By Aaron Day at Brownstone dot org.

The original vision for Bitcoin was simple: peer-to-peer digital cash, free from banks and government. However, the document argues that this vision was deliberately "hijacked," as Bitcoin is now pushed as "digital gold," a scarce asset for Wall Street, with slow and expensive transactions for everyday use.

This shift began with the 2015-2017 Block Size Fight, where a group won the argument to keep transaction blocks small, making the main network costly. The promoted "fix," the Lightning Network, is a faster system but relies on middlemen (hubs), fundamentally changing it from true P2P cash.

The funding for this change is linked to Jeffrey Epstein. After the Bitcoin Foundation collapsed, his money flowed through MIT's Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) to pay the core developers who favored the small-block path. Epstein also invested in Blockstream, a company started by those same developers.

Brock Pierce is identified as a key connector. He co-founded Tether, brokered Epstein's Coinbase investment, and had an extensive relationship with him. Tether then played a crucial role in inflating Bitcoin's price; a study suggests new, unbacked Tether, minted after price drops, accounted for roughly 50% of the 2017 bull run. The CFTC later fined Tether $41 million for lying about its reserves.

The control network continues with Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald. Despite lying about cutting ties with Epstein, Cantor now manages Tether's massive $130+ billion US Treasury reserves. Lutnick's ally, Bo Hines, pushed the industry-friendly GENIUS Act while serving as a White House crypto advisor, only to immediately quit and become CEO of USAT, Tether's US subsidiary.

The document views this as a coordinated "conquest," with laws like the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, and the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, cementing insider control and preparing the ground for a tracked, programmable digital dollar. The author calls for immediate action to shut down these initiatives and support real alternatives like privacy coins.

Bitcoin was supposed to be simple: digital money you could send to anyone, anywhere, without a bank or government getting in the way. When Satoshi Nakamoto released the idea in 2008, it was described as peer-to-peer electronic cash, like handing someone cash in person, but over the internet. No middleman. No permission needed. Privacy protected. Freedom built in.

That sounded perfect to me. I live in New Hampshire, part of the Free State Project, where people are working every day to shrink government and expand personal liberty. Bitcoin felt like the financial side of that same fight: sound money that could not be printed endlessly or frozen on a whim.

Today, though, Bitcoin is sold as digital gold, something you buy and hold, not something you spend on coffee. Transactions are slow and expensive on the main network. Most everyday use happens on side systems that add layers of control. The whole story changed from cash for the people to scarce asset for Wall Street. That did not happen by accident.

It was hijacked.

The people behind it used money, connections, and influence to steer Bitcoin away from its original purpose. Key evidence comes from the Jeffrey Epstein court files, government investigations, academic research, and public records. The names that keep showing up are Brock Pierce, Epstein himself, and later Howard Lutnick. Their fingerprints are all over the shift, and the tools now being built on top of it, like the GENIUS Act (signed into law in July 2025), the CLARITY Act (passed the House in 2025 and advancing), and the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve (established by executive order in March 2025).

Here is what happened.

The Fight Over Bitcoin's Size

Early on, everyone agreed that Bitcoin needed to handle more transactions as it grew. The simple fix was to make each block of transactions bigger, so more payments could fit every ten minutes.

Some developers pushed hard for that. Other...