Against Bitcoin By Edward Willis (gopher://encw.xyz and http://encw.xyz) Published Feb/14/2026 Last Updated Apr/8/2026 Over the years I've written many small criticisms of Bitcoin, but left them unpublished. What follows is all of them collected together and refactored into a complete article. If you're reading this on a phone, and wondering why it is misaligned, the answer is that this article, like all my blog posts, is an 80 column wide plain text file, not a web page, and is meant be read on a computer screen. Sections: INTRODUCTION TO BITCOIN HOW MINERS GET PAID: PART ILLEGAL LOTTERY, PART PROTECTION RACKET, PART PONZI PROTECTION IS GOING TO GET MORE EXPENSIVE BITCOIN IS ALREADY OVER BITCOIN DOESN'T DO WHAT IT PROMISES BITCOIN IS DIRTY, WASTEFUL, AND OBSOLETE BITCOIN IS WORTHLESS BITCOIN IS MAKING US POORER BITCOIN FUNDS OUR ENEMIES CONCLUSION * * * * INTRODUCTION TO BITCOIN I'm going to assume that the reader doesn't understand Bitcoin whatsoever and start from scratch explaining it. This isn't meant to be a complete, or completely accurate, explainer, but rather to give a simplified understanding good enough to help the reader make sense of the rest of the article. Let's start off with what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is a proof of work cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are digital tokens secured by cryptography -- the same general sort of thing that secures the web so that you can do your online banking. What is proof of work (PoW)? PoW is a consensus mechanism for permissionless blockchains. So, then, what is a blockchain? A blockchain is just a data store, and in the case of a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, most of that data is transactions. As a programmer, I see it as a hash chain, a fancy sort of linked list, because that is what it is. This is nothing special. And it isn't particularly fit for purpose in the way that it is used by Bitcoin. To go a little further in case you're interested in the technical side: Say you've got a data type that combines some data with the location of another instance of itself. chain_link { data; another_chain_link; } So, the program has a chain link, and that chain link has data, but it also has the location of the next piece of data, which in turn has another link. And a programmer links data together and moves through the list to access and process it. This is a linked list; it is an idea that is incredibly common in programs. So, Bitcoin does something like that, but instead closer to: hash_link { data; data_hash; another_hash_link; } So, to give a very simple explanation, a hash is data produced when you run a piece of data through an algorithm. Think of it as a unique identifier. That data run through the algorithm will always output the same hash. So each hash (aside from the first) will include its own data AND the hash of the previous link. Because hashes are unique to the data fed into them, if you have the hash of the last transaction, and someone else has the same hash, you know that you are both working with the same chain of data, no matter how long it is. This is not an invention of "Satoshi". It is old as dirt in computer science. Variations are used for P2P file transfers and a bunch of other common tech going back decades. Permissionless blockchains are blockchains that anyone can add data to. For instance, transaction data, like: Bob sent Frank 2 Bitcoins. The transactions are added in bundles called blocks. In the case of Bitcoin roughly every 10 minutes a block is added to the chain. Each Bitcoin block can contain at most around 4200 transactions, which means that Bitcoin is limited to ~7 transactions per second at full capacity. A Bitcoin block, those bundled transactions, gets added when a miner happens to guess the correct random number. This guessing constitutes the work in proof of work. The difficulty is in generating the correct random number, and the machines guess at it randomly billions of times a second. The network automatically adapts the difficulty so that a block is generated roughly every 10 minutes. Verifying that the number is correct is much less computationally intensive, so when the number is found and the block is generated, the other miners verify that the number was correct, and everyone moves on to trying to guess the next random number. It is a more complicated than that, but that is the gist of it. So, though they are called miners, cryptocurrency miners in reality are more like financial institutions that process transactions. Proof of work protocols are designed so that the biggest chain is considered to be the true chain. The rule that the biggest chain wins is what makes them susceptible to so called 51% attacks, whereby an actor with 51% of the network's total processing power can spend their cryptocurrency and get it back. An attacker can do this by processing transactions faster than the public chain does on their own private version. While they're working on making their chain longer, they spend and/or trade their cryptocurrency tokens. Importantly, they do not include those transactions in the blocks of their private chain. Then when their private chain is larger than the public