Peter Todd Drops Hard Truths at Permissionless: Why the Masses Still Ignore Bitcoin in 2025

Bitcoin's biggest hurdle isn't regulation or scalability—it's apathy. Peter Todd's Permissionless keynote cuts through the hype to expose why mainstream adoption remains elusive.

The Engagement Paradox

While institutions pile into ETFs, retail interest flatlines. Todd argues Bitcoin's 'digital gold' narrative fails to resonate when rent and groceries eat paychecks.

UX Still Sucks (But Nobody Cares)

Seed phrases and gas fees remain barriers, yet Todd notes convenience always loses to speculation during bull runs—until the crash comes.

Wall Street's Ironic Embrace

The very banks Bitcoin aimed to disrupt now profit from its volatility. Todd's mic drop? 'The revolution will be financialized.'

Polymarket success

Todd pointed to Polymarket as one example of a successful crypto app outside of Bitcoin. “Well, it’s a successful application because they managed to use things about blockchain tech to navigate the regulatory arbitrage necessary to stay in business. And I don’t think you can deny that Polymarket as a business is successful.” 

“Now, you know, did they go build on Bitcoin? No, but I’m still not likely to say it’s not a success. I mean, the amount of money bet on TRUMP is an example.”

Todd highlighted that this does come with downsides. Polymarket is not as actually as decentralized and self-custodial it could be. But in assessing those characteristics, it’s important to look at it from Polymarket’s perspective.

“They’re trying to run a business that does something specific. Because they’re running a betting market, a lot of that is very inherently centralized, because in reality all the bets go through a relatively small number of people in a relatively centralized way.

“Now they may disagree with me, but, you know, that’s kind of the truth of how this really works. And their client-side software, the way you get it, is relatively insecure. It’d be very cool to build all this in Bitcoin, but it requires so much more engineering effort to do well.” 

In terms of Bitcoin’s primary utility — peer-to-peer payments — Todd sees Lightning as the default mode to achieve that, rather than direct onchain transactions. “Matter of fact, I just had a talk two days ago by someone from Costa Rica talking about their main point-of-sale payment solution — basically, they’re just dropping onchain Bitcoin support because it’s pointless. Everyone uses Lightning, end of story. There’s just no reason to do anything else.”

Global Tether

But stablecoins on other more centralized networks have grown to be more ubiquitous in many places, particularly tether.

“I think Bitcoiners often underestimate how popular USDT is…A couple of years back I was in Macedonia, the capital, just visiting, and sure enough, every single currency exchange booth, they accept USDT or similar things,” Todd said. “And I actually wound up sitting down at one of them for a good half hour, because the guy behind the booth was new at his job and just interested in how Lightning worked and we struck up a conversation. And sure enough, every five minutes he had another person coming in, either selling cash or buying cash. And most of them were just using Binance.”

Rizzo asked: “But that’s competitive against Bitcoin, right? These are transactions that could otherwise have been in bitcoin.”

“Well, but the point is: All these people, they don’t care about Bitcoin — they care about moving value around. And what they care about is that they’re moving something that’s fairly stable,” Todd replied.

“Another more recent example is Kiev. Someone I know was buying a new laptop, and it just happened [that] the easiest way for them to buy a laptop was to give USDT to the laptop store — which is actually a very standard thing these days in that part of the world. And I’m sure the laptop store turned around and sent the USDT straight off to one of their suppliers the next day. You know, could they have done that with Bitcoin? Yeah, sure. But right now USDT is a more stable currency with regard to laptop prices.”

You can play back the rest of the chat, which covers the development arc of Bitcoin layer-2s, DeFi and more, via the Permissionless IV day one livestream on X.

• The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
• Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
• Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
• 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
• Lightspeed: All things Solana.
• The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
• Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.