BITCOIN DOESN'T NEED A REVOLUTION
Share
The idea of revolution is reassuring. It provides a form, a narrative, an identifiable moment. It promises a before and an after, a clean break, a spectacular shift. Human societies love revolutions because they resemble simple stories, with victors and vanquished, dates, symbols, crowds, and flags. In the collective imagination, changing the world implies overthrowing something, seizing a palace, burning down an old order to establish a new one. Bitcoin doesn't fit into this framework. And that's precisely why it works.
Bitcoin never sought to overthrow states. It didn't proclaim the end of banks. It didn't call for monetary insurrection. It didn't designate an enemy to be defeated. It appeared discreetly, as software, published on a mailing list, without a leader, without a political manifesto, without an explicit promise. Those who saw it as a revolution projected their own expectations, their anger, their fantasies onto it. The protocol itself remained silent. It simply continued to produce blocks.
The difference between revolution and erosion is fundamental. A revolution acts through shock. It concentrates energy, accelerates time, and forces events. It almost always creates a symmetrical reaction. One overthrown power is succeeded by another, often more centralized, more violent, and more distrustful. History is full of revolutions that promised freedom but gave birth to new forms of oppression. Revolution presupposes a center to be seized. It presupposes that power is localized, identifiable, and capturable. Bitcoin rests on the opposite intuition: modern power is not a throne, but a network.
The current monetary system doesn't hold up because its leaders are particularly competent or benevolent. It holds up because it's deeply embedded in our habits, infrastructure, and daily reflexes. It's invisible. It operates through inertia. We don't use a currency because we believe in it, but because everything around us is structured so that there are no easy alternatives. Overthrowing such a system through a frontal revolution is almost impossible. Bitcoin doesn't attempt this path. It offers something else: a lateral exit.
This exit is neither spectacular nor heroic. It is individual, gradual, sometimes tedious. It begins with a download, a private key, a few transactions. It requires no permission. It makes no noise. Each person who chooses Bitcoin doesn't overturn anything. They simply cease to fully participate in a system. It's a shift, not an attack. A quiet desertion.
Erosion is a slow process. It doesn't create a dramatic media moment. It doesn't produce iconic images. It acts over time, through the accumulation of micro-choices. A cliff doesn't collapse all at once because the sea attacks it head-on, but because each wave removes a tiny amount of material, day after day, year after year. Bitcoin acts in the same way on monetary power. It doesn't confront the state. It partially ignores it. And this indifference is far more corrosive than declared opposition.
This is why Bitcoin disappoints those who expect a revolution. It doesn't offer a symbolic victory. It doesn't promise the immediate end of injustice. It doesn't liberate the masses by decree. It even functions in an unjust, authoritarian, and unequal world. It doesn't seek to correct the morality of the system, but to make something else possible alongside it. This apparent modesty is often misunderstood. It's criticized for not moving fast enough, for not being political enough, for not being inclusive enough. In reality, Bitcoin is profoundly apolitical in its method, and that's what makes it politically powerful in the long run.
Time is a central element. States think in terms of electoral cycles, mandates, and budgetary emergencies. Their horizon is short, often constrained by the need to maintain apparent stability. Bitcoin thinks in terms of blocks, decades, and immutable rules. It doesn't adapt to political circumstances. It doesn't accelerate to please. It doesn't relax its rules to manage a crisis. This rigidity is often perceived as a weakness. It's the opposite. It creates a stable reference point in a world of opportunistic decisions.
When faced with a revolution, power tenses up. It defends itself. It mobilizes its forces, its laws, its narratives. When faced with slow erosion, it hesitates. It doesn't know when to react. Too soon, it loses credibility. Too late, it becomes useless. Bitcoin places institutions in this uncomfortable gray area. As long as adoption is marginal, it can be ignored or ridiculed. When it becomes significant, it is already too late to stop it without revealing the coercive nature of the system.
This is also why Bitcoin isn't spectacular. It doesn't need slogans. It doesn't need charismatic leaders. It doesn't need to convince everyone. Its growth isn't continuous and exponential. It progresses in stages, in waves, often linked to crises in the existing system. Each crisis acts as a catalyst. Not as a call to revolution, but as a silent invitation to seek an alternative.
Power that disappears silently is the most fragile, because it doesn't know when it's losing its relevance. States will continue to exist. Banks will continue to exist. Fiat currencies will likely continue to exist for a long time. Bitcoin doesn't replace them in the traditional sense. It makes them optional for certain uses, for certain people, in certain contexts. And this optionality is a far deeper threat than confrontation.