chain, they make their private chain public, and since it is larger than the existing public chain, it supplants it -- the protocol demands that all honest parties switch to it. The consolidation of hashing power is a threat to Bitcoin. Miners have attacked the cryptocurrencies they were mining: this happened to Bitcoin Cash in 2019. The top three Bitcoin miners/pools control 54.5% of the known hashrate. They could, presumably, team up to double spend at will. Mining pools are collections of miners working together and sharing the block rewards and fees (more on how miners make money below). * * * * HOW MINERS GET PAID: PART ILLEGAL LOTTERY, PART PROTECTION RACKET, PART PONZI When a new block is created, the responsible miner receives what are called block rewards, which is new cryptocurrency that is added to their wallet. Right now the block reward for bitcoin is 3.125 Bitcoins, which currently can be sold for around $210,000 USD. Block rewards are, in essence, an unlicensed and therefore illegal lottery. The amount of computing power protecting a PoW chain is dependent on the price of its cryptocurrency: The less money miners can get for selling block rewards, the fewer miners will be able to profitably mine that cryptocurrency, as everyone is chasing the same rewards. Crypto miners have to source electricity, and make up their investment in computer hardware and infrastructure. Miners further accumulate Bitcoin by earning transaction fees, which are built into the Bitcoin protocol. The amount of that fee is set by the market, with transactions offering higher fees given precedence by miners to be added to a block. As Bitcoin can only process ~7 transactions per second, in times of high transaction volume, transaction fees spike. Recently transaction fees have hovered mostly between 50c and $1. The block rewards in effect subsidize transactions as without block rewards transaction fees would be much higher. More on this soon. Bitcoin holders must, in aggregate, continue to buy Bitcoin from miners, so that the miners can afford to operate the system and make a profit. This is the core of why PoW chain cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are a scam: they operate and fail like ponzi schemes. Bitcoin requires new money to cash existing holders out, as no new money buying Bitcoin, means no ability to operate the network and transfer ownership. This is the real reason that Bitcoiners are desperate for you to join their cult, buy Bitcoins, and never sell them. Bitcoiners are stuck in a zero sum game. They need the price to continue to go up so that they can cash out without the downward pressure of their sales endangering miner profitability and therefore the whole rotten system. To recap: Bitcoin miners are in actuality financial institutions that process transactions, while operating an illegal lottery, and a protection racket that also functions as a ponzi scheme. * * * * PROTECTION IS GOING TO GET MORE EXPENSIVE The block reward, now 3.125 Bitcoins, halves every 210,000 blocks, which is roughly every four years. This means, that as time passes, either the price of Bitcoin, or the transaction fees, must increase in order for miners to afford to maintain the network. So far, for the most part, it has been the rising price of Bitcoin that has paid for the network, but that will, by design, come to an end. Since block rewards drop exponentially, and the price of Bitcoin cannot rise exponentially forever along with it, the network will need to be paid for by transaction fees. This is a big problem for two reasons: 1. The extremely inefficient design of PoW system means that costs are extremely high. 2. Bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions per second. Those 7 transactions per second are going to have to pay for a massive amount of energy consumption and computer equipment. According to this[1] coindesk.com article, it costs around $87,000 in early 2026 for a miner to generate a single Bitcoin. production cost per bitcoin * block reward = production cost per block 87,000 * 3.125 = 271,875. It costs on average $271,875 to mine an entire block's worth of bitcoin, or 4200 transactions. production cost per block / number of transactions in a block 271,875 / 4200 transactions = 64.73214286 The current cost of per Bitcoin transaction unsubsidized by significant block rewards would start around $64.73. And don't forget, the miner's investors would like some profit, too. * * * * BITCOIN IS ALREADY OVER Bitcoin supporters tout its ability to create life-changing, generational wealth. But if that hasn't already happened for you, it isn't going to happen; the party is over. If you're excited about Bitcoin, you shouldn't be. The Bitcoin early adopters were able to amass large amounts of Bitcoin, thousands, tens of thousands, at very little expense. Those people are the so-called whales of Bitcoin; the biggest things in the ocean. The halving of the Bitcoin block reward, that I described above, means that the number of new Bitcoin goes down drastically over time. In fact, since the effect is exponential, eventually there will be no new Bitcoin; the number of Bitcoin that will be mined is mathematically capped at 