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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @fiatbad 6h \ parent \ on: What are you thankful for? AskSN
wow.
Do you also do "what didn't go well today"?
Starting a business as a fresh college grad in your 20's, might be a good example.
In a Bitcoin world, no one would give you the capital necessary to start the business because you're young, unproven, high-risk. In a credit-based world, it is relatively easy to get the capital.
Based on this, it would seem that Bitcoin is anti-capitalism.... anti-entrepreneurial.
While there is truth to this, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Young entrepreneurs could still get capital in a Bitcoin world, but they would have to work harder to convince the capital allocators. They wouldn't be able to "fake" their way into it, the way they can today (ahem... SBF).
It's a very interesting discussion point, nonetheless.
I'm shocked at how little this is being used in comparison to the volume of Sats exchanged within KYC systems.
Do people just not know???
Wait.... the name is really throwing me off because Oshi already exists.... is there any relation to this website:
Roger Ver.
Also, I agree with @LibertasBR 's pick
Property is a human construct..... it belongs in the social-layer, and the underlying asset is in the physical realm. A house can be taken from you by force whether or not you have the private key to it on a blockchain.
Force is the only way to prove ownership over physical objects. Whether that force is your own guns or your government's soldiers guarding your borders.
So, sense we essentially need a government in order for "ownership" to be enforced, we trust their centralized authority to manage who owns what. In other words, they control the grand ledger of property deeds.
Why would we want to use a blockchain to keep track of who "owns" something in the physical world, when that "ownership" requires a government to enforce your right to "own" it?
I said all that because I really want to strongly establish the idea that property ownership is a centralized endeavor by necessity! Once you understand this fact, you realize that a centralized database is far superior for such a thing! The government would use an SQL database that they control because they're the ones enforcing the ownership anyway.
Blockchain is an incredibly inefficient database that comes with one very powerful property: no one holds the login credentials to it. Anyone can read/write to the database for entries which they have the private key to. But for a system that doesn't require extreme decentralization, ANY other database is far superior to blockchain.
So, no. Using blockchain to store property deeds is an incredibly stupid idea. I don't think it will ever happen for the reasons I've described here. But I didn't come to this realization over night. At first, it sounded like a really good idea. But it's not. The only use case for blockchain so far is: Bitcoin. Shitcoin "utility" is a scam.
I have yet to hear a use-case for blockchain other than money (Bitcoin).
Centralized DB's just work better for almost every other proposed use-case.
I'm not aware of any large-scale, properly setup Fedimint to-date. So, of course there's been rugging with them.
But, from having a basic understanding of the technology, it's clear that it shouldn't be called a "scam". That's too harsh. It's a tool that scammers could use, but it can also be a powerful scaling tool.
Perhaps I have been "lied to" about how Fedimints work. I admitted earlier that I have not audited its code. But I am a software engineer by trade, and I understand Bitcoin/Lightning very well. If Fedimint doesn't work the way I think, I know for a fact that it wouldn't be difficult to create my version of how Fedimints have been pitched to me. It's not like I'm believing in magic. I've learned enough about them to understand the basics. Fedimints, the way I've learned they work, can be incredible tools, if used properly.
WoS could be rug-pulled by a single malicious developer or CEO.
In a Federation, potentially hundreds of well-known, local community members would have to collude to rug-pull the community's funds. No single person could. Not even 10 people colluding could if it's a 20/100 multi-sig.
These are very important nuances.
Look, I'm only trying to push back on your calling Federations outright "hoax/scams". If you think Federations are scams, WoS is 100x worse! Yet, you seem to think there is no difference between them.... no nuance at all. ETF's and centralized companies like WoS are very different from Federated Mints.
I think we have different ideas of how Fedimints work. I haven't audited the code, so I could be wrong. But from my understanding your comment that "Lightning is the scaling layer, not the mint" is not correct, and could explain our disconnect.
Lightning works on the edges of mints, to connect them to other mints or other sovereign LN nodes. There could be hundreds of LN node operators within the mint. They get paid in the mint's ecash whenever someone uses their node to route payments to the outer world. But within the mint, ecash is the database layer. The raw Bitcoin held inside the mint is held in a multi-sig setup where potentially hundreds of people hold a single key in offline, cold-storage. Those people could collude to rug pull, and that's why I'm so interested in the social element to this, because there are infinite social-layer ways it can be done. Similar to how banks prevent executives from stealing funds.
So, that's my understanding
Two quick things:
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There are different categories of scaling. ETF's scale Bitcoin as a savings tech, but they do not scale Bitcoin as a MoE. Federations scale Bitcoin for both use-cases. I'm very interested in scaling as an MoE because I view it as an existential threat to Bitcoin if it cannot scale in this category.
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Saying that a properly setup Federation is akin to an SQL database is disgustingly misguided. If the federation is setup well, no single person has unilateral transactional power. It's just a multi-sig setup where potentially a hundred people have 1/100 keys. It's 1000x better than traditional banks, while giving the people the same conveniences as traditional banks. Nothing beats self-custody, but I think Federations can be an incredible middle-ground tradeoff for the average person living paycheck to paycheck anyway.
Woah there. Hol' up one sec.
I wanna talk about your second paragraph about Federations being a "hoax/scam". I don't have a strong opinion on it, but it's a subject I've wanted to have a discussion about for a long time. So, let me give a bird's eye view of my position so you can help show me where I'm wrong, if you do disagree.
I think Federations can be incredible for the future of scaling Bitcoin. They are a very tricky thing to get "right", but that doesn't make them a scam. They are easy to abuse and mis-use... but that doesn't make them a scam. They are a tool. If we utilize them properly, they aren't a hoax/scam.
I think your kind of messaging is probably why this incredible technology isn't taking off.
Yea, I agree.
But I think that time can be greatly shortened if this were handled more like a revolution than an episode of Sesame Street. If the people calling the dollar a shitcoin put their money where their mouth is and began doing everything possible to stop using dollars. If Bitcoiners started going out of their way to patronize merchants accepting Bitcoin, and boycotting those who don't. It really wouldn't "need time" if the revolutionaries started acting like revolutionaries.
@Aardvark just mentioned how the USD is the greatest shitcoin of all: #951426. Yet, I'll bet he and the stackers zapping his comment are all going to go out and use USD today without flinching. USD is more of a shitcoin than ETH, XRP, or Doge.... and yet Bitcoiners use it more than they use Bitcoin. So, what does it matter if Bitcoin is more decentralized, no pr-mine, or isn't a meme coin? If it's not doing anything, then it doesn't really matter how much better it is.
It shouldn't take much time. But it does take gumption.... virtue.... sacrifice.
I'm starting to think Bitcoin needs to start acting like money if it's ever going to separate itself from the shitcoins. As long as it remains merely "digital gold", it will just be the king of the shitcoins. The most decentralized, but a shitcoin nonetheless.
I just finished the recent WBD podcast with Juneseth about how Bitcoin hasn't done anything yet. And I've gone deep down the BCH, Hijacking Bitcoin rabbit-holes. While I don't fully agree with them, and still consider myself a BTC maximalist, I am growing frustrated in the Bitcoin community's refusal to make scaling a priority and to use Bitcoin as money instead of merely a savings tool.
Do you believe that petty-theft is a shootable offense?
There must be a line between a starving child stealing bread and an armed vault heist. Where is the line where it becomes okay to start blasting?
Reminds me of something @DarthCoin always says, "You play around with shit, then you smell like shit."