There are times I really wonder if Bitcoin has truly been taken over. From the perspective of someone who has been using it since 2012, I can't shake the feeling that this network has fundamentally changed.

The original promise of Bitcoin was quite simple: a currency that is not controlled by any government and resistant to censorship. In New Hampshire, that was actually becoming a reality. Fifteen years ago, many restaurants and stores routinely accepted Bitcoin payments. Under the state slogan "Live Free or Die," such experiments naturally emerged.

But around 2017, that story clearly began to change. As Bitcoin’s practical use as a currency diminished, more serious structural shifts were occurring. Behind the technical debates known as the scaling controversy, there was a fundamental shift in the funding sources for Bitcoin development.

In 2012, the nonprofit Bitcoin Foundation was established to support early development. However, three years later, the organization collapsed due to internal conflicts and funding issues. Immediately afterward, MIT Media Lab launched the Digital Currency Initiative, providing funding to core developers. It might have seemed like a practical solution. But that timing was precisely the problem.

As scalability issues became apparent and the future of the network started to be shaped by well-funded institutional players, the decentralization of the project gradually eroded. Today’s Bitcoin is directly connected to traditional banking infrastructure—through listed ETFs, institutional custody, and national reserve assets. Looking at these trends, it’s clear that what’s happening isn’t just technological evolution but a structural transformation driven by larger forces.

To put it bluntly, the original vision of decentralization has been led down a path of integration into the existing financial system. Was that inevitable, or was it the result of structural forces distorting its original mission? Reexamining this question in the current era of Bitcoin offers a perspective that cannot be easily ignored.