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Not all criminals are heroin dealers
I totally agree with this. I hesitated to use the word "criminals" but I went with it because it does get at the heart of what I think Bitcoin has to offer: it allows users to transact when the state (or any powerful actor...even a controlling family member) doesn't want them to.
I think bitcoin would be more widely used among people with such problems if it had better privacy preserving properties. Maybe I'm saying people who are interested in building bitcoin solutions should look for things that only Bitcoin can solve.
Things like Spark wallets or CashApp integrations will surely lead to more users, but probably in the same way that people are users of PayPal or Venmo. It just happens to be what they picked up. If something comes along with cheaper rates or more convenience, they'll switch to that. And I think Bitcoin is a very long way from winning the convenience race.
Is that a problem though?
I'm not sure. Probably not, but it means that all the people working on cool and exciting bitcoin products may struggle to find the sexy chandelier-swinging out of control growth they want.
How common do you think peer to peer exchange is in Venezuela?
Is it difficult to create an account on exchanges like Binance? And how easy is to move bolivars into such an exchange?
Where are your bitcoin solutions that attract real users?
privacy advances for bitcoin that lead to more criminals using bitcoin: payjoin, silent payments, BOLT12.
At the moment, I don't think bitcoin offers strong enough solutions to attract users who can get most of what they want from the traditional financial system.
self-sovereign control over one's money seems to be something that people only want when a state or other entity dramatically (violently?) interferes in their use of their own money.
The things Bitcoin has to offer are not attractive to normal users. They don't want censorship resistance, they don't want self-sovereignty, they don't want to participate in a permissionless network, they don't want to be free from trusting others to tell them what their money is. I doubt that we can make those things more appealing to people who feel well-served by traditional finance.
The post I wish more people read was "Dr Satoshi Nakamoto's Frankenmoney" (#738304) wherein I make the case that Bitcoin is like frankenstein's monster except in the role of Maria Von Trapp: The hills are alive with the sound of fuck-you money!!!!
What i find really interesting is that the defensive zaps mostly (70%) go to the stackers who work on the posts you zapped, while the downzaps 100% go to the reward pool. So on any kind of longer term scale, zaps ought to promote the kind of content we want to see more than downzaps discourage it. Downzaps only are succesful if they manage to hide the content before people notice it.
Nonetheless, it is true that we saw the true power of downzaps today.
Sad to hear that this didn't deliver in the end. But I enjoyed your review.
Have you ever read any if William Vollmann's novels? Europe Central is good. So is Rifles.
i need to up my post count. see if I can't dominate the bottom of the rankings!
then popularize looking at rankings by in reverse order.
4D chess