Careful, there's only one story for Bitcoin: "the price goes up" (I hear the kids today have shortened that to "NgU"). This story is very sustainable when Bitcoin's 1% ("decentralized") have been holding coins since $1.
You can always count on the market cap being inflated any time this story is endangered, both to make life difficult for critics and trigger a flood of free advertising in the form of low-effort stories by the fintech blogosphere.
An unregulated global lotto game camouflaged in slippery futurist memery, with zero accountability by its puppet masters as a primary design feature, may well turn out to be a safer play than, say, TSLA or anything starting with a dollar sign. What this implies for us as a species is probably best left unexamined.
Decentralization of anything other than leverage over liquidity and thus price, which is what the Bitcoin 1% (more like 0.01%) holds, is nothing more than a misdirection story to furnish prospective Joe 99% Bitcoiners with the illusion that once they switch to BTC, their wealth will be placed outside interference or control by undesirable, presumably centralized forces.
When Bitcoiners say decentralized they mean, in fact, that its value (through some gating mechanic like issue or "censorship") is not controlled by a government, as if this is somehow any better than the value of one's wallet being controlled by unknown parties, front running exchange operators or mining cartels.
Bitcoin proponents pretend that government centralization of money supply is the only kind of centralization of money that needs fixing, and its mechanisms are thus designed to make an elaborate show of diffusing operational accountability while doing nothing to counteract a pathological concentration of leverage.
As a result, it doesn't actually decentralize anything, it instead relocates all of the centralization under obfuscated cover. This in itself isn't a problem, if promoters would upfront about it. But then no decentralization meme would certainly mean no Bitcoin at $30k, and what's the fun in that?
You can always count on the market cap being inflated any time this story is endangered, both to make life difficult for critics and trigger a flood of free advertising in the form of low-effort stories by the fintech blogosphere.
An unregulated global lotto game camouflaged in slippery futurist memery, with zero accountability by its puppet masters as a primary design feature, may well turn out to be a safer play than, say, TSLA or anything starting with a dollar sign. What this implies for us as a species is probably best left unexamined.