21,000,000. The consequences of this may not be immediately evident, so I will explain: During the first 3-4 years of Bitcoin, whilst Bitcoin was a small, tight knit community, half of all Bitcoin that will ever exist was mined: 10,500,000 Bitcoin. Back then you didn't need fancy, purpose built equipment to mine Bitcoin. People mined Bitcoin on their gaming computers with their graphics accelerator cards. The Bitcoin elite are, by and large, libertarian leaning Gen X and Millennial computer geeks and video gamers drawn from the cypherpunk and Ron Paul (who was highly relevant at that time) fan communities. I should know: I was there. And no, before you ask, I do not own any cryptocurrency, and never have. I abhorred Bitcoin just as much then as I do now. Yes, half of all Bitcoin was snapped up within 4 years, here is how it worked: The Bitcoin block reward started at 50 Bitcoin. And with block reward halvings happening every 210,000 blocks, or roughly 4 years, that's 10,500,000: 50 * 210,000 = 10,500,000. And make no mistake, it was designed this way, it was intended to enrich the early adopters. Over the next 4 years, another 5,250,000 Bitcoin were mined. Today almost 20,000,000 of the 21,000,000 total have already been created. As an example of how easy it was for early adopters to horde Bitcoin and experience huge gains, Satoshi Nakamoto, the secretive creator of Bitcoin who disappeared shortly after it launched, has more than a million Bitcoin. On the other hand, Strategy, the company headed by Michael Saylor, that has spent more than 50 billion dollars on Bitcoin, owns 714,644. Strategy started buying back in 2020 when the price was $11,652, and has made a total of 98 purchases at the time I wrote this article. As of right now, Strategy is underwater on its purchases, having spent more than they're worth. Early Bitcoiners, that is Bitcoiners who got in within the first years, got gains of 1,000x, 10,000x or more because they got their Bitcoin essentially for free. And they got thousands of them. That isn't going to happen for anyone who wasn't there in the beginning. Can you see how horrible so called "hyperbitcoinization", the mass adoption of Bitcoin as the world's money, replacing existing currencies, would be for everyone who didn't get in during the first few years of Bitcoin's existence? We'd all be paupers, and they'd be our kings. Even if you own some Bitcoin, compared to the whales you have nothing, and would be at their mercy the same as everyone else. Of course, "hyperbitcoinization" will never happen; the technology is terrible, and national governments would never allow it to happen -- heck, the people would never allow it. Just be aware that when Bitcoiners talk gleefully of Bitcoin taking over the world, that you on your knees begging at their feet, and them being free to do whatever they please to you and your loved ones, is what they're imagining. Bitcoin is an anarcho-capitalist project; if you care about your freedom, and your basic human rights and dignity, you should oppose it all you can. * * * * BITCOIN DOESN'T DO WHAT IT PROMISES Bitcoin is not decentralized. All Bitcoin transactions are stored together in one long chain, and all transactions require the permission of a single network, that operates the single, global truth. Without a connection to that network, and its approval, you can't transfer Bitcoin. Bitcoin IS public and permissionless (at least for miners), and it IS distributed across many computers, but that's altogether different from being decentralized. The US banking system is actually more decentralized than Bitcoin. If I transfer money from one bank to another, those banks are the ones that log the transaction. The whole banking system doesn't know about it. Heck, my local branch was cut off from head office due to internet trouble, I was able to write myself a check and get cash then and there, and they communicated the check to head office when they reconnected. The US dollar is even more decentralized, especially in cash form: If I give you a dollar bill, no one and nothing else is necessary except for you, me, and the dollar in my wallet. I don't need thousands upon thousands of computers all around the world to give you a dollar bill, and that transaction isn't logged for all to see. The way Bitcoin works, if half the world's internet was cut off from the other for an hour, when they were rejoined, the half with the smaller Bitcoin chain would lose all of its transactions. I'm not sure if I could design a system more centralized than Bitcoin. Trustlessness is a meaningless gimmick. Trust can't be removed from any transaction that involves anything outside of Bitcoin itself -- like, you know, buying real things. If A pays B Bitcoin so that B will send them an item, B can refuse to send the item, or do all manner of shady things, and there is no way to undo the transaction and get A their Bitcoin back. Trust is an integral part of human interaction, and that includes economic interactions. It is idiocy to think that trust in commerce can be eliminated by code, or that eliminating concerns about trust is desirable in the first place. Seller reputation matters, and trust can't be made not to matter. Even