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202 sats \ 1 reply \ @anon 3 Oct \ on: Self-Custody Found Dead in Miami Condo - bluematt bitcoin
This is an interesting way to end the article.
The majority of every-day people will never care about self-custody. They don't want or need it, and will never jump through the hoops.
In fact it is dangerous to sell people on self-custody when they don't value it themselves, because it often ends in a horror story of someone losing all their funds.
IMO, the "store of value" sales pitch is a massive LARP. Bitcoin is designed and built to be a payment protocol. It stores value for the purpose of payments, not your retirement account. There's zero protection against being hacked, phished, or losing your information.
Bitcoin is valuable because the code works as advertised and the tools are useful to those that need them. So the "builder's responsibility" really should be towards improving mining and payments, not self-custody.
As long as mining remains profitable and decentralized so that any transaction can find its way into a block in a reasonable amount of time, Bitcoin will be fine. Everything else is fiat games and kabuki theater.
As long as mining remains profitable and decentralized so that any transaction can find its way into a block in a reasonable amount of time, Bitcoin will be fine. Everything else is fiat games and kabuki theater.
I appreciate this take. My one question is how secure the consensus rules are if the only economic actors are large custodians?
If Bitcoin as a store of value is a larp, why not just use custodial bitcoin? Custodians have big budgets and can handle the infrastructure burden of lightning or other potential L2s. Why do we need self custody for payments? Presumably, if there were enough custodians to choose from, censorship wouldn't be a problem.
I don't really believe any of that last paragraph. Bitcoin needs widespread self custody to deliver on its censorship resistant value proposition as much as it needs widespread mining. And the store of value approach seems like the primary way we incentivize this. Thoughts?
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