An open letter to the Bitcoin community by Jörg von Minckwitz

I have been in the crypto economy since the very early days. This was back in 2011 and since then I got to know the ups and downs of the market. I have seen the market crash from over $10 to almost zero, from $100 to under $10 and so on. On Monday morning, as I have always done for the last 6+ years, I was shocked after checking the Bitcoin price. The first thing that came to mind was: This is the end.

It took me a few hours to remind myself that I have been through this more times than I can remember or possibly count. The MtGox closure, “Bitcoin got hacked”, China banning Bitcoin mining, JP Morgan CEO calling Bitcoin “a fraud”, Bitcoin is only for money laundering and many more.

What scares me this time is that there are other players in the game now. In the early days, when the word hodl was more or less born, I had contact with most of the major players and actors in the space and there was always one thing that we all agreed on: We want to change the world. So we fastened our seatbelts and went on the fun and thrilling crypto ride together.

It is the end of an era for me. I say this because, for many in the crypto space, bitcoin and other cryptos are no longer about changing the world – it became a way to make more (and fast) money. That is one of the reasons why people tend to panic and sell – People are afraid of losing money.

In my humble opinion, this is not how bitcoin should be treated. Bitcoin is the biggest experiment in the world so far and it has the potential to change the world as we know it forever. It is not, nor was it designed to be, a tool to get rich quickly.

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