100 sats \ 0 replies \ @21stackage 25 Jul 2023 \ parent \ on: What is the WORST case scenario for Bitcoin? bitcoin
Money Matters Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/@MoneyMattersPod
I learned about the utility of bitcoin in multiple economic sectors and noticed that the utility of alts are to...dump them for fiat or do shadow banking with liquidity pools. Their utility would pretty much never leave the exchanges and DEXes they were listed on. Also, like I mentioned a few days ago, it was Samson Mow's tweet about VTPS:
https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/1333966283876954113
Really good food for thought.
This is a matter of education, which is difficult to broach in short order. Normal people don't know that
- the IRS is outnumbered and outgunned so they only really come after people who "owe" large amounts
- fiat paper trails are created through off-ramping bitcoin, so taxable events are more of an issue when someone sells their bitcoin
- taxes don't pay for anything but interest on Treasury bills (except maybe municipal tax? correct me if I'm wrong) and taxes are a means of retiring dollars, like a token burn. Do we need to burn bitcoin? lol
- paying taxes for using a currency they don't accept as payment is just ???
- taxing bitcoin makes zero sense when they can MINE it and collect fees instead
It isn't surprising to me that a lot of bitcoiners have thrown the book out altogether when it comes to spending sats. Also, bitcoin is a new paradigm in that it regulates itself via consensus rules, and that takes a long time to wrap one's head around like what I listed above. This is what happens when our financial system is obfuscated from the general public.
I'm not concerned about mass adoption, though. The masses will come when they have no other choice, but bear in mind that I am deep in the rabbit hole and I am solidly convinced that all fiat currencies will go to zero
The issues of politics are systemic rather than administrative, so it takes a lot more than voting in order to bring about true reform. Voting is an action that just gets filtered, anyway. I take a politician's pro-bitcoin stance as nothing more than advertising.
Also, I genuinely fear for RFK's life as the Kennedys have had a long history of being...punished for their anti-establishment stances
Actually, not Twitter. I found out about SN from Googling about El Salvador. I found this (excellent) post:
#97082
Also I was troubleshooting my node on r/lightningnetwork and someone mentioned that Stacker News is a better place to discuss bitcoin and LN. Made my account and I'm thankful to find a community with strong signal instead of cheerleading moonbois or drive-by FUDsters.
I didn't even find out about Nostr from Twitter either lol, it was Swan's 'Bitcoin in 2023' video
My observations of our virtue signaling group of parrots says most of my bitcoin friends will import all the same problems of today to the other side: the conspiratorial politics, unwillingness to revisit world views often, obsession with gender, and willingness to fight as many pyrrhic wars as there's time in a day.
Ordinals was a much-needed shakeup of the culture as it outed the uncritical parrots rather quickly. Bitcoin is more akin to a discovery than an invention, so the network has emergent properties such as posting files and images on a censorship-resistant timechain. Whilst some got apoplectic about NFTs and 'pizzaposting,' I saw unbounded potential as a freedom tool—historical documents, ghost guns, recipes, "forbidden images" like Tank Man...Bitcoin isn't just money, and this realization was humbling for me. I've seen seemingly rational people No True Scotsmansing other bitcoiners and calling for censorship of ordinals, and that was disheartening.
I do think a big part of this cultural change is the advent of alternative platforms like Nostr that aren't algo-driven salt farms. Twitter and Reddit seem to breed hostile communities, and they may be a large part of why the virtue signalers were controlling the narrative for a long time. From here on out, I can see builders and entrepreneurs being more experimental with the network since it has become more apparent than ever that Bitcoin is more than a financier's playground and the people of the legacy platforms are having the narrative slip away from them
Evangelion (showed it to ALL of my friends, could talk about it for days. It's kinda anti-CBDC when I squint)
Legend of the Galactic Heroes
SDF Macross
Utena
Hunter x Hunter
Honorable mentions to Jujutsu Kaisen, Michiko & Hatchin, and Ghost in the Shell '95
My favorites are old but I'm watching JoJo part 5 and loving it
New cars are full of IoT crap and I'm gonna keep my old one for as long as I can. Wouldn't be surprised if people start paying a premium for cars without spyware.
I too would love to see more walkable areas, reliable transportation, and dense housing in the US. Not everyone needs expensive single family homes, but apparently it isn't easy to re-zone land—zoning laws are a huge part of the shitshow of unaffordable housing in the US. I've considered moving closer to the city so I won't have to drive all of the time. Driving can be exhausting sometimes
Most of the bitcoiners I've spoken to have a more urbanist mindset, so I wouldn't say they're against carless cities. In fact, I've come to find that bitcoiners mostly have little in common with one another
None, unfortunately. My roommates are too skeptical or nihilistic to be at least curious about it. I have some friends who own some sats, but they're not active in the space—Bitcoin is just another slot in their portfolio.... The closest person to a bitcoiner in my life is my sister, mostly because I've been orange-pilling her over the past year. I can see her becoming a toxic maxi in the next cycle.
At least I'm finally going to my first meetup this week!
Does a sousveillant, transparent ledger obviate the need for KYC/AML? Privacy is a feature, not a value proposition, and the need to transact under cloak-and-dagger is overstated in the whole space (few situations call for this in the first place). I'm all for opt-in privacy when it comes to Bitcoin, but I think that the transparent ledger is a huge advantage overall
As far as I know, this is the only legitimate opposing view on Bitcoin that I've seen. However, this raises one big question from me: WHAT ARE THEY WAITING FOR?! If nation-states can kill Bitcoin, the best times were in 2010, 2013, 2017, 2021...if they're capable of creating a mining monopoly, they should do it NOW just so everyone can be sure. All I can do is guess what the state has in store for Bitcoin
I disagree with Matt on this one. I think the point that Jason Lowery is making with power projection is that war can cross into new frontiers and people should take measures to defend against 51% attacks (I wouldn't be surprised if Jason read Joe Kelly's essays). Also, showing tweets from 2021 while Jason was cooking his thesis is uncharitable