TECH Why I'm Bullish on Bitcoin and Stablecoins, Not Crypto
Bitcoin's back above six figures and stablecoins are about to get an actual legal framework. None of that makes the average crypto project any less of a scam.
Bitcoin touched $112,000 in May and has spent the back half of June sat in the low $100,000s, and for the first time since a stranger on a forum paid 10,000 coins for two pizzas in 2010 and got a fair trade by the standards of the day, I don’t think the price is the interesting part of this story.
Bitcoin’s actual pitch has never needed the hoodies
Bitcoin is a ledger, copied across far more machines than any single company could plausibly control, that issues a maximum of 21 million coins on a schedule that’s been public since 2009 and hasn’t been changed once. That’s the whole pitch: scarcity you can verify yourself, without asking a bank or a government to vouch for it. Everything else built on top of that idea, the ten thousand knock-off tokens, the JPEGs of bored-looking apes, the coin named after a dog that a different, funnier dog later got its own coin for, is a separate industry wearing the same jacket, and treating it as the same bet is the first mistake most people make.
Stablecoins are the boring, useful part, and boring is the point
The US Senate passed the GENIUS Act on 17 June by 68 votes to 30, giving dollar-backed stablecoins an actual federal framework for the first time instead of a patchwork of state licences and vibes. Done properly, a stablecoin is a token backed one-to-one by real reserves, usually short-term US Treasury bills sat in an account somewhere, so that one coin is always redeemable for one dollar. Rather than a bet on price movement, it’s a way of moving dollars over the internet at three in the morning without a bank in the middle taking two days and a fee to do it, which might be the least exciting sentence I’ve written about money and also the reason I think it’s the part of this industry that actually sticks around.
The scams are a real, separate problem
None of the above makes the surrounding industry any less full of scams, and pretending otherwise is how people end up defending things that deserve no defending. FTX wasn’t a stablecoin or a Bitcoin failure, it was a company that took customer deposits and lent them to a related trading firm without telling anyone, and its founder is currently serving a 25-year sentence for it. Ordinary people are also still being talked, over weeks and sometimes months, into moving their savings into an app by someone they’ve never met, a pattern with a grim official name now, “pig butchering,” because the con artist spends the early weeks fattening up the relationship before the slaughter. Both of those are real, current problems, and neither one is an argument against a ledger that issues 21 million coins on a fixed schedule, any more than a Wall Street Ponzi scheme is an argument against the existence of a stock exchange.
Where I actually think this goes
Forbes ran the numbers on a $150,000 Bitcoin by the end of the year this week, on the basis that ETFs and corporate treasuries are absorbing supply faster than miners are releasing it, and for once I think the mechanism holds up better than the number usually does in these pieces. I wouldn’t put money on the specific figure. I would put money on the general shape of the argument, because you can’t have this much of the available supply getting locked into ETF wrappers and company balance sheets and expect the price to just sit still.
My own guess, for what it’s worth from someone who still isn’t buying a JPEG of an ape, is somewhere in that region by the turn of the year. Ask me again in twelve months whether that held up.