IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/exe/wpaper/2502.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

False Premises, Failed Promises: BTC's Market Illusion and the Abandonment of Bitcoin's Design

Author

Listed:
  • Craig S. Wright

    (Department of Economics, University of Exeter)

Abstract

BTC, diverging fundamentally from the original Bitcoin protocol, has attained outsized market capitalisation despite abandoning Bitcoin's primary function as a scalable, traceable system for electronic cash. The Lightning Network, frequently misrepresented as a Layer 2 solution, is demonstrably a separate payment routing structure that never requires final settlement on-chain. This paper deconstructs the economic, technical, and ideological divergence of BTC from Bitcoin, critiques the architectural and empirical failure of Lightning, and examines the speculative mispricing driven by false narratives, branding confusion, and structural ignorance.

Suggested Citation

  • Craig S. Wright, 2025. "False Premises, Failed Promises: BTC's Market Illusion and the Abandonment of Bitcoin's Design," Discussion Papers 2502, University of Exeter, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:exe:wpaper:2502
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://exetereconomics.github.io/RePEc/dpapers/DP2502.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    BTC; Bitcoin; Lightning Network; digital cash; scalability; protocol divergence; Layer 2; micropayments; transaction finality; network economics;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E42 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Monetary Sytsems; Standards; Regimes; Government and the Monetary System
    • G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:exe:wpaper:2502. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sebastian Kripfganz (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deexeuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.