The Existential Bitcoin Crisis That Nobody Wants To Talk About

Bitcoin’s biggest believers have spent the last decade celebrating one thing everyone loves: number go up.

But according to OP_NET founder Samuel Patt, that success may now be creating one of the biggest long-term threats to Bitcoin itself.

“This digital gold narrative emerged around Bitcoin where Bitcoin just keeps going up,” Patt tells Coinage in a new interview. “But that narrative is a dangerous narrative in my opinion, because ... there's nothing about Bitcoin's code that says it's going to go up forever.”

While that level of thinking has certainly helped Bitcoin the asset, much less talked about is the impact the "better store of value" thinking has on actually wanting to spend any Bitcoin -- and what that means for Bitcoin the network.

“That puts Bitcoin in this weird position where everyone holds it and no one uses it for anything,” he says.

At the center of Patt’s concern is Bitcoin’s long-term security model. Every four years, Bitcoin’s halving cuts miner rewards in half. Historically, rising Bitcoin prices, measured in dollars, have offset the reduction in mining revenue. But Patt says that dynamic cannot continue indefinitely without meaningful transaction activity happening directly on the network.

“Miners get a 50% pay cut every four years,” Patt says. “The Bitcoin miners give Bitcoin its security, which is the entire value proposition of Bitcoin.”

Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision, Patt argues, depended on Bitcoin eventually becoming an actively used network where transaction fees — not newly minted Bitcoin — would sustain miners over time.

“The Bitcoin network was designed to be used,” he says.

That concern has fueled a growing push among developers attempting to bring decentralized finance directly onto Bitcoin itself. While much of the crypto industry spent the last decade building DeFi infrastructure on Ethereum and alternative layer-1 chains, Bitcoin largely remained focused on its role as a passive store of value.

Patt now believes that may need to change.

“If I can hold my Bitcoin and lend against it and earn some sort of yield in the form of a stablecoin or more Bitcoin, that has huge product market fit,” he says.

OP_NET is attempting to build exactly that: native DeFi infrastructure directly on Bitcoin without modifying Bitcoin’s core codebase. Patt says the goal is to bring smart contracts, decentralized exchanges, lending, and eventually tokenized real-world assets onto the Bitcoin network itself.

“It'll be a year plus process to basically speedrun ten years of Ethereum development on Bitcoin,” he says.

And as Bitcoin ETFs drive institutional capital into the asset, investors accustomed to earning yield elsewhere in traditional finance are increasingly looking for ways to do more with their Bitcoin than simply hold it.

At the same time, stablecoins have quietly emerged as crypto’s dominant payment rail — something Patt acknowledges creates an ironic tension inside the Bitcoin ecosystem.

“Stablecoins are the ultimate, I think like Satoshi rolling in his grave thing,” he says. Despite Bitcoin originally being designed as peer-to-peer electronic cash, Patt admits stablecoins have clearly overtaken mindshare when it comes to spending rather than Bitcoin.

“When I'm making payments, I'm not making payments with BTC or even using lightning,” he says. “I'm using stablecoins.”

That reality has forced some Bitcoin developers to reconsider whether stablecoins themselves may ultimately need to live natively on Bitcoin in order to increase transaction activity on the network.

“There’s no reason why every major stablecoin shouldn't be deployed on BTC,” Patt says.

The debate reflects a broader ideological divide now emerging inside Bitcoin. One side believes Bitcoin should remain largely unchanged and continue “ossifying” into pristine collateral and digital gold. The other increasingly sees programmability and financial applications as necessary for Bitcoin’s long-term survival.

Patt argues the two visions may not necessarily be incompatible.

“I think that institutional adoption of Bitcoin… has been huge for Bitcoin’s price,” he says of Strategy, the giant digital asset treasury company that has amassed $60 billion in Bitcoin, and the ETF boom. “It’s great for the digital gold narrative ... but it’s not as good for Bitcoin, the network, long term.”

For Patt, the future of Bitcoin may ultimately depend on whether the network evolves beyond simple speculation into something people actually use every day. Otherwise, he warns, Bitcoin’s biggest threat may not come from governments, regulation, or even quantum computing.

It may come from inactivity itself.