A BICYCLE WITH AN AIR CONDITIONER

The idea was born in 1991. The implementation arrived in 2008. And the world lost its mind in 2017. Blockchain entered our lives wrapped in a mythology of mysterious origins and a promise to solve every problem of trust and honesty known to mankind. We were supposed to stand in the supermarket queue for milk with absolute certainty that no one would steal our spot at number five. And a note slipped to a classmate would finally carry ironclad proof — it was I who invited her to dinner, not that insufferable John from the next class over.

But before blockchain, there were other “revolutions.” The dot-coms. The VR metaverse into which Zuckerberg poured $40 billion — then quietly renamed the company back. The IoT refrigerator from every advertisement that still hasn’t learned to order milk. Each wave was accompanied — and this matters far more than any media noise — by a sharp surge in market and investment activity. Followed, inevitably, by the collapse of 80% of the companies involved.

But the collapse of that 80% is not a tragedy. It is a mechanism. The fiber-optic cables laid in the ground on dot-com money still carry the internet today. The GPUs Nvidia sold to crypto miners became the foundation of the AI revolution. Progress is an excellent gardener. The flowers of technological revolution have traditionally grown in soil fertilized by other people’s savings. The infrastructure remains. The startups burn. The retail investor foots the bill.

Bitcoin, within this system, is the most sophisticated instrument of all. A mechanism capable — at precisely the right moment — of releasing the overheated pressure of excess liquidity and resetting financial counters that cannot be reset any other way. Digital gold for the new economy — or a managed pressure valve for the old one?

Shakespeare wrote that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. But there is a question he left unasked: are you playing your own role — or are you an extra in someone else’s production?

They will keep fitting bicycles with air conditioners. And they will keep finding investors to fund it.

There is only one question that matters: do you understand why you need this bicycle — or are you simply riding wherever you are taken?

P.S. I asked AI to fill the logical gap between Bitcoin and this conclusion. It managed. Which, as it happens, only confirms the thesis — a tool works when you know what you need it for, and it complements and assists rather than acts in your place.