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Bitcoin is facing challenges. Miners are struggling to stay afloat. Due to low transaction fees and a halving of the block subsidy every four years, smaller players are being pushed out of the market, threatening concentration.
Furthermore, there is constant pressure from governments: stricter regulations make it increasingly difficult to conduct truly pseudonymous peer-to-peer transactions. And then there are the institutions: Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), treasury companies, investment banks—they have embraced bitcoin as an asset class and are eagerly stacking, causing a growing portion of the supply to end up in their vaults.
What is left of the original ideology? Is bitcoin on its way to becoming a centrally regulated network, where access is only through gatekeepers?
Is Bitcoin becoming a Minitel-like version of digital money?
What Is Minitel? #
In France, millions of households had a beige terminal on their table, connected to the telephone line. Through this box, you could bank, book train tickets, consult directories, shop, and chat. Long before the average Dutch person had even heard of the ‘internet’.
It was a national pride and an economic success. Minitel was invented, developed, and managed by the French state via France Télécom. The infrastructure, access, and tariffs: everything ran through one central player.
If you wanted to offer a service on Minitel as an entrepreneur, you had to go to that gatekeeper. Ask for permission, sign contracts, join their business model. Minitel was innovative, but within a tightly fenced framework.
When the World Wide Web emerged, it wasn’t necessarily prettier or faster, but it was radically different in its organization: open protocols, commission-free, permissionless. Anyone could start a website without permission, set up a server in their shed, and reach the world. Where Minitel ran on control, the web ran on open access.
The rest is history: Minitel became a museum piece, the web became the global standard.
Fiat: The Monetary Minitel #
Fiat money—the euro, dollar, yen—is the monetary variant of Minitel. It is state-issued money that only exists by the grace of trust in the government and the (central) bank. They have the monopoly on issuance and management.
For transactions, you depend on banks and payment processors; for cross-border payments, on a network of regulated intermediaries. Your savings are structurally exposed to inflation created by the same policy cartel. Fiat is centralized, permissioned, and entirely dependent on intermediaries. This enables governments to finance deficits and ambitions far beyond their tax capacity through money creation and debt issuance. The bill ultimately lands with citizens, through creeping purchasing power erosion. It’s a system that seems stable but has a built-in power asymmetry.
Bitcoin: The World Wide Web of Money #
Bitcoin is precisely the opposite. It is not a ‘faster payment app’ within fiat, but a radically different design: an open, decentralized monetary network. Anyone can run a node, verify transactions, and build software on the protocol. There is no central server, no company that can pull the plug, no government that can turn a single knob to shut it down. The rules are fixed in open-source code and are enforced through cryptographic consensus across thousands of independent machines.
Decentralization here is not an ideological concept but the core of its existence. There is no central point of corruption, no committee that can expand the money supply, and no single party that can block all access as long as users manage their own keys and infrastructure. Trust shifts from people and institutions to transparent rules and mathematics.
The Tensions: Centralization and Regulation #
Yet, the picture is not so black and white. Mining often concentrates with larger players who have economies of scale, especially after halvings and when fees are low. Regulation focuses on exchanges, custodians, and other access points. As a result, many users access the network through regulated front-ends instead of directly.
Institutional investors now hold a substantial portion of the supply through ETFs and funds, which increases demand but also shifts ownership and influence toward traditional players.
These developments fuel the question of whether Bitcoin is slowly moving toward a Minitel-like model: a protocol that is open in theory but, in practice, is primarily used through a handful of large, regulated gatekeepers.
Vigilance as the Core of Sovereign Money #
This brings us back to the initial question. Is Bitcoin in danger of becoming a Minitel-like version of digital money? The architecture of bitcoin still resembles the World Wide Web far more than fiat resembles Minitel, but that is not an automatic shield against centralization. The distinction hinges on how we use it.
As long as a meaningful group of users chooses self-custody, their own nodes, peer-to-peer transactions, and a critical stance toward further integration into existing power structures, the open character of bitcoin will remain intact in practice.
Institutions and regulation do not necessarily have to mean the end of sovereign money, but it does pose a question to every bitcoiner: how much is it worth to you to have money that you can own, move, and verify without permission—and what choices do you make today to sustain that?