It seems like every week lately a new country has their own "strategy" with today's being Brazil. It is pretty obvious what is happening at this point. Back before the price ruled everything, these entities would be considered an attack on Bitcoin. Now, they are the bribe that gets our community to sell out the goal for. Being totally honest, I don't even know what the goal of Bitcoin is anymore. Certainly not P2P currency, or removing power from central banks... Who cares though right? Bitcoin to the moon! We're all getting lambos!
Your post is food for thought.
My own take - but I haven't thought about it much yet, honestly.
WTF were we expecting? The best asset in the world left to a bunch of cyberpunks smart enough to see the truth back in the day? Of course human greed - of which corporate greed is the more structured incarnation - would take over. OK, maybe the P2P road seems a bit troublesome right now. However, Lightning does work, and I'm using a nifty app that moves sats in seconds, no questions asked.
Apart from P2P currency, the goal of bitcoin could still be protecting money from evaporation via inflation. And in due time, possibly disciplining rogue central banks that solve each and every problem by what they know best how to do - namely printing. Gold failed at that, after Nixon blah blah blah, and it is too easy to confiscate: remember Eisenhower - and Hitler and Mussolini and all the other warmongers thirsty for war funds before that, back to the Incas maybe?
Now bitcoin has this thing about private keys and boating accidents that makes it much, much better than gold at establishing a baseline for value. That might be the ultimate goal.
Interesting times indeed.
I find this topic to be extremely interesting for several reasons.
Obviously, there are risks associated with these giant players coming into Bitcoin. I think the main attack vectors end up being two things. First of all, rehypothication, and second of all, honeypot custodians.
But two popular narratives running right now kind of bug me.
The idea that it's somehow negative for certain people, organizations or even nations to be buying it is against the ideal of what Bitcoin is in the first place. There can be and should be no limits on who can own it. That is something we should be on the lookout for. And if these plays are a plan towards that end, then yes, this could turn out badly.
The second one is the fact that we seem to have given up on Bitcoin as a currency. My problem with that narrative is I feel it is too short-sighted. I think Bitcoin has to establish itself as an asset with actual value before people will start using it for trade. Unlike Fiat, they're not guns behind it. So people can't be forced to use it to pay taxes or anything else.
But I do think people like us feeling warning flags going up makes sense because there are a lot of ways this can go sideways and there may even be ways for Bitcoin to be tamed, as Charlie Munger said, some time back.
Finally, we are also in uncharted waters. We've never seen an asset like this before as a race and whether we follow Gresham's Law or Thier's Law or one for a while and then the other. I mean, we've never seen this type of asset until now on the world stage. What's going to happen? It's interesting to speculate.
Good discussion though.