06-22-2026 
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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of CoinGeek.
- A reflection on Bitcoin’s ever-changing landscape
- Current Trends: New faces and their gambles
- The Exodus: What happened to the past leaders?
- True Believers: Those committed beyond price fluctuations
There was a time when you could not scroll through Bitcoin Twitter or flip through a Bitcoin conference lineup without seeing the same three faces. Andreas Antonopoulos was the patient professor. Roger Ver was “Bitcoin Jesus,” pouring his fortune into evangelism. Max Keiser was screaming about silver and the death of the dollar on Russia Today until Bitcoin came up, and then he was happy to tear up $100 bills on stage for the crowd!
For a few years, those guys were the movement. If you wanted to understand Bitcoin, you went to them. Then the cast changed.
The next wave came in with the 2017 run and never really left…until they did. Trace Mayer talking about economics and game theory, Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano turning Bitcoin into a daily CNBC hit and a podcast empire. Tuur Demeester, with his endless intellectualizing of otherwise simple concepts. Saifedean Ammous wrote the book that gave every new BTC maximalist their talking points. Robert Breedlove turning “the number go up” into a four-hour philosophy lecture. And on the retail side, newsletter salesmen like Teeka Tiwari and James Altucher promise your barber and your dentist that this one pick would change their lives.
Now look at today. The faces have rotated again. It is Jack Mallers, pretending to be a plucky young disrupter despite being the royal heir of Chicago’s largest derivatives-trading dynasty. Or it is Michael Saylor and the gospel of buying and never selling; well, for you, anyway. Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) sells when it needs to, and Saylor can’t be bothered with the details.
There is a parade of men in quarter zip pullovers building “Bitcoin Treasury Companies,” which is a fancy way of saying they raise fiat to buy a coin and hope the chart keeps the lights on.
Almost every single person I just named, at one point or another, told me I was going to disappear because I was the “altcoin guy.” I had picked the wrong chain. I was a heretic, a scammer, a dead man walking who just had not noticed the funeral yet. They said it with total confidence, the way you say something when the price is going your way, and you have mistaken a bull market for genius.
So let me ask the obvious question. Where did they go?
Antonopoulos stopped being the face of anything years ago and recently retired due to health concerns. Ver got chewed up by the very community he funded and is now lying low after fighting the U.S. government. Trace Mayer vanished without a trace (see what I did there?!) The 2017 crew mostly cashed their chips, pivoted to whatever pays now, or quietly stopped tweeting when the four-year cycle stopped flattering their egos. The newsletter guys moved on to artificial intelligence (AI), precious metals, or NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), or whatever the next thing is that you can sell to a mailing list. The tourists took their pictures, bought their souvenirs, and went home.
There is a word for this kind of Bitcoiner. They are “Tourists.”
A tourist shows up when the weather is nice. He takes the tour, buys the t-shirt, posts the highlight reel, and leaves the moment it gets uncomfortable. He was never going to live there. He never learned the language or adopted the culture. He came for the view, and the story he could tell back home, and the view here was always the price of BTC.
That is what most of these people actually cared about. Not Bitcoin. The trade. The fiat gains. The narrative that justified the position they were already holding. Bitcoin was never the point for them. It was the vehicle for their short-term ends. And when the vehicle slowed down, or when a better-looking one pulled up, they got out and waved goodbye to the rest of us who actually live in the neighborhood.
I am still here. So are many of my friends in the BSV space.
We did not stay because the chart told us to. We stayed because we actually care about the thing itself. We care about Bitcoin as a system. We care about scaling it into a global ledger that can carry data, identity, micropayments, and honest accounting at a scale that makes the whole “store of value and nothing else” crowd look like people who bought a Ferrari to keep it in the garage. We care about the protocol, the engineering, the use cases that have nothing to do with whether it is a good year to be long.
That is the difference, and it is the whole difference. When you only care about the gains, you are at the mercy of the cycle. The cycle giveth and the cycle taketh away, and when it takes, it takes your conviction with it. But when you care about the technology for reasons beyond price, no cycle can run you off. There is nothing to disappear from. The work is the same in both bull and bear markets. You just keep building.
I have watched three full generations of Bitcoin celebrities come and go, and I have been declared dead by most of them. Here is the funny thing about being told you will disappear by people who then disappear themselves. The ones who scream loudest about their conviction are almost always the first ones out the door, because the conviction was never in Bitcoin. It was in the bet.
BTC people are Bitcoin tourists. BSV people are Bitcoin warriors. A warrior does not need the weather to be nice. He does not need the price to validate him. He shows up when it is ugly, when the crowd has thinned out, when the cameras have moved on to the next thing, and he keeps doing the work because the work is the point.
I am proud to be one of them. I will be here when the current crop of treasury company CEOs has moved on to whatever the 2029 narrative turns out to be. I will be here when the next round of influencers shows up to tell the new kids that I picked the wrong chain. And I will be here long after they have packed their bags and flown home.
The tourists always leave. The warriors stay and build.
Be good to each other. And keep building.
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
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