David Bailey, CEO of Bitcoin Inc., sat down with Bitcoin.com’s COO Jason Sheman during the Bitcoin Asia Conference in Hong Kong to reflect on his company’s journey—from painful mistakes to a decisive pivot that reshaped the business. Bailey admitted he started in Bitcoin at age 22 with zero real-world experience and made “every mistake there is to make.” In 2017 the company rode the bull market to huge profits, but by 2018 it had lost nearly half a billion dollars on bets Bailey didn’t even believe in.
The Transformational Decision of 2018
“That was the worst feeling,” Bailey recalled. “I was 27 and realized I had burned half a billion on stuff I had no conviction in.” The low point forced a radical rethink. An employee, Bitcoin journalist Aaron Van Wirdum, laid out a compelling argument: all crypto is downstream from Bitcoin. If Bitcoin has a scaling problem, everything else has the same problem. Better to go to the source. “From that meeting,” Bailey said, “we started liquidating everything that wasn’t Bitcoin.” By the end of 2018, the company published a blog post titled ‘Make Bitcoin Fun Again’ and announced that its conference would be Bitcoin-only. “People thought I was committing suicide,” he laughed. But the first Bitcoin Conference in San Francisco, held in a garage with Lightning-enabled pinball machines, proved there was a huge market for authentic Bitcoin culture.
Championing Soft Forks and Resisting Ossification
Bailey is vocal about the need for Bitcoin to keep evolving. He criticizes those who want Bitcoin to “ossify,” arguing they lack confidence in its antifragility. “Bitcoin is a beast,” he said. “The more it’s tested, the stronger it becomes.” The immediate challenge, in his view, is activating the next soft fork—whether OP_CAT, CTV, or something else—to give developers confidence that good ideas can actually be implemented. “It’s demotivating when people work years on an idea and nothing happens,” he noted. He also called on miners to fully embrace their role in the consensus process and for developers not to back down. “We need to align the community: is Bitcoin digital gold or the future of all money? I know which direction capitalism needs—Bitcoin as world money, not money for a few.”
Layer2 Definitions and Stablecoin Tensions
Regarding the recent update to Bitcoin Magazine’s Layer2 editorial policy, Bailey clarified it was not about exclusion but about precise language. “Terminology is losing meaning,” he said. “Everything calls itself a Layer2 or a sidechain or a rollup with no common definition. Our high bar helps people build toward real expectations.” On stablecoins, Bailey expressed personal distaste: “I hate stablecoins. Bitcoin’s mission is to implode fiat.” Yet he acknowledged that permissionless systems should allow whatever the market chooses. He warned of a “massive collision” between Bitcoin and USD stablecoins, especially as the latter infiltrates regions like China. “A bull market in Bitcoin will be a bull market in the real world; a bear market will be a recession. The geopolitical conflict over digital dollars is about to get crazy.”