Apology for $100,000 in BTC

Author: Liu Jiaolian

Overnight, BTC fell from $100,000 to $99.5k. When BTC first reached $100,000 at the beginning of the month, the Financial Times' FT Alphaville column published a so-called apology letter. Some friends may not have read the original text in detail, but concluded that this was a sincere apology, and intended to put pressure on other media that have criticized and belittled BTC for many years, claiming that the latter owed everyone an apology.

This is purely overthinking. Below is the full text of the so-called apology letter from the Financial Times. Read the full text, and maybe you won't think they are really apologizing.

"FT Regular readers of Alphaville may have formed the impression that current and former authors are skeptical of cryptocurrencies in general, and Bitcoin in particular. This is true.

“From June 2011 to the present, FTAV’s articles may have conveyed the view that Bitcoin is a negative-sum game, that its protocol is very clever and theoretically useful as a unit of account, but that it is inefficient as a traditional medium of exchange and flawed as a store of value. Our articles may also have mentioned that the Bitcoin price is an arbitrary hype metric disconnected from any real utility because its utility can be easily replicated, so any intrinsic value comes from the sunk costs of infrastructure and intangible factors such as regulatory default permission, interconnectedness with the mainstream financial system (which was once the goal of its opposition), and the monumentality of being “the first.”

“We stand by every point made in these articles.

>"Nevertheless, with the price of Bitcoin recently breaking through $100,000, many commentators seemed to feel that we owed them an apology given our long-standing skepticism. So, here is our apology:

"If at any time in the past 14 years you decided not to buy something with a 'going up' number because of our coverage, we're sorry about that. It's indeed nice when your numbers go up. We're also sorry if you misunderstood our skepticism about crypto as a statement in favor of traditional finance, because we hate traditional finance, too."

This is a bit like an elderly executive of a large company, who went to a subsidiary company to hold a meeting for all employees and gave a "daddy-like" speech, which was leaked to the Internet by the post-90s and post-00s employees in the audience who didn't buy it, causing negative public opinion. The executive then punished himself with three cups of wine, issued an apology statement, saying that he has always been straightforward, said what he thinks, and didn't hide anything. He didn't take into account the feelings of the employees in the audience, hurt everyone's feelings, and apologized to everyone, and so on. (The case is for illustration only. Any similarity is purely coincidental.)

The logic of this apology is similar to that of the Financial Times. This logic is to say that I still think that what I said before was right, but since you are unhappy, I apologize. What is the subtext? The subtext is that although I apologized, I don’t think what I said, what I did, and what I thought were wrong!

There is a saying that "it is harder to touch interests than to touch the soul."

Many times, the reason why it seems that the soul is difficult to touch is actually a matter of interests when analyzed to its essence.

Why? It’s a very simple reason, because most of the people who criticize BTC don’t have BTC. Without BTC (or lost BTC), they missed the benefits of BTC’s rise, so they criticize BTC. This is the real reason.

From this perspective, it is unreasonable for people who don’t hold BTC to criticize BTC, just like it is unreasonable for people who have never eaten durian to criticize the taste of durian. If you make comments without deep experience, you will be far away from the spirit of "seeking truth from facts" and fall into the error of subjectivism.

What's worse is that in order to cover up your own interests, you have to find some "fig leaves", that is, some grand narratives, to kidnap the audience's position and emotions, pretending to be standing on the moral high ground to make righteous criticism.

The teacher said that if you don't investigate, you have no right to speak. Without long-term heavy positions in BTC, there is no cognition to evaluate BTC, and the speech is endless and absurd. It's best not to read it, because it's a waste of time.

Only those who have long-term heavy positions in BTC and continue to obtain compound interest have enough cognition to evaluate BTC. Such evaluations are worth our precious energy to read and understand.