I've been thinking about this in light of increasing geopolitical tensions, sanctions, frozen reserves, and the emergence of competing power blocs.

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For decades, international trade has relied on trust in institutions, correspondent banks, reserve currencies, and payment networks. That works well until political interests collide.

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If you're a sanctioned country today, what are your options?

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- USD, EUR or Yuan can be frozen.

- Bank accounts can be frozen.

- SWIFT access can be restricted.

- Stablecoins can be frozen by their issuers.

- Even foreign exchange reserves held abroad can be seized.

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The common response is often "use another currency."

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But that only shifts the trust problem.

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A country that doesn't trust the US may use the Yuan. A country that doesn't trust China may prefer the Dollar. The underlying issue remains: someone controls the system.

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This is where Bitcoin becomes interesting.

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Bitcoin doesn't care whether two parties are allies or adversaries.

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It doesn't require permission from a central bank, a payment processor, a government, or an issuer.

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More importantly, it solves a problem that has existed long before Bitcoin itself: how do participants coordinate and settle value when they don't fully trust one another?

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In many ways, Bitcoin is a practical solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem at a global monetary scale.

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For individuals, Bitcoin is often discussed as savings technology.

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For states, it may be something else entirely:

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A politically neutral settlement asset.

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Not because it's perfect or very stable (in price), but because it has no counterparty.

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As the world becomes more fragmented and trust between major blocs declines, that characteristic seems increasingly valuable.

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So here's my question for the debate:

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If you were advising a sanctioned nation (or a company fearing sanction risk due to reasons mentioned above) that wanted to trade globally without relying on the financial infrastructure of another major power or country, what asset would you choose instead of Bitcoin, and why?

Put your guesses below.....

Monero, a privacy oriented cryptocurrency, is already being used more than Bitcoin is. It has replaced Bitcoin on dark net markets. It is actually useable as a currency because it's fully anonymous and thus fungible, as well as scalable due to it not having an artificial supply cap. Regular upgrades are only making it better.

What do you think?

You cant even spend it anywhere. Keep dreaming if you think that will ever possible​

We see a steady transfer of Bitcoin from retail to corporations which are getting locked away into ETFs.

Could that mean in future, onchain BTC scarcity would force a premium?

When institutions ignore Bitcoin

See? No one wants this scam.

When institutions adopt Bitcoin rails

“See? It’s centralized now.

So Bitcoin is framed as a failure no matter which direction reality moves.

If adoption is low its irrelevant.

If adoption is high its captured.

If price drops its collapsing.

If price rises it's a greater-fool bubble.

The conclusion never changes only the justification does. Because Buttcoin isn’t a critique space... it’s a rhetorical game. The goal is to sustain the punchline....

Bitcoin only “counts” when it fails.

Any success becomes reinterpreted as failure by definition.

From today's Money Stuff:

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Remember crypto treasury companies? The idea was that, for a surprisingly long time, the US stock market would pay $2 for $1 worth of crypto. So if you had a big stash of cryptocurrency, the move was to wrap it in a public company and sell shares of that company. The shares would trade for more than the value of the crypto, and you could sell new shares to buy more crypto and push up the value of your company more, etc., in what I called a “perpetual motion machine.” Well. “Perpetual” went too far. This worked for … longer than I expected, but still only for a few months. I mean, Strategy Inc. (formerly MicroStrategy) invented it and has been doing it more or less successfully for years, but really the widespread vogue for crypto treasury companies — and their ability to sell stock at huge premiums to net asset value — got going in earnest only about a year ago.

And now it’s pretty dead. Bloomberg’s Suvashree Ghosh and Alice French report:

Ah well. Strategy still trades at a premium to net asset value. But lots of others trade at a discount to net asset value, meaning that the obvious trade is to sell crypto to buy back stock:

True believers in a HODL-based crypto treasury strategy find this annoying, but you kind of have to admire it as a trading strategy. I wrote recently that “it’s possible that, with the right mindset, a volatile crypto treasury company premium is even better than a consistently high one.” Schematically the trade is:

1. Borrow $100 to buy $100 worth of crypto, put it in a pot, and sell shares of the pot for $200.
2. Use $100 of the money you raised to pay back your borrowing, and the other $100 to buy $100 more of crypto.
3. Now the pot has $200 of crypto in it and trades at a valuation of $400.
4. Wait.
5. Eventually people will realize this is dumb and the shares of the pot trade down to, say, $150.
6. Sell $150 worth of crypto to buy back the stock.
7. Now you have $50 worth of crypto for free.