with Bitcoin itself, when you buy it, you are trusting that the miners will accept your transactions, and that they won't pool together and do a 51% attack, which they could. Bitcoin is not private. Bitcoin is a public ledger of transactions: it is by its very definition NOT private. The Bitcoin block chain is regularly data-mined. Imagine if your credit card statements were public knowledge; that's Bitcoin. You can create an anonymous wallet, yes, but the moment your wallet is associated with your identity by any entity, your life becomes an open book for them and whoever they sell that knowledge to. Don't spend Bitcoin in person. The merchant's known wallet address, and the time of your purchase, can be used by anyone merely watching you make the purchase to uncover your Bitcoin wallet address and your purchase history. Bitcoin is not good at being a currency. Bitcoin's fees make it too expensive for small purchases, and it is too risky for larger purchases. People want to be able to call their card issuer, a trusted third party, and get their money back if they are defrauded or hacked. There is no customer service representative for Bitcoin who can get one's money back. And if people did try to adopt it as a real currency for buying things, the 7 transactions per second limit would quickly bring an end to that as wait times for transactions to clear, and transaction fees, shot up to the stratosphere. Bitcoin is not good at being digital gold. Why? Because the idea of digital gold is incredibly stupid. It might as well be called digital food, or a digital house. Gold, food, and houses are physical things with real physical uses. Bitcoin is digital nothing, and likening it to any real world object is techno-mysticism garbage specifically concocted to deceive. It doesn't even follow gold's price, but rather that of other risk-on tech assets. * * * * BITCOIN IS DIRTY, WASTEFUL, AND OBSOLETE The Bitcoin mining industry is wasting a crapload of energy running its unlicensed and illegal lottery, whilst marketing the idea that burning all of that coal and oil, and wasting all that electricity makes Bitcoin valuable. Bitcoin consumes more energy per year than Poland, a European country of 36.5 million people, and about as much as Pakistan, a country of 241.5 million. Around 40% of that energy usage occurs in the United States, pushing up our electricity prices up and causing the emission of pollution that negatively affects our health. This[2] is a paper in Nature, published in 2025, titled "The environmental burden of the United States’ bitcoin mining boom", that investigated the largest 32 Bitcoin mines and their environmental impact. Rather than me quoting it endlessly to make the point of how how dirty Bitcoin is, go read it. Proof of stake is a much more efficient alternative to proof of work. Proof of Stake works by those validating transactions, called validators, or stakers, putting up their own tokens as collateral to the trustworthiness of their block. If they attempt to validate fraudulent transactions, they lose some portion, or all, of their collateral. Validators are randomly selected to validate a block of transactions based on their portion of the total staked amount. Proof of Stake has been proven to work at scale by Ethereum, so whilst beforehand it could be argued that the enormous energy bonfire of Proof of Work was necessary for the operation of the Bitcoin network and the minting of new tokens, now the waste is a choice -- the operation of the Bitcoin chain and the energy it uses are completely separate issues. Bitcoiners miners benefit from holding on to PoW even though it is now obsolete. No mining means no miners, and their businesses are over. Beyond the miners themselves, PoW is part of the Bitcoin marketing story. All of the money being spent on equipment, infrastructure and electricity gives the illusion that something important is happening, and that a productive industry exists. Further, Ethereum did PoS first, so if Bitcoin switches to it, then Bitcoin wouldn't be first anymore. The Bitcoin story is techno-mysticism sold to unsuspecting people by charlatans looking to extract wealth from them. Do not take what I have said above as an endorsement of Proof of Stake cryptocurrency. Arguing the supposed merits of one mechanism of generating cryptocurrency tokens vs another is rather frustrating when the whole idea is garbage to begin with. I am not in favor of PoS cryptocurrencies because PoS crypto, as do all cryptocurrencies, enables crime. I am in favor of reducing the enormous waste and negative externalities of the worthless cryptocurrency industry, and if switching to PoS reduces the harm that Bitcoin and other PoW tokens cause, then that's a good thing, and I'm in favor of it. * * * * BITCOIN IS WORTHLESS The internet and all of its infrastructure enables cross-border data transmission -- it is the internet that has value. Bitcoin leverages the power of the internet to update a distributed ledger. Whether updating that ledger has any actual value depends on whether the units of account upon that ledger themselves have any value, and they do not. You can't do anything with a Bitcoin except transfer it to someone