Did you read Nassim Taleb's book Antifragile? Do you remember the byline of it?
"Things that gain from disorder"
A great metaphor is the hydra from Greek mythology. What happened when you cut off its head? Two grew in its place. The hydra gained from attempts to kill it.
There are a lot of people who are confusing the concept of antifragility with robustness, and I see it a lot when people talk about bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not antifragile. Bitcoin is robust.
Bitcoin exchanges were recently taken down in China, but the Chinese still buy and sell Bitcoin using WeChat groups. Bitcoin markets may be antifragile, but Bitcoin itself is not.
The Chinese people are antifragile.
Is there an Antifragile Cryptocurrency?
While I don't believe Bitcoin itself is antifragile, the idea of cryptocurrency and cryptoassets is. It has taken the world 9 years to go from zero to $200 billion market cap in this new asset class. The idea of Bitcoin is incredibly antifragile.
It's extremely unlikely, but a concentrated effort by world governments to destroy Bitcoin could be successful. It could involve buying a large portion of Bitcoin, building competing ASICS while shutting down "unlicensed" miners, and plenty of unsavory other things. I don't think Bitcoin could stand up to a united effort of a few major countries trying to shut it down.
On the other hand, I don't think governments can control the total cryptocurrency market. The idea of Bitcoin: peer to peer cash, either pseudonymous or anonymous, is here to stay. The technology is sufficiently developed and the idea is everywhere, with tens of thousands of capable developers. The myriad of cryptocurrency tokens available on the market right now represent different ideas on how to best make that idea available, scalable, and better than the original. Whether Bitcoin prevails as the crytpocurrency of choice, or is dethroned by another remains to be seen (don't let anyone tell you they know otherwise).
So, again, let me stress that Bitcoin itself is very robust, and has brushed off a great deal of near death experiences. But Bitcoin is not antifragile by itself: it doesn't grow another head. Instead, it inspires new tokens, new cryptocurrencies, new forks (so many forks...), new ideas.
Bitcoin itself is not antifragile. Cryptocurrency is.
-Jeff
Somehow I missed this post but broadly agree. Bitcoin is not anti-fragile but cryptocurrency as an "ecosystem" is. The more things that happen, good and bad, the better the overall system gets. Even though bad things 'suck' (like wallet hacks and frozen coins) the system learns from this and makes continual improvements. In the long run I see things improving.
I'm also a fan of Taleb's work and been following him for years. Haven't read his latest book yet.
Thanks, yes, we all learn from the collective mistakes, with the added bonus that many of the mistakes are deflationary in nature (coins get burned and lost forever).