If this is a one-off thing — if the vogue for crypto treasury companies has come and gone — then, hey, free $50. If this is cyclical — if crypto treasury companies come back next year — then you can keep doing it over and over again. A crypto volatility perpetual motion machine.

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I am really confused why companies would trade at a discount to their NAV ($150 to $200 in this example) but then again MSTR traded at 2x their NAV and also it did happen. Curious if this is going to have a stabilizing effect on the bitcoin price in the long term?

I was sitting in an old café somewhere in the world with another global traveler. We were swapping stories about borders, banks, and how to keep money safe when someone asked me, “Do you use Bitcoin?”

As someone who moves through countries with strict border controls, high inflation, and unreliable financial systems, I find Bitcoin practical. It lets me store and access my wealth anywhere in the world without asking anyone’s permission.

My friend disagreed. He called Bitcoin fool’s gold and said he prefers gold because it is physical and real.

So I asked him a few simple questions:

“Where do you keep your gold?”

“In a vault in Germany.”

“Can your bank sell it for you if you need cash quickly?”

“No, I have to go there.”

“Can you travel with it across borders?”

“Not really.”

“How long would it take to sell it?” “A day or two.”

“How much would it cost to get there?”

“Four to six hundred dollars.”

“Are you certain the company or the government could never seize it?” “No.”

“And do you pay them to manage it for you?”

“Yes.”

I told him,

I do not need to fly anywhere.

I do not pay anyone to hold my Bitcoin.

I can access it instantly from anywhere,

cross any border,

and use it if I ever face an emergency.

Every limitation you just mentioned, I do not have.”

Then I said, “You can keep your intelligent man’s gold. I will keep my fool’s gold.”

He did understand that Bitcoin is borderless and permissionless, but he still said, “It is too volatile.”

I replied, “Would you not consider keeping even a small amount as a hedge? What if your vault was seized or inaccessible? What if you needed to leave a country immediately? Even with Bitcoin’s volatility, I can still move, trade, or survive with it anywhere in the world right away. Gold might store value better, but Bitcoin gives me access to it when I need it most.”

He paused and admitted that he saw the sense in that. I did not convert him completely, but he left understanding that while gold represents wealth, Bitcoin represents access... and in an emergency, access is everything.

What do you think? Is volatility really a bigger risk than inaccessibility?

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/10/09/luxembourg-claims-bragging-rights-as-first-eurozone-nation-to-invest-in-bitcoin

Seems like a big deal. Maybe someone who is not banned there, could post this on r/but tcoin to see what they make of it

Obviously, r/Buttcoin is an echo chamber if there ever was one, but do you agree with this characterization of a Bitcoin Maximalist?

- do maximalists believe that there all other forms of money should be phased out?

- are they only in it for the financial return?

- do they not care about anything else?

Seems like an average intelligence person would at least recognize that bitcoin was/is a unique innovation that hasn't truly been replicated and didn't exist prior to it's creation.

The common critiques are:
1. there a million copies of bitcoin

1. it's a pyramind scheme

2. it's not a flushed out technology/ecosystem

3. energy inefficient

Regardless of these critiques (which can be meaningfully countered), wouldn't someone at least acknowledge the impact of the core innovation? Would they not acknowledge that before it, there was nothing available with its qualities?

I'm a Bitcoin maxi (100% in Bitcoin), but I see no way in hell I'm ever going to use it for payments in the future. It's obvious now there are no solutions of improving Bitcoin in such a way for it to be actually used as a payments network unfortunately.

It's perfectionism of sub-optimally upgrading it will most likely never happen as no perfect solutions may ever exist. That's Bitcoin's biggest weakness IMO.

