A man who was once one of its strongest champions now says yes.
Jeffrey Tucker recently published “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” in The Epoch Times. After sixteen years following the space, he argues Bitcoin is down by half over the last year, lower than five years ago, and that the dream is finished. He claims HODL was terrible advice and, most of all, that Bitcoin has become one of the most powerful tools for government surveillance ever created, delivering the abolition of financial privacy instead of freedom.
Coming from someone who once believed as strongly as I do, those are heavy words. Tucker raises legitimate concerns. But I believe he is jumping to the wrong conclusion.
He sees failure. I see a technology still in its early chapters.
Tucker’s strongest argument is the public ledger. Every transaction is permanent. If a wallet is ever linked to a real identity, the entire history becomes visible. Banks keep records for a few years. Bitcoin’s ledger never forgets. That is a real feature of the system.
But the public nature of the ledger is not a later corruption. It was designed this way from the beginning. For a network to function without trusted third parties, every full node must independently validate every transaction. Satoshi was clear in the whitepaper: transactions must be publicly announced so the network can agree on a single history. There was never a promise of strong privacy at the base layer.
What Satoshi did say is that privacy could still be maintained by keeping public keys anonymous and by building solutions outside the base protocol. That’s exactly what we’re seeing today with tools like Lightning, zero-knowledge proofs, client-side validation, and mixers, which let users add privacy without changing the base layer itself. This is the same logic that built the internet. TCP/IP stayed simple and transparent while higher layers added capability. Bitcoin is following that path. The base layer’s job is to be the most secure and unchangeable settlement layer possible. That requires it to remain slow, conservative, and transparent.
Instead of forcing everything onto Layer 1, the ecosystem has built higher layers. The Lightning Network already handles millions of fast, low-cost transactions daily. Other approaches are moving more activity off the public chain while still inheriting Bitcoin’s security. This is not failure. This is the original vision playing out.
The block-size debate was not a hijacking either. Those who wanted larger blocks for cheap on-chain payments forked and created Bitcoin Cash. The market chose the version that prioritized security and decentralization. That was the network protecting itself.
On the base layer alone, Bitcoin is too slow for everyday purchases. That critique is years out of date. Lightning settles near-instantly for fractions of a penny. Expecting every coffee to settle on the base layer was never the plan.
Even without strong on-chain privacy, Bitcoin remains a powerful sovereign tool. If you control your keys, you own your wealth and can move it across borders without permission. No central bank can print more of it. No politician can inflate it away. In a world of continuous debasement, that feature has become more valuable, not less.
Tucker is right that no technology alone delivers freedom. Freedom requires people willing to build and defend the tools of liberty. Bitcoin is not perfect and not finished. But it is the first form of money whose rules are enforced by the people itself rather than by governments or corporations. We may never get another opportunity like this.
The choice is still in front of us. The outcome is not predetermined. It depends on what we do next.
About the author: Matthew J. Moore host of The Money Block™ on BizTV, Amazon best selling author of the book “Foundations For Liberty”. Tune in every Saturday at 3pm ET for Matthew’s Bitcoin focused conversations. Click Here! and connect on social media: FOLLOW ON X, FOLLOW ON YOUTUBE, FOLLOW ON LINKEDIN, FOLLOW ON FACEBOOK, FOLLOW ON INSTAGRAM.
