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Bitcoin, and eventually the broader cryptocurrencies, were driven by being a decentralized alternative to the state and towards integration into the financial system that it was meant to replace.
In an interview, Aaron Day, co-founder of Daylight Freedom, a foundation dedicated to financial sovereignty and individual freedom, came to this conclusion based on his personal experiences with Bitcoin.
Questioning Bitcoin’s Original Mission
Today, it is known as Bitcoin With its non-sovereign features and resistance to censorship. The cryptocurrency community has been promoting this asset for several years It looks like goldEven if it’s digital.
Day, a cryptocurrency critic and libertarian thinker, thought so too.
That is why he started using Bitcoin as early as 2012. However, he soon began to understand that his narrative was in a state of constant transformation – a change from its decentralized nature.
His constant statements on social media And his sharp criticism of some of the most powerful companies in the industry Some people represent it as a conspiracy.
However, his long career as a cryptocurrency user in this field, together with the research he has carried out as a fellow at the Brownstone Institute, provides a perspective that is difficult to ignore, especially amid the wider adoption of Bitcoin.
New Hampshire as a Bitcoin testing ground
When Day, a resident of New Hampshire, started using Bitcoin 15 years ago, many restaurants and stores accepted it directly. It already functioned as a spendable digital currency.
In many respects, the state has been fertile for this type of activity.
to know New Hampshire Also known as the “Live Free or Die” area, it has also become home to the Free State Project, a non-profit political immigration movement founded in 2001 that has successfully relocated around 20,000 free thinkers to the area, with the aim of concentrating them in a sparsely populated state.
Dai was the head of that project, and thanks to his beliefs, he became attracted to the possibilities of Bitcoin.
“In 2012, the conferences were mainly about how to use Bitcoin As an alternative to central banksHow will it be something that solves the problem of the financial crisis of 2008, and how will it be an instrument that does not need intermediaries or third parties. That’s how I got to know him,” Day told BeInCrypto during a podcast episode.
However, despite its initial adoption in his city, the narrative began to change in 2017. According to him, it quickly became unusable.
“Suddenly, fees have grown like crazy. We’re going from completing transactions in seconds to days. It’s losing its primary benefit, which was to be something that anyone anywhere in the world could do in voluntary transactions without third parties,” he added.
Although that was Dai’s original frustration with the coin, it soon became just the tip of the iceberg.
A narrative shift from money to store of value
When Dai started using Bitcoin, he saw it as another form of currency for everyday transactions with decentralized advantages. He never saw it as anything else.
“People didn’t talk about it basically as digital gold. It’s just something you keep and save and don’t spend. It’s not in the title of the white paper, this is not the behavior and function of Bitcoin,” he explained.
These changes coincide with the increase Layer 2 solutions in cryptocurrencies. These secondary protocols, built on top of the primary blockchain, are designed to dramatically increase transaction speed and reduce fees. Protocols like Segregated Witness (SegWit) have become and the Lightning Network Especially common at that time.
While many developers argued that these updates were necessary technical compromises, Day interpreted them differently.
In his view, the technical debate over scaling was inseparable from a broader structural change going on behind the scenes — a change in who was funding Bitcoin’s development.
From nonprofit support to corporate impact
In 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation, a non-profit organization in the United States, was established to promote the use of Bitcoin and protect the integrity of the project. It also supported early Bitcoin core developers.
But after three years, the organization collapsed amid internal turmoil and financial difficulties.
Soon after, the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), through the digital currency initiative – Managed by Joi Ito linked to Jeffrey Epstein – Funded several Bitcoin core developers.
For many in the ecosystem, this was a practical solution. Bitcoin was an open source protocol with no official corporate sponsor. The developers needed funding to continue their work.
But for Day, the timing raised questions.
“MIT took over, and then some of the same developers who were working on things like SegWit and the Lightning Network, effectively slowed down Bitcoin as peer-to-peer money and moved to the narrative of Bitcoin being digital gold.
As Bitcoin’s scalability issues became more apparent and the future development of the network was increasingly directed by well-funded institutional interests, the project’s decentralized character began to erode.
Fast forward to today, Bitcoin has become widely integrated into the infrastructure directly associated with traditional and centralized banking. I entered Asset-linked exchange-traded fundsinstitutional supervision, the reserves of nation states Under debate ever since.
Day wondered if this path was inevitable or the result of structural forces that redirected Bitcoin’s original mission.
“I think at the end of this, the longer it takes, the clearer it becomes that all cryptocurrencies have been hijacked,” he concluded.