It's important to emphasize a point that's often misunderstood: Bitcoin is not a weapon. It's not designed to destroy. It's designed to function independently. If tomorrow all states were to become perfectly virtuous, transparent, and responsible, Bitcoin would continue to exist without changing a single line of code. It doesn't need an enemy to justify its existence. This neutrality makes it elusive. You can't negotiate with a protocol. You can't co-opt it without accepting its rules. You can't corrupt it without openly breaking it.
The erosion is also psychological. Bitcoin is gradually changing how individuals perceive time, value, and responsibility. It teaches patience to those who truly engage with it. It discourages impulsive consumption. It challenges the logic of perpetual debt. These changes are invisible in short-term macroeconomic statistics, but they profoundly transform behavior. An individual who thinks long-term is more difficult to govern through fear or urgency.
Unlike a revolution, Bitcoin promises nothing to those who adopt it. It doesn't guarantee success. It offers no assurance of wealth or recognition. It demands cognitive effort, discipline, and an acceptance of uncertainty. Many will give up along the way. And that's normal. Bitcoin doesn't seek to seduce the masses. It seeks to remain consistent with its own rules. This consistency is its main strength.
The spectacle of revolution is seductive because it flatters the collective ego. It gives the impression of participating in something grand, historic, and visible. Bitcoin rejects this gratification. It moves forward without applause, without celebration, without announcing its victory. When a government adopts a more inflationary monetary policy, Bitcoin doesn't react. When a bank fails, Bitcoin doesn't comment. It's already elsewhere. It offers continuity where the existing system produces disruptions.
This lack of spectacle is frustrating for those who want to believe in a final confrontation. But it is reassuring for those who understand the fragility of human systems. Lasting changes almost never happen in the spotlight. They take hold discreetly, until they become obvious in retrospect. We don't remember the precise moment when a technology became indispensable. We simply realize that we can no longer do without it.
Bitcoin doesn't need a revolution because it doesn't seek to seize power. It changes the nature of power by making it less centralized. It doesn't abolish institutions. It reduces their monopoly. It doesn't abolish the law. It offers a space where some rules are mathematical rather than political. This distinction is crucial. A revolution replaces one law with another. Bitcoin offers a domain where the law is written into the code, and where changing it requires a far broader consensus than that of a parliament.
The slow process of obsolescence is often invisible to those at the heart of the system. They continue to operate as before, convinced of their continued relevance. Then one day, they realize that their power is no longer exclusive. That alternatives exist. That their ability to exert control is limited by the possibility of exiting the system. Bitcoin does not eliminate the state. It gradually strips it of its indispensability in the monetary sphere.
This gradual withdrawal is profoundly destabilizing for power structures. A revolution can be suppressed. A revolt can be crushed. A movement can be demonized. But how can one combat an open-source, global, centrally-less protocol, used voluntarily by dispersed individuals? Any attempt at repression reveals the fragility of authority and accelerates awareness. Any attempt at co-optation runs up against the rigidity of the rules.
Bitcoin is moving slowly, but it's moving forward with no turning back. Once someone understands that a functional alternative to state-backed currency exists, that knowledge cannot be erased. Even if they stop using Bitcoin, the concept remains. The possibility remains. It's a seed planted in the collective imagination. Revolutions often fail because they focus too much hope on a single moment. Bitcoin disperses hope over time.
It's tempting to want to accelerate this process, to force adoption, to politicize Bitcoin, to use it as an ideological banner. But every attempt to transform it into a revolution betrays its fundamental nature. Bitcoin doesn't need to be loved or understood by everyone. It needs to remain functional, predictable, and incorruptible. Its victory, if we can even use that word, will have no official date.
The power that disappears silently is the one that failed to foresee its gradual replacement by something simpler, more robust, and more honest in its rules. Bitcoin doesn't herald the end of states. It heralds the end of a monopoly. And this nuance changes everything. States will continue to exist, but they will have to contend with a new reality: the possibility for individuals to no longer be entirely dependent on their currency.
Bitcoin isn't revolutionary because it doesn't promise a better world. It offers a more neutral tool. It's up to each individual to make something of it. This lack of promise is unsettling for those seeking a collective meaning, a mobilizing narrative. But it is profoundly liberating for those who understand that the most sustainable systems are those that don't need to believe in themselves.
Erosion is patient. It is often ungrateful. It offers no immediate recognition. But it transforms landscapes irreversibly. Bitcoin is this slow force. It doesn't overthrow states. It forces them to justify themselves. And in a world where power has long been exercised without real monetary counterweight, this simple obligation is already a major transformation. Bitcoin doesn't need a revolution. It needs time.
👉 Also read: