Stroll by the Bitcoin mempool these days and you’ll see less bustle than at a salad bar in a Texas steakhouse. It’s so underwhelmed, you’d half expect tumbleweeds to roll past your transaction, should you ever bother to send one. Naturally, this has provoked hand-wringing and eyebrow acrobatics among those who once believed Bitcoin would buy them coffee, lattes, and a Lambo. ☕🚗💸
Bitcoin as a Retail Marvel: Is the Dream Deader Than Disco? 🕺
The Bitcoin blockchain, once lauded as the mall of the future (if the mall charged you $30 to buy chewing gum), now looks less used than that gym membership everybody regrets by February. The ongoing debate? Whether Bitcoin as a currency for the people has quietly packed its bags and left town, or if it’s merely getting a spa treatment in the back room until everyone figures out what “digital gold” actually means. 😏
On social media, Isaiah—a Bitcoin fan, presumably named after the prophet—gazed into the digital abyss and noticed basically nothing happening. According to him, the mempool’s so empty, it may as well be one of those “Here before it was cool” hipster bars… except not even spammers show up for happy hour:
Bitcoin’s at 104k and the mempool looks like this. No one is transacting. Retail is gone. Not even spammers care enough to spam it anymore. Insane.
Isaiah’s stunning hypothesis? Institutional overlords like Blackrock and ETFs have taken over, and retail users are now rarer than someone admitting they read the whole Bitcoin white paper. 🧙♂️
Of course, because this is the internet, the crowd did not wave candles and start a group hug. Pierre Rochard, veteran Bitcoiner and unofficial confusion amplifier, chimed in. To him, the lack of congestion was a miracle—a sign that Bitcoin had scaled so beautifully that nobody noticed because, well, nobody’s actually using it right now. He even declared (with possibly an entire eyebrow raised):
“Bitcoin has successfully scaled. Bewilderment intensifies,”
One can only imagine shrill gasps from rival keyboard warriors. Sure, only 0.01% of humans own Bitcoin, but look, at least they get through the checkout line really fast! 🛒
Not everyone’s ready for the parade, though. James O’Beirne, a Core developer, dusted off his soapbox to insist the “successful scaling” line was about as plausible as self-driving hoverboards. To him, all this emptiness just means the average person will need a bank-sized vault, three lawyers, and possibly a moon landing to do self-custody:
Bitcoin has not meaningfully scaled. If it stops here, it will go the way of gold: self-custodial use being totally out of reach for all but the richest, locked away in KYC’d warehouses. Impotent.
O’Beirne, never one to pass up an existential crisis, warned that without true retail adoption, even Bitcoin’s sacred 21 million limit could be up for a haircut. After all, if block rewards dwindle and miners can’t pay the rent, who’s to say the rules won’t suddenly change? In the grand tradition of technological optimism, beware: today’s digital gold may become tomorrow’s digital paperweight. 🪙💤
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2025-05-14 03:09