcome back to Bankless.

**Dan Held** (0:11)
Thanks for having me.

**David** (0:12)
I just want to have a pretty broad zoomed out discussion. Dan, you and I have been both in crypto Twitter, you're in Bitcoin Twitter, I'm in Ethereum Twitter, whatever, for, it feels like a decade now. It is approaching a decade, at least for me. I think you got into Bitcoin before I came into crypto.

**Dan Held** (0:28)
Crypto is kind of like dog years, right? Like every year that passes is like seven years. So we've been in the space for effectively about 100 years.

**David** (0:35)
Right, it has certainly how it feels. And so I kind of just want to ask you, like, if we go back and put ourselves in the shoes of our younger selves, like the 2018s, the 2020 era, is Bitcoin going according to plan? It's kind of the broad premise I want to investigate in this episode. So I'll ask that question to you.

**Dan Held** (0:55)
Yeah, and the reason why I said yes to this is I think it's a pretty fun one, both from my perspective as a Bitcoin maxi who's been in this space for 15 years, and also I'd be curious to get your side of this. But I think, let me kind of zoom back all the way to the beginning, because I got in in 2011, started purchasing in 2012, but I created my Mt. Gox account in December 2011
Back then, Bitcoin is a very rebellious, anti-government sort of mechanism, right? You had people who were into Silk Road, peer-to-peer file sharing, so torrenting. Those are in online gambling. The origins of Bitcoin came from a pretty, I would say, rugged place. It wasn't, this wasn't clean, nice, institutionalized, anything like that. So Bitcoin's core ethos, I used to joke, is 3D-printed guns, drugs, and Bitcoin. That's what it originally was.
Came from the cypherpunk slash extropian communities, which were very libertarian meaning. What's interesting about that is both, that was the cultural values around the Bitcoin code itself. So you've got the code of Bitcoin, which represents what Bitcoin is.
It's essentially just the code that runs across every Bitcoin node, and that's what we all agree upon, is the Bitcoin network. That is what Bitcoin is. Then there's the community and culture around it. So that's the old culture. Today, the culture is much more institutionalized. You have Bitcoin and ETFs. You've got top investment banks. You've got Fed chairmans. You have presidents talking about Bitcoin. You have them referencing it in a positive and negative manner. You know, Bitcoin has largely been institutionalized. And so I think there's a lot of hand wringing around the idea that Bitcoin has been captured, that the original Bitcoin cultural ethos has changed. I do think that's true. So, you know, I'm not going to deny that Bitcoin's cultural ethos has changed a bit. I think a lot of people view it as just another asset in their portfolio, rather than truly understanding it. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. People buy a lot of assets that don't really understand them. People buy gold or the S&P 500 You know, with the S&P 500, I often joke, can you tell me one of the quarterly earnings of any company, the S&P 500? Most people can't. But that's fine. You know, so Bitcoin, in terms of the obfuscation of understanding how it works culturally, of course, I wish everyone understood how it works and would keep all their Bitcoin on a treasure or a ledger. But that's just not how mainstream adoption works. Now, when it comes to Bitcoin's core code, because that's ultimately representative of what Bitcoin is, you know, did we see institutions have any sort of capture of how Bitcoin's core code functions, or do they push any changes that were implemented? And we don't see any of those. So from Bitcoin's code perspective, it didn't bend the knee, the institution's bent the knee to bring Bitcoin into it. So I don't think Bitcoin has compromised on its core code values, but the community certainly has changed. And as an OG, I don't mind that. I think this is how institutionalized and mainstream adoption works. I'm a weird libertarian guy who studied finance during the 2008 financial crisis, got radicalized from that, grew up in Texas, I own seven guns. I'm not a normal person.
This is not normal person behavior. I'm a weird libertarian, formerly gold bug, got into Bitcoin.
So I don't expect everyone to have my same cultural values. So Bitcoin's culture has certainly changed, but that doesn't mean that Bitcoin itself has changed at all. And certainly we would have seen that in the code.