It's really not though. The point was to get rich and if you can get rich quicker in a custodial pump-and-dump than in a self-custodied decentralized boiler room... you might as well.
There's nothing in the bitcoin whitepaper about getting rich quick. If that's your goal, go ahead and send your money to FTX, Luna, Voyager, or Binance. But that's not my goal. I'm here so I can have self-sovereignty of my money.
the entire concept of money is a social construct. It's a culture wide bluff that we all agree to never call. "self-sovereignty" is antithetical to the idea of money.
It's also notable how much technological infrastructure is required to make this "self-sovereign" money possible - from specialized ASICs to constant internet connectivity. Gold is a much more self-sovereign store of value than any cryptocurrency.
Why does that matter? I'm pretty sure Bitcoin couldn't go back to CPU/GPU mining without killing the transaction rate or spiking the transaction cost. Using your self-sovereign money successfully (and at its current value) requires specialized ASICs to continue to be available.
> I'm here so I can have self-sovereignty of my money.
Except you aren't really. You will always be beholden to one entity or another, in bitcoin the 51% who need to clear your transactions. You just decide to not trust in the current financial apparatus and instead bet on the new.
Betting on something where there is no single interest that can decide to screw you is fundamentally different than trusting something where one entity is in control. In a more principled world, I'd like to think the latter would never exist and people would be willing to go to great lengths to avoid or even protest against its existence.
> There's nothing in the bitcoin whitepaper about getting rich quick.
Sure there is. The capped supply is intended to cause deflation and enrich early adopters if/when Bitcoin goes mainstream. To argue otherwise is to claim that the author of the whitepaper was ignorant of how a currency with limited supply would behave. And if that's true, it's more damning of Bitcoin than the "get rich quick" stuff.
