Szabo’s Bitcoin Prophecy: The World’s Too Thick to See It!

by

Ah, the inimitable Nick Szabo, that doyen of cryptography and computer science, whose intellect has fathered more than a few Bitcoin bastards, has deigned to grace us with another of his bullish prognostications. How delightful!

Despite the wretched underperformance of the so-called “flagship cryptocurrency” (a term that reeks of maritime pretension) relative to the venerable gold, Szabo insists that the market’s collective ignorance is, in fact, a cause for jubilation. How very convenient for him!

“Still plenty of upside,” he declares with the air of a man who has just discovered fire, simply because the masses remain as clueless about the technology as a debutante at a rugby match.

The Great Divergence: A Farce in Two Acts

This pearl of wisdom emerged from a twittering debate on X (formerly Twitter, now a cesspit of intellectual flatulence) concerning the “debasement trade.” The skeptics, those poor souls, have dared to question Bitcoin’s pretensions as “digital gold,” now that it lags behind the lustrous metal like a lame horse in a steeplechase.

The fracas was ignited by one @Buhlaque, whose frustration with Bitcoin’s failure to act as a hedge is as palpable as a bad oyster. “If gold and BTC are going in opposite directions due to this debasement trade, what gives BTC its value if it doesn’t work as a hedge…?” he wailed, his head no doubt spinning like a top in a tornado. “I can’t wrap my head around why BTC works as a hedge against debasement long-term if when massive debasement happens short-term, gold goes up and BTC goes down.”

Szabo, ever the patronizing sage, retorted that Bitcoin cannot be judged as a mature hedge just yet, for its price is still on a “learning curve” rather than governed by pure monetary mechanics. How very indulgent of him to educate the unwashed masses!

“Bitcoin is riding a learning curve, like a NASDAQ stock,” he penned with the gravitas of a man explaining the obvious to a child. “There are still plenty of people like you who haven’t learned why Bitcoin in the long term works as a hedge against debasement. So there is still plenty of upside.”

He then proceeded to argue that Bitcoin’s historical gains (from the infamous “pizza purchase” to the present) were driven by early adopters realizing the value of this technology, not merely by inflation. How quaintly reductionist!

“It’s hard to tell that Bitcoin protects against debasement from just its price, since most of the price rise since the pizza purchase has been due to the learning curve, not to debasement (fiat has fallen, but not by nearly as much as Bitcoin has risen!),” Szabo explained, his tone dripping with the condescension of a man who has solved all the world’s problems over breakfast.

He concluded with a dense, technical defense of why Bitcoin is superior to gold, asserting that the “upside” exists because most investors still do not grasp the engineering differences between the two assets. How very reassuring for those of us who find such complexities as baffling as a Rubik’s cube in the dark!

“To understand why Bitcoin has and very likely will protect in the long-term against debasement, better than gold has and will, requires deep understanding of the underlying respective technologies that are gold and Bitcoin, especially in terms of their respective extents and qualities of trust minimization, and it requires knowing why trust minimization is valuable,” Szabo wrote. “These kinds of understandings are still uncommon.”

And there you have it, dear reader: the world is too thick to see the brilliance of Bitcoin, and thus, the upside remains as vast as Szabo’s ego. How utterly Waugh-some!

Read More

2026-01-28 11:24