else. $10 worth of Bitcoin or of most other cryptocurrency tokens, of which there are thousands, do the exact same thing; you can keep it or you can transfer it. Government fiat money, like the US Dollar, is intrinsically worthless too. But the key difference is that the USD has men with guns that will kidnap and imprison you if you don't get dollars to pay tax. The threat of imprisonment stimulates demand for USD in the USA. But what about Bitcoin's market cap? Here's what I'll do. I'll create two trillion "Ed Bucks", and have a friend buy one for a dollar. My Ed Bucks will then have a market cap, based on their last transaction price, of two trillion dollars, and I'd be a trillionaire on paper twice over. Just because something has a price doesn't mean that the price is reasonable or sustainable, or that the market cap can be actualized. The difference between a stock market cap and Bitcoin's market cap is that if a company wanted to sell, provided there is adequate fundamentals to support the stock price, a buyer could be found and the price paid. With Bitcoin, if everyone went for the exits, there wouldn't be enough buyers to hold the price anywhere near current valuations. Valuing Bitcoin like a stock on a stock exchange, with a market cap, doesn't make sense. Bitcoin's price is heavily manipulated in two main ways: wash trades, and stablecoins. A wash trade is when someone sells something on an exchange and buys it at that same price. They end up where they started, less fees (if they have to pay fees). This is used by the Bitcoin community both to create artificial volume to make Bitcoin seem more popular than it is, and to overwhelm the market and fix prices. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the value of a real currency, and unlike regular cryptocurrencies, is issued by their controlling entity, rather than won by lottery. Stablecoins can be used to buy other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, as if they were the real currency. Yes, you read that right, fake internet money is being used to bid up the price of Bitcoin. Yes, the scam is pretty straight forward: buy up Bitcoin with stablecoins, generate hype, and get real money from suckers. Also a risk free way to perform wash trades. On many cryptocurrency exchanges, you can buy Bitcoin for real dollars, but you sell it for a stablecoin. Cryptocurrency exchanges may or may not let you convert your stablecoin to real currencies and get your money back. The real money in the system is much less than the value of the trades, and goes to miners and well connected whales, which is why stories of cryptocurrency exchanges locking accounts and delaying withdrawals is so common -- they literally do not have the money. I wager stablecoin manipulation is why the whole Bitcoin ecosystem has yet to collapse. How stablecoins and the manipulation they are used for is legal I have no idea; another failure of our corrupt government. Tether is the largest stablecoin, with more than 187 billion having been created. Tether is pegged to the US Dollar, and the company behind, called Tether International Limited, or commonly just Tether, claims to hold assets sufficient to redeem all existant Tether tokens. The problem with this is that a significant portion of Tether's assets are cryptocurrency as a result of all the price manipulation they do. Tether, the company, owns 96,185 Bitcoin worth around $8.5 billion USD. They also count on their reserves $8.2 billion USD worth of loans, issued in Tether tokens of course, to cryptocurrency exchanges! When the Bitcoin price looks like it's in trouble, Tether, and other stablecoins, issue large quantities of counterfeit money to buy it up. Again, this is clearly illegal behavior, that regulators in the US and Europe have turned a blind eye to because the Bitcoin stakeholders have bought the politicians off, or otherwise fooled them with techno-mysticism. I'd go as far to say that the entire Bitcoin ecosystem is a criminal conspiracy. * * * * BITCOIN IS MAKING US POORER Bitcoin is altogether terrible for the economy, and if the whole industry had never happened America would be materially better off today. Bitcoin is make believe internet money, but it is responsible for the misallocation of real world resources; real money, real computers, real electricity, real infrastructure and real land use. Without Bitcoin that real money that gets invested with a cryptocurrency mining company could be invested instead in a company that produces real world goods that actually make people's lives better. It would be better invested in a service, or research, or really anything. It could be put in bonds and money market accounts or whatever, and then it could be borrowed and invested responsibly by someone else, or someone uses that money to buy or build their house. Whatever. Lots of things that could have been done with it. Without Bitcoin the fab space on TSMCs nodes, it gets used instead for real products that people can buy and use, and this drives prices down through competition and innovation. Or heck, maybe the fab space goes unused and the energy costs aren't sunk and the CO2 isn't emitted. I'll take that as a win. Then there are the