This thread was created by me on the Romanian board and translated into English now for the international one.
I've been wondering for a while how the Romanian community of BitcoinTalk could be revived. I'm more than sure that we have a pretty significant number of Romanians on the forum. However, as far as I can see, most of them are silent.
Therefore, I have decided to create a topic about a vision on Bitcoin's future. I only have two simple questions I'd like to be answered: How long have you been in the crypto sphere and how do you envision Bitcoin in the short/long term future?
I am going to begin by expressing my own ideas.
The so-called 'journey' in the middle of which I am right now began in late 2013. I won't get much into detail - long story short, I found out about Bitcoin's existence through news.My perspective about Bitcoin has changed, unfortunately, negatively among these 7 years of experience. From the idea that Bitcoin could turn the economical and governmental systems of the world upside down, today I see it as nothing else but an obstacle the governments overcame long ago and for which they surely have a plan of attack so that it would never be a threat for them be it in the present or short and long term future.
If until 2016-2017 there were no laws regarding cryptocurrencies and the law could be easily interpreted so that nobody knew for sure what they should or should not do properly about owning, using and transactioning them, today we have laws that appear as if they are opposing more and more the fundamental ideas of cryptocurrencies - almost as if the intention behind these regulations was to destroy them while using this entire time the "cryptocurrencies are used in criminal activities" excuse.
This has changed, in my opinion, Bitcoin's destiny. If in 2015 I could peacefully conduct transactions anywhere with cryptocurrencies and ATMs did not have anonymity limits, today I feel taken over by the world governments' regulations that ruthlessly entered my personal, private life.
The so-called "support" of cryptocurrencies by the states has proven, in my opinion, to be exactly the opposite. To be more precise, "sustaining" them has led to the resistance in front of genius Satoshi Nakamoto's essential ideas he began with. Through some kind of sabotage, the state could argue that being against the regulations means implicitly sustaining illegal activities. A kind of
"Let us seize your personal life and control even this attempt of freeing yourself from the chain of wage slavery and criminal banks or we consider you a terrorist".
Today we have all these surveillance measures. Some of them are partial surveillance, others are surveillance from start to end. While we are fighting the pandemic and the incredible influx of uncertain information, surveillance is taking over our privacy "step by step" as our president Klaus Iohannis says, privacy becoming therefore an idea, a definition from the past.
Taking all the above into account, putting all the information in a nucleus, I can only get to one conclusion: Bitcoin's future will either have an abrupt and sad ending or will represent our revolution against the system of modern enslavery and against the flux of authoritarian and imposing laws we are witnessing right now.
The existence of privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Monero surely did provoke fear inside all the world's governments, but the volume of transactions does not appear to be a threat to them so far.. which calms them down. But if Bitcoin ever fails because of these governments and we'd all move to the privacy-focused Monero immediately, would Satoshi Nakamoto's vision still be achieved? Would we still be able to finish what he started more than a decade ago, trying to turn upside down the attempt of "those above us" to transform our privacy into a definition of the past?
To me, the future is now uncertain. I will never give up, but I am afraid a significant number of apparent supporters of Satoshi's vision would, leaving us with no more soldiers in our war. I am afraid that too many of the ones currently supporting cryptocurrencies are only doing it because they have the hope of getting rich one day and are capable of accepting any sacrifice as long as their hope would become reality.
But nobody realizes that the privacy we knew and our freedom are the wealth we've been taught to ignore for a lifetime.