If you want to understand the pushback, don’t think like a Bitcoin enthusiast. Think like a central planner watching your toolset disintegrate in real time.
Introduction
Bitcoin was never supposed to survive. It was dismissed, mocked, and largely ignored by central banks in its infancy. But it kept growing—not just in price, but in relevance, resilience, and reach. What we’re witnessing now isn’t merely a financial shift—it’s a psychological unraveling at the highest levels of global monetary control.
Inspired by a passing comment from Jeff Booth, one of my most respected Bitcoin macro thinkers, I began to view Bitcoin not through the eyes of its fans, but through those of its most entrenched opponents. What if we frame Bitcoin through the emotional lens of institutions that spent the last century perfecting monetary hegemony? It struck me: What if central banks are going through the classic five stages of grief?
The Kübler-Ross model, originally developed in the late ’60s, to describe personal loss, feels eerily applicable. Because in the realm of what’s possible, central banks are facing the erosion of more than monetary policy—they’re confronting the slow-motion loss of narrative control, monopoly power, and potentially, their primacy in the global financial order.
Bitcoin’s timeline is best understood in four-year epochs, which correspond to the halving cycles. Every 210,000 blocks (roughly every four years), the block reward for mining new Bitcoin is cut in half. In 2009, the reward was 50 BTC every 10 minutes. Today it is 3.125 BTC. At the beginning, this deflationary incentive model was a gamble. The bet was that the value of each Bitcoin would rise over time, despite the decreasing issuance reward. What we’ve seen is not just survival, but a pattern of exponential price discovery every four years. These cycles offer a natural framework for understanding Bitcoin’s impact—and the world’s reaction to it.
Epoch Zero (2009–2013): The Orphaned Genesis
Bitcoin launched its Genesis block on January 3, 2009.
I don’t consider this part of the grief model proper—it’s more of a prologue. If you’ve read The Jungle Book or seen Disney’s 1967 adaptation, you’ll remember Mowgli: a human infant abandoned in the jungle, with no reasonable odds of survival. And yet, through a stroke of wild magic, he’s raised by wolves and eventually becomes a figure of legend.
Bitcoin in its early days had similar odds. A decentralized, leaderless, open-source money born in the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis? Ludicrous. A toy for cypherpunks, cryptographic hobbyists, and libertarians. To the academic, banking, and political elite, it wasn’t just implausible—it was invisible. But the most powerful forces on the planet, the banks and the monied-class sort of had their eyes on it.
But beneath the surface, among the people, something was stirring.
Stage 1: Denial (2013–2017)
“You can’t just create internet money and expect it to matter.”
Denial isn’t passive ignorance—it’s active dismissal. Even as Bitcoin began grabbing headlines and crossing price milestones, it was treated as a fringe phenomenon.
President Obama once referred to Bitcoin as “a Swiss bank account in your pocket,” clearly implying it was a vehicle for tax evasion and criminal finance. Years later, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin used the exact same phrase. The talking points were coordinated—and telling.
Still, few central bankers issued formal policy responses. Bitcoin was laughed off as a speculative sideshow. Too small to matter. Too volatile to trust. Too anarchic to engage.
It wasn’t seen as a threat—because they hadn’t taken the time to understand it.
Stage 2: Anger (2017–2021)
“This must be stopped.”
Bitcoin didn’t fade. It surged—from $1,000 to $60,000 in four years. And with that price surge came something more dangerous than headlines: legitimacy.
Now the system got angry.
Regulatory crackdowns began in earnest. China banned Bitcoin mining. The U.S. launched Operation Choke Point 2.0, quietly pressuring banks to debank crypto companies and venture capitalists. Open-source developers were arrested. The U.S. government began regulating through prosecution, sowing fear rather than offering clarity.
Even more telling: federal agencies bickered over jurisdiction. Not because Bitcoin was meaningless, but because each wanted control over it.
The war had begun. And the message was clear: “We gave you time to die quietly. You didn’t. Now we fight.”
Stage 3: Bargaining (2021–2025)
“Okay… maybe there’s a place for Bitcoin—under our terms.”
Bargaining isn’t capitulation. It’s co-option.
Central banks and regulators are now trying to integrate Bitcoin into their frameworks—but on their terms. The U.S. embraces Bitcoin mining—so long as it’s domestic and “responsible.” ETFs are approved—so long as custody lives in institutions they oversee. Politicians praise Bitcoin—so long as it behaves.
Putin, having failed to ban it, now shrugs: “No one can stop it.”
The 2024 U.S. election cycle saw the crypto industry become the largest corporate donor, with over $238 million spent during the campaign. Suddenly, candidates who had ignored Bitcoin were promising to embrace it. The Trump campaign even welcomed it into its platform positions, with positive proposals advancing Bitcoin as a concept. Welcoming and encouraging Bitcoin.
But look closer. Even well-meaning efforts to “support” Bitcoin often result in a gravitational pull toward centralization. When regulators suggest the U.S. should control 20% of the mining hash rate, it betrays the instinct: to domesticate Bitcoin.
The tragedy is that this instinct—to shape Bitcoin into something familiar—is the very thing Bitcoin was designed to resist.
Stage 4: Depression (Emerging)
“We can’t stop it. We can’t even slow it down.”
Reality is setting in.
CBDC pilots are underwhelming. Faith in fiat is eroding. Sovereigns like El Salvador are adopting Bitcoin as legal tender. Retail holders, companies, and even small governments are beginning to understand: the fiat jail-cell door has always been open, since the inception of Bitcoin, they just never knew there was a way out.
And now they do.
Adoption remains slow but exponential. The longer people watch Bitcoin, the more inevitable it begins to feel.
The IMF warns about “currency substitution.” The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and entities like the DTC have issued cautious statements. They know what’s happening.
They just don’t know how to stop it.
Stage 5: Acceptance (Conditional, Future)
“Bitcoin is here. Let’s figure out how to live with it.”
We aren’t here yet. But we might get there.
In this future:
- Bitcoin is part of sovereign reserves.
- It becomes a neutral base layer for global trade settlement.
- Traditional systems integrate with Bitcoin voluntarily, not coercively.
But that future hinges on a critical condition: Bitcoin must remain decentralized and secure. If it’s captured—through regulation, identity controls, or surveillance layers—it becomes another compromised system.
The defense? Full nodes.
A full node is like keeping your own independent copy of the monetary rulebook. It verifies every transaction and every rule from the Genesis block to now. No trust—only truth. No permissions—just participation.
In the fiat world, money requires trust. In the Bitcoin world, money requires verification. That’s why full nodes matter.
If just a fraction of Bitcoiners run full nodes and small-scale miners—yes, even space heater-sized home miners—we get a resilient, decentralized immune system. We make the network too big to rig.
And if we can achieve that, central banks may not embrace Bitcoin—but they’ll be forced to live with it.
Final Thoughts
This is not a prophecy. It’s a framework.
It helps explain why the world’s most powerful financial institutions have reacted not with curiosity, but with emotion—because this isn’t just about technology. It’s about loss.
And loss triggers grief.
As Lyn Alden puts it: “Nothing stops this train.” The only question now is whether central banks choose to interact with Bitcoin the easy way—or the hard way.
The hard way leads to repression, monetary instability, capital flight, and—potentially—currency collapse.
The easy way means embracing USD tokens as a gateway: onramps into the network for billions without bank accounts. Let Bitcoin serve as the monetary base, and USD tokens (Stablecoins) serve daily needs.
Either way, Bitcoin remains.
“Bitcoin doesn’t need to win a war. It only needs to survive one.”
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