I rarely agree with Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on anything crypto. Yet, Dimon has previously called Bitcoin a pet rock. This is one of the few statements from Dimon on crypto that I strongly agree with. This note might not sit well with every Bitcoin maximalist, but you pay me to express my honest opinions, so please brace yourself.

We start with some background knowledge. I read the Bitcoin whitepaper for the first time in 2015. I was absolutely stunned by Bitcoin’s technical foundation by its use of mathematics at its finest. This cleared the way for the very first fully decentralized cryptocurrency. It enabled transactions to be facilitated and wealth to be securely stored without the need for intermediaries or excessive control of governments or firms. Bitcoin was – and is – brilliant.

But, since Satoshi Nakamoto wrote Bitcoin’s whitepaper, Bitcoin has barely changed for the better. There have been some additions to the protocol such as SegWit and Taproot throughout the years, but the naked eye cannot find what these changes have brought to Bitcoin. By and large, the network is simply as it was ten years ago.

Strictly speaking, Bitcoin remains highly unscalable given its maximum transactional output of about 7 transactions per second relative to VISA’s 24,000 transactions per second. With its lack of scalability, alongside its inability to natively facilitate decentralized applications and tokens, Bitcoin is short of anything relative to ecosystem and utility. Furthermore, the network still utilizes a proof-of-work consensus mechanism that makes Greenpeace dust their demo flags from their basement. By this approach, Bitcoin has stressed its position as a cryptocurrency that enjoys the status quo but limited further development.

The proposition of an almost completely locked-in design has attracted its fair share of Bitcoin maximalists. The argument is that knowing what you get, including that Bitcoin is not going to divert from that, is the ultimate form of crypto. They claim that Bitcoin has turned into digital gold, mainly due to its broad recognition and scarcity. This suggests that its value is primarily based on a monetary premium rather than utility and intrinsic value.

This limits Bitcoin’s upside relative to the rest of the market.