Was Bitcoin Hijacked? How Institutional Interests Shaped Its Narrative Since 2015
Bitcoin, and eventually broader crypto, was steered away from being a decentralized alternative to the state and toward integration into the very financial system it was meant to replace.
In an interview, Aaron Day, co-founder of Daylight Freedom, a foundation dedicated to financial sovereignty and individual liberty, reached this conclusion based on his personal experiences with Bitcoin.
Questioning Bitcoin’s Original MissionNowadays, Bitcoin is best known for its non-sovereign, censorship-resistant characteristics. For several years now, the crypto community has touted the asset as akin to gold, albeit digital.
Day, an outspoken critic of cryptocurrencies and a libertarian thinker, once thought this too.
That’s why he started using Bitcoin as early as 2012. However, he soon started to realize that its narrative was in a constant state of transformation– one that parted ways with its self-proclaimed decentralized nature.
His persistent remarks on social media and sharp criticisms of some of the industry’s most powerful companies have inevitably made some paint him as a conspiracy theorist.
However, his long trajectory as a crypto user in the space, paired with the research he conducts as a fellow at the Brownstone Institute, provides a perspective that’s hard to dismiss, especially amid Bitcoin’s broader mainstream adoption.
New Hampshire as a Bitcoin Testing GroundWhen Day, a New Hampshire resident, started using Bitcoin 15 years ago, many restaurants and shops accepted it directly. It already functioned as a spendable digital currency.
In many ways, the state was a breeding ground for this type of activity.
Known as the “Live Free or Die” region, New Hampshire also became the home of the Free State Project, a nonprofit political migration movement founded in 2001 that successfully relocated roughly 20,000 free thinkers to the area, aiming to concentrate them in a low-population state.
“Live Free or Die” — Start your Journey with the Free State Project
The fight for liberty began right here in New Hampshire and it’s alive and thriving today. We are Free Staters — thousands of liberty lovers who’ve made the move to the Granite State to live free and build a… pic.twitter.com/8JssrpsMfC
Day was the Chairman of that project, and by virtue of his beliefs, he became attracted to Bitcoin’s potential.
“Back [in 2012], mostly conferences were about how Bitcoin was going to be used as an alternative to central banks, how it was going to be something that solved the problem of the 2008 financial crisis, [and] how it was going to be a tool that didn’t require intermediaries or third parties. This is how I got introduced to it,” Day told BeInCrypto during a podcast episode.
However, despite its early adoption in his city, the narrative began to shift by 2017. According to him, it soon became unusable.
“All of a sudden, the fees went through the roof. We went from transactions being finalized in seconds to days. It lost its fundamental utility, which is to be something that anyone anywhere in the world could engage in voluntary transactions without third parties,” he added.
Though that was Day’s original frustration with the currency, it soon only represented the tip of the iceberg.
A Narrative Shift From Cash to Store of ValueWhen Day started using Bitcoin, it was seen as just another form of currency for everyday transactions with decentralized advantages. It was never perceived as anything else.
“People weren’t talking about primarily as being digital gold. It’s something you just hold and save and don’t spend. It’s not in the title of the whitepaper, this is not the behavior and function of Bitcoin,” he explained.
These changes coincided with the rise of Layer 2 solutions in crypto. These secondary protocols, built on top of the primary blockchain, are designed to significantly increase transaction speeds and reduce fees. Protocols like Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Lightning Network became particularly popular at the time.
While many developers argued these upgrades were necessary technical trade-offs, Day interpreted them differently.
In his view, the technical debate around scaling was inseparable from a broader structural shift happening behind the scenes — one related to who was funding Bitcoin’s development.
From Non-Profit Backing to Institutional InfluenceIn 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation, a non-profit organization, was established in the United States to promote Bitcoin use and protect the integrity of the project. It also supported Bitcoin’s earliest core developers.
Three years later, however, the organization collapsed amid internal turmoil and financial difficulties.
Shortly afterward, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, through its Digital Currency Initiative —directed by Jeffrey Epstein-linked Joi Ito— began funding several Bitcoin core developers.
Current staff at the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative. Source: MIT.
To many in the ecosystem, this was a practical solution. Bitcoin was an open-source protocol without a formal corporate sponsor. Developers needed funding to continue their work.
But for Day, the timing raised questions.
“MIT took over, and then some of the same developers that were working on things like SegWit and Lightning Network, essentially hobbling Bitcoin as peer-to-peer cash and moving to this Bitcoin is digital gold narrative.”
As Bitcoin’s scalability issues became more apparent and the network’s future development was increasingly steered by well-funded institutional interests, the project’s decentralized nature began to erode.
Fast forward to today, and Bitcoin has become extensively integrated in infrastructure directly tied to traditional, centralized banking. Exchange-traded funds tied to the asset, institutional custody, and nation-state reserves have since entered the conversation.
Day questioned whether this trajectory was inevitable or the result of structural forces that redirected Bitcoin’s original mission.
“I think at the end of this, the longer it goes on, the more it’s pretty clear that all of crypto has been hijacked,” he concluded.
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