Great joke. Truly a free and untraceable currency the plebs are profiting off right now. I am mining some too! I just cashed out my 50 dollars profit and bought myself a meal at my local trader Joe's, next time when I'm there, I will probably pay with chainlink though.

.. most of the coins are held in giant blocs by unknowns, and the price is largely driven by a couple of funds issuing tokenized dollars?

The proportion if wealth consolidation that bitcoin poses if it can consume fiat currencies makes all other coercive powers in history look like they weren't even trying.

If.

BTC itself can't do that: the transaction rate would be borderline even just for a low-ball estimate of all the once-a-month payments happening in just the city of Berlin.

The various proposals for layer-2 stuff makes it look like a bunch of banks using a funky currency without any of the controls that exist because weird currencies are bad for business, but AFAICT because of that, the BTC part itself works like interbank balancing transactions, and the BTC transaction rate isn't sufficient to cover once-a-day interbank balancing transactions.