It did. With Bitcoin, anybody with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet access can send money globally in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). They can be their own bank without trusting any single third party. It doesn’t matter if their country has secure banking infrastructure and it doesn’t matter what their credit score is. There are countries on this planet where women aren’t allowed to open bank accounts. Bitcoin doesn’t give AF.

It has promoted and maintained the exact same fiscal policy for 15 years without a single hour of downtime or hack: a limited supply and a guarantee of your ability to transfer your coin to somebody else. No bank holidays, nobody devaluing your currency by increasing the supply. No having your savings robbed by an unstable central bank. It gives anybody in the world access to a currency that is already as stable or more stable than most national currencies. And it gives any country in the world an option aside from using USD and, inherently, losing some degree of autonomy in the process. There’s a reason Ecuador and Argentina went in on it so hard.

People underestimate how big Bitcoin really is. It’s market cap is 850 billion USD, that’s the size of Sweden’s GDP and puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On average, it has a trend of consistent growth year after year as adoption continues to increase. It is uncensorable, the US could decide to ban Bitcoin tomorrow, a gamma ray from space could blast half of the earth out of existence, and the next block would come regardless and the network would continue to function.

It does all this for around 1% of global electricity usage, mainly from renewables and is powering a new green revolution by being a “buyer of last resort” for power grids. This makes electricity cheaper for all other users of the grid as it’s able to buy power when nobody else wants it, enabling power generation facilities to not lose money during times of low demand. This also makes it easier for grids to add renewable capacity. Bitcoin is a form of energy storage in that sense. Miners don’t buy power during times of peak demand for price reasons, so it doesn’t take power that anybody else would be using.

Anybody remember how cryptocurrency was supposed to democratize money or something?

Smokescreen to get people who don’t really understand computers to buy into a system which can be easily controlled by those who produce/own the physical devices involved, while hiding their tracks near perfectly.