Bitcoin maximalists often perpetuate the myth that decentralization is purely a matter of ideology. The reality is it’s also a matter of throughput. If you cannot move value permissionlessly at scale, then you cannot maintain decentralization at scale. So we are left to grapple with Bitcoin’s core contradictions: A trustless base layer…that forces most activity into trusted super-nodes. A bearer asset…mostly held as claims. A decentralized network…whose liquidity is governed by centralized gateways. And that is the crux of Bitcoin’s IOU Problem: Because the chain can’t scale, exchanges scale for it. Because exchanges scale, users trust them. Because users trust them, the intermediary layer becomes the real network. Has Bitcoin failed? In some ways, yes. It has hit the boundary of its design philosophy. Security at the base layer has become scarcity at the settlement layer. Scarcity has turned sovereignty into a luxury good. We need systems that preserve hardness and eliminate chokepoints. ...