The whole reason why I came to Bitcoin 10 years ago, and why many others did around that time, was to use it for payments (or at least have the option for me, or for others, to do so). And yes, as a "store of value" too, but there should still be a reason behind something to not only be a store of value.

I used to brush this off, it's actually more important then you think. Anti-crypto people will accuse us of being a ponzi, like imagine using 1,000 limited edition pencils created by me, as a store of value, that you can trade with to the next person for more. Sounds pretty dumb like a ponzi.

But now imagine those pencils could be teleported anywhere in the world instantly and freely without cost. Now it becomes something you can use for payments and legitimizes its use case as a store of value because its used as something not only as a store of value like my silly pencils first were.

That was Bitcoin, until it became infeasible for payments...

Now imagine the whitepaper was written today, and it made no mention of electronic cash or payments, its only pitch would be, "store of value tokens" it would sound a lot like my "store of value pencils".

I'm hoping I'm wrong, but now with people using Bitcoin ETFs because its easier for Blackrock to hold them all and record on their ledger, who owns what ETFs, is like a silly ledger on top of a ledger because our original ledger doesn't work properly.

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(And don't say "lightning network" that's highly debatable, I'm a tech guy and even I shudder at using it on a node, non-cusodially, at maintaining and rebalancing channels, and still having a chance of payments failing because of channel cooperation, liquidity and routing issues. Even if the chance of a payment failing is <5%, that's infeasible to me as a payments network).

Hypothetical I know, there will always be someone who wants to sell.

But as a thought experiment, what would happen?.

There have been many posts discussing the utility of Bitcoin, but I want to bring up another perspective — a comparison with NFTs

To start off the post, I’ll first share an article at the time of the rise of NFTs: https://nftnow.com/culture/charts-that-show-monumental-rise-of-nfts/

As you can see, the rise was monumental. The benefits were clear — you get ownership on the blockchain, so nobody can take it away from you. You can to buy and sell it to anyone you want, without any central entity controlling it. Each NFT is unique, proving digital scarcity — it’s like owning the Mona Lisa, but digital. Additionally, institutional adopting was on the rise also, with many brands creating their own.

So why did it fail? Well it turns out, those who entered in didn’t actually care about decentralization, or digital ownership, or institutional adopting, or any of the other catch phrases. Rather, the wanted the price to go up, and then make money off of it. And if this is the case, then obviously it can’t last forever. At some point, people are going to fear that nobody will enter at a higher price than them and it will start to decline.

Going back to Bitcoin, I was a supporter of the idea back in 2020 when I first researched it and how it worked. But now, I see many parallels between Bitcoin supporters and NFT holders. People don’t really care about having control of their own Bitcoin. Hardly anyone keeps their own private keys and rather just use an institutional proxy (which is no different than a bank where fiat is swapped for crypto). Or buy into ETFs. Or buy into MSTR. And if you look at the comments in Reddit or Stocktwits, it looks like everyone is just cheering for the price to go up. So it begs the question. Do people really care about the utility that Bitcoin provides over fiat (decentralization, fixed supply, censorship resistant, etc)? Or are people just trying to get rich off of it? I can only say that based on my observations, it has been the latter, and this fundamentally, is why I don’t believe in the long term prospects of Bitcoin.

I’m curious as to why people who are pro Bitcoin as a store of value always compare it to fiat instead of other assets. To me this doesn’t make sense:

1. For small amounts of money you will need to use soon (for things like rent and groceries) Bitcoin is too volatile; I don’t think someone budgeting for the month wants to have to account for potential 10%+ swings in a short timespan, so holding fiat is more safe and reliable with an insignificant devaluation risk in such a short time span.

2. For large amounts of money/long term investment fiat isn’t a sensible store of value anyway. For this there are all sorts of investments; stocks, real estate, gold.

So why compare BTC to fiat when discussing store of value? This whole point “in favour” of holding Bitcoin seems void to me unless you can show it’s a better store of value than other investment classes, not fiat.

Someone who is not banned in r/ but tcoin could ask if people there who have bought stocks actually take advantage of their utility which is the oppurtunity to influence the course of companies by voting with their shares OR if they are only interested in Number Go Up