Thanks for taking the time to explain.

Do you think both is possible?

In order to be truly censorship resistant you need 1) to hold your keys, 2) for miners to not be too centralized, 3) be able to get a transaction to the chain.

Do you think it will be possible to achieve this for a scale of transactions that includes daily small-value use all over the globe?

I'll admit I don't understand. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on his assumptions about Bitcoin's provenance and USG incentives.

Awesome fun fact. Bitcoin is a small world.

I hope the analogy isn't exact. Sometimes I fear that by focusing on guns, the 2nd amendment has allowed us to cede so much other ground to the gov't. Surveillance is near-constantly imposed on almost all aspects of our lives, drones are quickly on the way to being highly regulated, many chemical substances are thoroughly controlled, and money is getting more controlled every year. Freedom to bear arms should have been freedom to resist the government, but that's nonsensical, I guess.

--> anyone anywhere

Now you get my question.

Not at scale.

Lightning is great. At the moment, not something that will underpin most of the economic activity on the internet. Most of the soft fork proposals right now have to do with making lightning easier to use or making it easier to build things like lightning and ark.

I'm asking how much are we willing to change bitcoin to allow things like lightning and ark to be easy to use.

Would you accept potentially increased miner centralization (side chains)?

Would you accept complexity risk (new op codes to allow more complicated txs so that we can have offline lightning receives, channel factories, utxo sharing)?

Anyone anywhere: bitcoin is about censorship resistance: no one, no nation can stop anyone from using it to make a payment to anyone else anywhere on earth. But not necessarily convenient for paying for a coffee.

Everyone always: bitcoin is a better version of visa payments: digitally native money that ends up being the basis of most transactions on earth.

I'm asking which you think it should aim to be.

I have often expressed the same opinion (get to everyday use without compromising security, privacy, decentralization). But I'm worried it's a bit of a naive outlook. Why not just stay 100% focused on maximum censorship resistance?

It seems like ease of use always comes at the cost of reduced censorship resistance. Is it possible to make a money that provides unstoppable coffee purchases?

I often wonder how much of the tension around development in bitcoin comes down to a lack of clarity/consensus between these two goals.

The salty tears of unfathomable sadness. Mm, so yummy and sweet!

Made this tonight. Very nice. Grapefruit zest was an excellent touch.

Great point. And this only gets more messy as more things like LN come online.

Thanks for the clarification. I should have had option one be "Accept coins on original chain."

However, I suspect many bitcoiners would choose to accept coins on the new chain. Especially if the change promulgated by the forkers was a change already discussed by the bitcoin community. The danger I see here is in the precedent it sets, not necessarily in the coin it creates.

I agree that centralization is a problem, but my scenario also came from thinking about how bitcoin changes. I could see a very real world where many bitcoiners adopt the new fork (as long as the only change was already a somewhat popular quantum hardening). But the result would be a precedent that probably wouldn't be good at all.

Long form writing, especially long form fiction, has aspirations to be relevant for a much longer time span than a post or comment.

One aspect of the v4v model on SN that doesnt work with such aspirations is that value and attention mostly goes to "fresh" content.

The long form fiction I've seen on here gets a bump of zaps in the first 12 hours, and then the zaps quickly fall off. Also, there is a bias in v4v toward new content. Very few readers seem willing to zap old fiction.

I'm not clear if this is true for readers as well (do you get 99% of your readers the first day as well?). Even though there are aggregation newsletters for ~BooksAndArticles, it seems difficult to garner attention after you publish. I suspect that this is particularly true on SN, but it applies to v4v in general.

100 is good.

Merry Christmas! 2025 is the year to try something you're pretty sure you'll fail at. Here's hoping you surprise yourself.