Bitcoin - The goal was digital cash—simple, direct, final.

The tragedy is that so few see it.

The history of digital money is a graveyard of failed experiments. Each collapse followed the same predictable script: a central operator, a trusted authority, a single point of control. Inevitably, trust was betrayed, costs mounted, systems imploded. The critics, smug in their certainty, declared the entire idea of electronic cash impossible. They saw only the wreckage and assumed the problem was the dream itself, not the flawed structures propping it up. What they missed was that the issue was never digital money—it was centralization.

“A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.”

That is the context. Not decentralization as utopia, not decentralization as some ideological endgame, but as a method. Every other method had been tried and had failed. Centralization doomed them. So the alternative was tested: remove the trusted third party, remove the central operator, design a system that works as cash does—direct, final, beyond permission. The point wasn’t to canonize decentralization. It was to achieve digital cash.

And this is where the irony bites. The zealots have turned a means into an idol. They chant “decentralization” as though the word itself liberates them, mistaking the scaffolding for the building. Cash was always the ultimate decentralization. A note in hand requires no network graph, no ideological sermon, no million-node theatre of self-importance. Yet here we are, surrounded by people who believe the goal was their precious decentralization, when the truth was always simpler and sharper: decentralization was the tool. The goal was cash.

The point has already been made: decentralization was never the end, only the means. 

Decentralisation was chosen because every centralised system failed. And yet here we stand, watching the same play rehearsed again, only this time with louder actors and cheaper costumes. 

The critics once dismissed e-currency because centralization doomed it. Now the saboteurs circle back with a new trick: take decentralization itself, inflate it into an idol, and use it to kill the very thing it was meant to serve. The tragedy would be comical if it weren’t so tedious.

Look at what is happening: the stage is crowded with projects that have no interest in functioning as cash (#BTC). They dress themselves up in the language of decentralization, decentralization at all costs, decentralization for its own sake. 

They, like #Bitcoin core chant about permissionless ideals, uncensorable fantasies, and the theatre of running millions of idle nodes. But when you peel back the curtain, there is no cash—no system designed for everyday trade, no infrastructure to function as digital notes and coins. What you find instead are excuses, obfuscations, and elaborate distractions.

BTC and its cousins are perfect examples of this. They repeat the cycle of failure, not by centralizing, but by wielding decentralization as a weapon against functionality. They turn every small inconvenience into a badge of purity, every inefficiency into a moral principle. The result? Digital cash is transformed into another failed experiment. Not because it was impossible. Not because the design was flawed. But because ideologues twisted the method into the goal, hollowing out the purpose until only slogans remain.

And here is the cruel irony. Decentralization was introduced to stop e-currency from failing. It was the one adjustment that made digital cash viable. But in the hands of zealots, decentralization is now being used to ensure failure all over again. By focusing on decentralization as the prize, they sabotage scalability, strip away efficiency, and make it impossible for digital cash to operate in the real world. What was meant to be a tool has become a millstone. What was designed as a safeguard has been transformed into an obstacle.

The goal was never a million hobbyist nodes scattered across the globe like broken toys. The goal was never to celebrate censorship resistance as an abstract ideal while ignoring whether anyone could actually buy coffee with it. The goal was never decentralization as theatre. 

The goal was digital cash—simple, direct, final. 

Cash is #decentralization perfected. It is unmediated exchange, value moved without permission, no matter how loud the bureaucrats complain. But instead of embracing that, these projects conspire to kill it, smothering cash beneath their ideological weight.

So yes, everything seems to conspire against it once more. Not just the familiar enemies—governments, regulators, institutions desperate to keep their grip on the purse strings—but also the false friends, the impostors waving the banner of decentralization while dismantling the very possibility of cash. They are not guardians; they are saboteurs. They will use decentralization itself as the poison, ensuring that digital cash is remembered as another failed experiment, another grave marker in the long history of financial illusions.

But the truth remains unaltered. The goal is not decentralization. It never was. The goal is digital cash. Every attempt to obscure that, every project that pretends otherwise, every ideology that elevates method over outcome, is an act of betrayal. The real battle is not against centralization alone. It is against the conspiracy—deliberate or ignorant—to make cash fail once more by replacing substance with slogans. The tragedy is that so few see it. The irony is that it was spelled out from the beginning. And the consequence, if this madness continues, is that the one working solution to the trust problem will be buried alive beneath the rubble of its own false prophets.

Plagiarised form a piece by @CsTominaga on X earlier today