Bottom line: The “BTC-as-crippled-distraction” story is coh…

Bottom line: The “BTC-as-crippled-distraction” story is coherent but not necessary. A simpler reading is that markets selected Bitcoin’s base-layer minimalism for durability and neutrality, then layered for scale; institutions joined because demand was real; gold and BTC serve different jobs-to-be-done and can rise together; and a BRICS gold-backed currency is politically and operationally unlikely. The thesis leans on speculative coordination and underestimates both the technical logic of layered scaling and the political economy that makes hard gold pegs unattractive.