I am very sensitive to pro-ossification arguments as the only way to protect against state compromise, which lends itself to: every week will be a slow news week and hence all "news" will be stupid. however I'm also pretty critical of the way core organization has faltered and some pretty obvious innovations could have been accelerated (especially if you also want eventual ossification) so I guess "not focusing on those things and getting them done" is part of the answer too.

at a higher level though, I've honestly always disliked the idea of a Bitcoin-specific "storyline" as such in any realm other than what is becoming newly technically possible. a soft fork, or discovering/inventing Ark, or René's work on Lightning are all different flavours of what is truly valuable (basically the kind of stuff that gets discussed at a btc++ and hardly anywhere else). beyond that, "X company now holds bitcoin" doesn't interest me at all. it just should happen. it shouldn't be "news".

thank you very much for the praise for the essay, I'm glad you liked it. you'll notice however we don't use the word "bitcoin" even once. that's kind of how I feel bitcoin content should be: either technical and progressive and, by whatever means, creating new knowledge, or just about some broader topic that relates to bitcoin intellectually but isn't breathless "news".

dude I did an AMA in 2022 :P

#53950

interesting question, never actually thought about it. I actually disagree slightly on the fee point because, for example, say you have a lightning balance or an Ark vTXO lower than the chain fee. there is an interesting philosophical discussion as to whether you truly "own it" or if you are more like a de facto custodial customer. however, you definitively can still spend it. so are you a bitcoin user? I would say surely you are, and for the exact reason you point out of how many will inevitably be priced out by chain fees, probably a lot of people end up in this position.

and btw I don't bring this up just to ponder a cute technicality but rather because the point you are making is so fundamental, any either future L2 or improvement to an existing L2 surely has to be measured on these terms. no scaling solution can overcome this entirely, so asking how well it can be mitigated is valuable.

yes

I honestly have no idea what is likely but the cleanest way to think about the options is that labour and conservatives may as well no longer exist and the lib dems never did, leaving the following options:

first world country: restore
second world country: reform
third world country: green

depends on the type of institution but I think there is a lot of cope and hopium around this. wherever there is fiduciary responsibility, there is dramatic risk aversion. and it's not like that's a fiat invention, it exists for a good reason if you want to have any principal/agent risk in a complex financial system. what I do think is exciting, however, is multi-institutional multi-sig, which has no analogue in fiat and potentially gives those in that position the best of both worlds (or decent of both).

the more bullish answer is that wherever you don't have that risk to address, people will probably learn the hard way that they should indeed hold their own coins.

gave this same answer below but worth pointing you to this: https://njump.me/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpqnwn7y4hqdtgxj9ygngkfy7drgze2qkpr002c4yj08wxhlut36eqqxnzde5xs6rjv3kxcer2vp3lc8ac9

TLDR of my "opinion" - they are popular because fiat is even dumber so they actually have decent economic merit by comparison, but they are still kinda dumb in that you don't need a blockchain at all and they are only used as regulatory arbitrage because regulators are bamboozled by the innovation theatre.

Edinburgh is the most beautiful city in the world. it's an absolutely magical place to live that numbs you to how shit everything else is here.

on question 2, no idea, but it's pretty wild when you check the logs! whisky maybe?

I guess at the very least it should be completely normalized for people to save long-term in bitcoin, for that to not even be questioned or second-guessed.

I think the second question kind of answers itself: if people use it, it's useful. I think it gets more useful the more people use it for probably obvious reasons.

can't make it, sorry

destroy them

launder some!!

I'd massively prefer personal adoption but I try to be realistic about how likely that is.

I don't think I understand the second question or at least can't think of a good answer beyond recognizing that institutions don't have any meaning outisde of the individuals who comprise them so hopefully there is still some residual benefit where it matters.

it depends what exactly you mean by "on bitcoin". fwiw I wrote a huge post on this about a year ago so I won't try to summarize the whole thing (https://njump.me/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpqnwn7y4hqdtgxj9ygngkfy7drgze2qkpr002c4yj08wxhlut36eqqxnzde5xs6rjv3kxcer2vp3lc8ac9)

the simplest point I would make is that it strikes me as an obvious evolution of bitcoin's growing utility and adoption that fiat payments will be routed through it (probably lightning but not necessarily). whether the UX is that you have a "token" on one or either side representing a dollar is maybe interesting in terms of the evolution of the product but not really in terms of the underlying economics. what I argue in that article is it probably converges on being dollar ecash rather than "stablecoins" and then finally fiat disappears altogether.

I don't buy Szabo's "annoying" argument, but I do buy Knut's "that's fiat" argument. I don't wanna speak for him but as I roughly recall, he thinks it's much more likely you just pay a normal amount for x-many usages you redeem at your leisure. at the same time it's a bit arrogant to say you know how people will use something that has only just been invented or only just become possible so, sure, maybe they take off massively. but by base case is Knut's.

there's no simple (or interesting) answer. I didn't have sole responsibility for anything, I was on a team with a hierarchy of partners, managers, and analysts in which, by design, nobody could do anything unilaterally, but seniority determined how much you could do.

please elaborate on what you think "America's Triffin Dilemma" is in the first place. different people mean different things by this.

no

no, it's just better money. you can get far too carried away with how novel you think it is when it is mostly very very old.