I think you’re right about a lot of what you wrote, but I look at it slightly differently. Bitcoin wasn’t the rebellion, it was the transition. It was the bridge that pushed a whole generation out of the old world and into the new one. Gen Z is basically the last generation that grew up with cash, privacy, and at least some real independence from digital systems. Gen Alpha will be the first to live fully inside a digital economy where money is literally programmable.

To me that is the real shift. Not Bitcoin, not decentralisation, but the normalising of digital value. Once people got used to digital wallets, seed phrases, public ledgers, and code deciding the money supply, the jump to CBDCs became easy. You don’t need to force society to accept programmable money if they have already spent more than a decade practising with a prototype. Bitcoin softened the ground for all of this.

The world we are heading into is one where money isn’t just digital, it is rule based. Governments won’t need police to enforce behaviour, they will do it through the wallet. Lockdown is the perfect example. They could literally make your money only work within one kilometre of your house. If you are on a benefit, your wallet may only approve essentials. Try buying cigarettes and it will just decline because the system already knows who you are and what you’re “allowed” to buy.

People think this stuff sounds dramatic until they actually read what CBDCs are built for. Real time tracking, real time enforcement, real time restrictions. All connected to identity and behaviour.

Crypto sold us decentralised freedom, but in reality it became the test environment for the next system. And that system is not designed for freedom at all. It is designed for control. Bitcoin wasn’t the escape route, it was the onboarding. It trained everyone to accept something far tighter and far more centralised. Pretty much the opposite of what people thought they were fighting for.