I had no idea Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal was so close to being a bitcoiner:
I always laughed at the guys in suits who would go to conferences and say things like "Bitcoin is a speculative asset, but we're really excited about the underlying blockchain technology."
He goes on to say something that sounds like the exact sort of thing your average bitcoin maxi might say:
The thing that seemed "neat" to me about Bitcoin (or perhaps crypto in general) was this idea of being able to make a true peer-to-peer transaction on the internet...Debanking is a thing and so censorship-resistant money was (and still is) a powerful idea.
That's why I got pretty locked into my view that censorship resistance was the sole advantage of a blockchain. After all, if you don't care about the existence of an intermediary, there are plenty of centralized databases that work at lightning-fast speeds, and are virtually zero cost already1
Are you kidding me?! This is almost word for word the sort of thing I've been saying for years.
But, unfortunately, it seems that it is a case of close but no banana:
Now here in 2026, I increasingly have to admit that maybe those [blockchain] guys were right.
Weisenthal goes on to explain how a 2024 interview with Austin Campbell convinced him that maybe banks need blockchains to coordinate with each other and provide "a credibly neutral protocol upon which transactions can take place."
And then he goes into a stablecoins aplogia thing and an advertisement for Hyperliquid and finally a long bit about perpetual futures. The perpetual futures bit seems to me like it doesn't have anything to do with the "blockchain, not bitcoin" argument Weisenthal makes above, so let's set it aside.
Is there any possible world where a blockchain is a reasonable way to provide a "credibly neutral" coordination layer for stodgy banks who cannot seem to find a normal database way to coordinate?
I think the answer is no. The entire internet is full of a myriad of ways to coordinate that don't involve the painful massive redundancy of a blockchain. Am I missing something?
Bloomberg is involved with a propaganda and misinformation campaign against bitcoin and pro “stablecoins”. It is said there is an agenda underway to promote and integrate “stablecoin” adoption while suppressing btc in order to prop up dollar relevance and demand for tbills. NOTHING Bloomberg says or posts should be taken with any amount of credibility, nor should anyone who takes Bloomberg credible.
So they want the tech but not the freedom? And the token is literally called $HYPE? They were going to name it "Surveillance as a Service", but the marketing team said it lacked buzz
Arthur Hayes has also been non-stop pushing HYPE. There's some sort of big money behind that, whatever it is.
That says it all, follow the money. Arthur Hayes shilling it just confirms it's a VC casino, they want a fast database where they control the admin keys and the exit. Bitcoin is the only asset without a CEO to pump it or a VC to dump it on you
For it to be a valuable 'blockchain' it needs to be reasonably decentralised, proof of work, provably scarce, censorship resistant, and hard to change monetarily.
Do the bank 'blockchains' meet these criteria? If so well great.
If they don't then... What is the point?
This is exactly how I think about it. I don't understand how a blockchain could allow them to gain anything here. if they don't fully trust each other, couldn't they just run some sort of append-only database?
I wonder if there is a situation where they are actually too lazy to figure out how to coordinate and so they are willing to take on all the redundancy of a blockchain because it's easier in some way? But I can't see that working. so then I come back to this is all marketing.
Can a pleb run a node at home on an old thinkpad with a newish SSD? Can a pleb mine with a bitaxe, with a few SATs a day as a reward?
Is the blockchain hard to censor? Is it extremely difficult/virtually impossible to confiscate the UTXOs remotely cryptographically?
And finally is the monetary policy very hard to change and hard to influence by a centralized group?
Because something like tether meets none of these criteria. Like none of them
Is a bank blockchain going to provide censorship resistance and literal mining, inviting the return of commodity-money? They don't want that now... So why would they want that through a 'blockchain'?
To me their comments make no sense
I never take Weisenthal seriously.
I actually enjoy their show, even though they are clearly full of themselves. it has a certain fun to it, and they get interesting guests.
I saw it on Twitter the other day, he sounded ridiculous when he said it.
...then again, fame has gone to Joe's head, that's for sure.
I was just very surprised by that he was able to articulate such a solid understanding of the value proposition of bitcoin. It reads like someone who really gets it. And then he goes off on this whole thing about Hyperliquid and perps and I don't get how he is so close and yet still misses it.
It's conceivable, but after they put all the controls on it they'd probably negate most of the potential. Don't see these tigers changing their stripes much.
There is an unneccessary centralization vector wrt equities:
https://m.stacker.news/162466
Tokenized equities could dis-intermediate this company and potentially unify all brokerages into one liquid market, that could be good for execution prices at some level.
Instead of DTCC, the brokerages like Fidelity, Shwabb etc and the PubCos that actually issue stock, could be the peers in a p2p replacement.
The cost savings could be massive in nominal terms, but I think also irrelevant in the grand scheme of how much notional value sloshes around.
Tokenized bonds and paying the yielding tokens instead of coupons on them are probably more easily implemented in such a system.
So there's something there, but our definition of blockchain and theirs is going to be wildly different. What they end up with will paradoxically more resemble centralization and consolidation via federation rather than decentralization.
I got a lottery ticket long on $HOOD as they seem to be the tip of the spear on implementing this shit.
Jordi Visser has some reasonable takes on this, it accelerates price discovery, which long story short is good for Bitcoin.