Bitcoin’s Failure as a Peer-to-Peer Payment System
Green revisits the initial promise of Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper: to create a decentralized payment system capable of bypassing banking institutions. “Bitcoin has marketed itself as several different things to attract investors at various points in time,” he explains. However, the result is unequivocal. On-chain statistics confirm it: the volume of actual transactions for purchases or peer-to-peer payments remains negligible. It’s even more so compared to speculative activity on exchanges.
The investor highlights a fundamental paradox. While the Bitcoin network processes approximately 300,000 transactions per day, the majority involve speculative trading or movements between platforms. The number of merchant payments or peer-to-peer transfers for real goods and services remains marginal, even after fifteen years of the protocol’s existence.
This observation aligns with numerous on-chain analysts who note a continuous decline in payment activity since 2017. High transaction fees during congestion periods and price volatility make BTC impractical for daily transactions. Lightning Network, meant to solve this problem, remains underutilized with only 5,000 BTC in total capacity.
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Bitcoin Destroys the Monetary Creation Necessary for the Economy
Green’s most technical criticism concerns the impossibility of creating credit in a Bitcoin system. The investor distinguishes between emergency monetary printing by governments and everyday bank credit. “When a bank grants a €1,000 loan, it simply creates a new account containing €1,000.” This monetary expansion via bank credit constitutes the foundation of the modern economic system.
Bitcoin eliminates this possibility by design. Its cap fixed at 21 million units prevents any additional monetary creation. Banks cannot issue new BTC through loans, unlike fiat currencies where credit expands the money supply. “No new money can be created. There is no capacity for forgiveness of errors in this type of framework,” Green argues.
This monetary rigidity creates prohibitive interest rates and credit spreads for a functional real economy. The few BTC lending platforms display rates well above traditional markets, with massive collateralization requirements to compensate for the absence of elastic monetary creation. The DeFi market on Bitcoin remains embryonic compared to Ethereum, precisely because of these structural limitations.
A Monopoly Game Where the Last to Arrive Systematically Loses
Green’s most radical argument concerns distribution and intergenerational equity. “Because we have a finite quantity of Bitcoin, that means everyone born after BTC’s launch finds themselves at a deficit,” he states. This dynamic creates a system where early adopters accumulate an insurmountable advantage over new entrants.
Green compares this situation to the feudal system of the 14th century: “A serf living on land that didn’t belong to him and to which he would never have access.” In a hypothetical world where Bitcoin became the dominant currency, each subsequent generation would start with a growing disadvantage against historical holders. Data shows that approximately 2% of addresses control 95% of the total BTC supply, a concentration unparalleled in monetary history.
The Monopoly analogy perfectly illustrates this dynamic. “You cannot add new players while the game is ongoing, because they will lose very quickly. How does every Monopoly game end? Someone wins. With a single winner.” This winner-takes-all structure fundamentally contradicts the objective of a functional monetary system, which should facilitate exchanges rather than concentrate wealth.
Green, who describes himself as an early Bitcoin adopter who initially found the concept “really interesting,” has radically changed his position after simulating the long-term implications of the system. His conclusion is that Bitcoin cannot function as either a medium of exchange or an equitable store of value, but only as a speculative asset creating growing structural inequality.
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