Has Bitcoin Been "Tamed"? From the Decentralization Revolution to Wall Street's Tool

Bitcoin, and later the entire cryptocurrency system, has shifted away from its role as a decentralized alternative to the state and toward integration into the very financial system it was created to replace.
In an interview, Aaron Day, co-founder of Daylight Freedom, an organization advocating for financial sovereignty and personal freedom, reached this conclusion based on his personal experience with Bitcoin.
Questioning Bitcoin’s Original Mission
Today, Bitcoin is best known for its non-sovereign nature and resistance to censorship. Over the years, the crypto community has praised this asset as a digital gold, even calling it digital gold.
Day, a strong critic of cryptocurrencies and a libertarian thinker, also once shared this view.
That’s why he started using Bitcoin in 2012. However, he soon realized that its story is constantly changing—an evolution that runs counter to its claimed decentralized nature.
His continuous statements on social media and sharp criticisms of some of the most powerful companies in the industry have led some to label him a conspiracy theorist.
Nevertheless, his extensive experience as a crypto user, along with research he conducts as a member of the Brownstone Institute, offers a perspective that cannot be ignored—especially as Bitcoin becomes more widely adopted in everyday life.
New Hampshire as a Testing Ground for Bitcoin
When Day, a resident of New Hampshire, began using Bitcoin 15 years ago, many restaurants and stores accepted it directly. It functioned as a spendable digital currency.
In many ways, this state became the birthplace of such activity.
Known as the “Live Free or Die” state, New Hampshire also became home to the Free State Project, a non-profit political migration movement founded in 2001, which successfully relocated about 20,000 libertarian-minded people to the area, aiming to concentrate them in a low-population state.
Day is the president of this project, and driven by his beliefs, he was attracted to Bitcoin’s potential.
“In [2012], most conferences talked about Bitcoin as an alternative to central banks, solving the 2008 financial crisis, and as a tool that doesn’t require intermediaries or third parties. That’s how I got involved,” Day shared with BeInCrypto in a podcast episode.
However, despite early adoption in his city, the story began to change in 2017. According to him, it quickly became unusable.
“Suddenly, transaction fees skyrocketed. We went from completing transactions in seconds to taking days. It lost its fundamental utility—allowing anyone anywhere in the world to make voluntary transactions without third parties,” he added.
Although this initially frustrated Day with the currency, it soon turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Changing Narratives: From Cash to Store of Value
When Day started using Bitcoin, it was seen as just another currency for daily transactions with the advantage of decentralization. It was never viewed as anything else.
“People didn’t mainly talk about it as digital gold. It’s something you hold, save, and don’t spend. That’s not what’s outlined in the white paper, nor is it Bitcoin’s behavior and function,” he explained.
These changes coincided with the rise of Layer 2 solutions in the crypto space. These secondary protocols built on the main blockchain were designed to speed up transactions and significantly reduce fees. Protocols like Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the Lightning Network became particularly popular at that time.
While many developers saw these upgrades as necessary technical trade-offs, Day had a different understanding.
In his view, the technical debate over scaling issues cannot be separated from a broader structural change happening behind the scenes—one related to who is funding Bitcoin’s development.
From Non-Profit Support to Organizational Influence
In 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the U.S., was established to promote Bitcoin adoption and protect the project’s integrity. It also supported Bitcoin’s initial core developers.
However, three years later, the organization collapsed due to internal conflicts and financial difficulties.
Soon after, MIT Media Lab, through the Digital Currency Initiative—run by Joi Ito, who had links to Jeffrey Epstein—began funding some of Bitcoin’s core developers.
For many in the ecosystem, this was a practical solution. Bitcoin is an open-source protocol without official corporate sponsors. Developers need funding to continue their work.
But for Day, this period raised many questions.
“MIT took over, and then some developers who worked on projects like SegWit and Lightning Network basically weakened Bitcoin’s role as a peer-to-peer cash and shifted the narrative to Bitcoin as digital gold.”
As Bitcoin’s scalability issues became more apparent and future network development increasingly influenced by the interests of heavily invested organizations, the project’s decentralized nature began to erode.
Today, Bitcoin has been widely integrated into infrastructure directly linked to traditional banking systems, with exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tied to the asset, custody services of organizations, and national reserves also entering the discussion.
Day questions whether this trajectory is inevitable or the result of structural factors that have altered Bitcoin’s original mission.
“I ultimately believe that the longer this continues, the clearer it becomes that the entire cryptocurrency market has been manipulated,” he concluded.