Progress Recap: First Crises

Two more weeks of history. Here’s what the institutional era actually looked like.

MicroStrategy put $250 million of company treasury into Bitcoin in 2020 — and kept buying. The move opened a door that couldn’t be closed. Corporate Bitcoin treasury became a real conversation.

El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021. The experiment has been messy, imperfect, and genuinely important. The remittance corridor works. The broader adoption is still a work in progress.

The 2021 bull run reached $69,000, driven by institutional demand on a scale the market had never seen before. The infrastructure built during this period — custodians, regulated products, trading desks — didn’t disappear when the price fell.

Luna and UST showed what happens when algorithmic complexity replaces genuine reserves. $60 billion gone in eleven days. The lesson: if you don’t understand how something maintains its value, that’s important information.

FTX showed what happens when a centralised custodian lies about what it holds. $8 billion of customer funds misappropriated. The founder sentenced to 25 years. Bitcoin kept running through all of it.

The pattern through all of this is consistent. The centralised layers — exchanges, lending platforms, algorithmic constructs — are where the failures happen. The decentralised base layer keeps producing blocks, every ten minutes, regardless of what happens around it.

The most important Bitcoin education often comes not from the network working as expected — but from watching everything else fail.

If the FTX chapter sharpened your thinking about why Satoshi’s disappearance was different from every other founder’s behaviour, this book tells that full story:

Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? — amzn.to/4sWg7Q5

Tomorrow: the 2022 bear market — who held and who folded.

— The Daily Bit