rest of the computer components, the metal, all the HVAC equipment, the land and facilities that are being bought, without Proof of Work it's all still available to be put to some good use. And holy heck, the enormous amount of electricity! Bitcoin mining in the USA drives up our electricity costs and misallocates money to energy production where it wouldn't otherwise be necessary. That's terrible. Then there are the economic losses to crime. When Bitcoin does finally die let us all hope that it doesn't, through contagion similar to the way the 2008 real estate crash caused a financial crisis, cause pain across the entire economy. That's AI's job. * * * * BITCOIN FUNDS OUR ENEMIES I mentioned above that the only thing you can do with a Bitcoin is transfer it to someone, and that's true, but unfortunately, that does open it to two specific kinds of transfers: getting around sanctions and crime. I suppose that can be simplified to just crime. Countries hostile to the United States, and criminals all over the world, are joined in their love of cryptocurrency. Much crime has been enabled and made profitable by the rise of cryptocurrency, which has given criminals access to payments from victims, and easy money laundering. From pump and dump crypto schemes, hacks of crypto-wallets, ransomware and other computer crimes, to drug and human trafficking, to kidnappings and ransoms, to murder for hire, to the distribution of snuff films (filmed torture/murder) and CSAM, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is the gift to criminals that just keeps giving. How much crime? $158 billion USD in 2025 according to blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs. That's a lot of evil things happening to people. Some of this crime is performed by regular criminals, some by sophisticated and organized gangs of criminals, and some by governments. North Korean state hackers stole billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency in 2025 for the North Korean government. Russians have used cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions intended to put pressure on Russia to end its war on Ukraine. * * * * CONCLUSION: Bitcoin fails to deliver on its promises. Bitcoin is not efficient, it is not useful, and it is not the future. The future of money is not a system that processes 7 transactions a second in just about the most wasteful way imaginable. The future of money is not a criminal conspiracy to extract money from gullible and greedy people. The future of money is not Bitcoin. The Bitcoin project exists only to enrich and empower early adopters, miners, and other insiders, at the expense of, and to the harm of, everybody else. There are two types of people, that I've noticed, who are attracted to cryptocurrency; the ideological believers and the greedy pigs seduced by fanciful promises of generational wealth. In order to be seduced by Bitcoin, a person has to have flaws in their understanding of both computers and economics. I understand the desire people have for Bitcoin to free them from overbearing government and its seemingly limitless power. Cryptocurrency makes people feel powerful. But it's all a mirage: you do not become powerful by using or owning cryptocurrency. Participating in cryptocurrency only enriches early adopters, and gives money and power to crypto mining companies and pool operators. Most of these people, those who didn't get in during the first few years and become whales, were disillusioned and left a long time ago. The pigs will get slaughtered (lose their money). I think government has a role to play. In large part the purpose of government is to prevent individual greed from doing harm to the public good. To keep the small and mean from overwhelming the good and great. I think legislation will ultimately become necessary, as the waste and externalized costs of Bitcoin pile up, to force Proof of Work tokens to switch to Proof of Stake. Perhaps by making it illegal for exchanges with US customers to deal in Proof of Work cryptocurrencies; that'd probably do it. The US government absolutely has the power to force Bitcoin stakeholders to make the change to Proof of Stake. The government might not be able to completely stop people from using Bitcoin, but they can crush its price by keeping dollars out of the system, and starving the Bitcoin industry of the cash it needs for electricity. If it is a choice between making the change to Proof of Stake, or giving up the fantasy of Lamborghini ownership, Bitcoiners will pick Proof of Stake. It would be better still, of course, if governments around the world outlawed cryptocurrency altogether, as that would eliminate much of the rampant crime that cryptocurrency enables. And finally, Bitcoin has not been subverted by miners or other interests, and it cannot be saved; it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem is that the design is awful and the person/s behind Satoshi Nakamoto was likely either a fool, or involved in organized crime. References: 1. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/02/05/bitcoin-trades-20-below-its-producti on-cost-as-miner-stress-intensifies 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58287-3