History shows how fragile conviction can be. An offer for a seat at the table is enough to flip once passionate defenders of sound money to enablers of credit and unlimited debt. Original goldbugs like Keynes in the 1920s and Greenspan in the 1980s proved unable to brush off the emotional pull of notoriety, currency, and control. Each flippening reintroduces inflationary tactics that corrode money’s principles and value.
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126 sats \ 5 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4 Oct
I'm sorry but I really could not understand the analogy
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107 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 4 Oct
I think it’s that the two sides trying to save the gold standard actually had other motives and it would have been better to just stick with the gold standard as it was.
Like @justin_shocknet has been saying, not updating your node software is an option.
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523 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 4 Oct
Aye, it's really the only option (maybe others like BTCD or Libbitcoin since they're not in positions to be nudging anything)
I have to dismiss Knots v Core takes like the article because they're inherently ignorant of the fact that, just like the gold example, Knots and Core are the same (wrong) side... Which is not monetary maximalism, but application stack maximalism.
The only way to prevent that from happening is so many economic nodes rejecting application blocks that miners start to feel the burn of incentives. That means rejecting "enhancement" of something that already works.
Bitcoin is by design not a technical system, but an incentive one.
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17 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 4 Oct
This is why I am addicted to stacker news
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 OP 4 Oct
That's what I got from it too, after having to read it three times.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @leaf 4 Oct
I don't really understand it - and am happy to be corrected - but I think garbled circuits may change what is possible even if bitcoin stuck to its "gold standard".
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111 sats \ 0 replies \ @leaf 4 Oct
How does someone throwing out a particular transactions from their node's mempool for ~10 minutes before that same transaction is mined in block represent "protocol inflation"? What does "protocol inflation" even mean?
Even if I believed "spam" was some kind of existential threat to bitcoin, policy wouldn't be the way to fight it. The way to fight it would be through a consensus change. The only argument I've seen for why they don't push for consensus change is that it wouldn't happen - and yes, it wouldn't happen, because the real stakeholders understand that's a dumb change to make.
Every so often, I try to find an argument for why bitcoin doesn't work or isn't what I think it is. If such an argument exists, I want to know it. Yet every time I've done this, I've only found misunderstandings. But I continue to periodically look for such an argument in case someone has a new argument I haven't considered.
The same thing happens when I look at knots runner arguments: that Core is a unified group of devs that are somehow all compromised and/or that they're trying to sneak in a dangerous change and/or they're all lefties. All I've seen is people that haven't read any communications between core devs, don't understand the difference between policy and consensus, or don't understand the cat-and-mouse game that results if you try to block arbitrary data.
No matter how many times those arguments are refuted, those same people outright deny the truth and continue posting the same bullshit. A refuted point, frequently repeated by many (supposedly authoritative) people, doesn't somehow make that point true.
At the risk of falling foul of Godwin's law, you might as well take the Nazi's "big lie", substitute Jews for Core devs, and you'll find the strategy is exactly the same.
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36 sats \ 1 reply \ @Solomonsatoshi 4 Oct
Can someone explain the Core vs Knots debate in basic terms I can understand?
Is it really such a big deal?
It seems to be mentioned quite a lot but I do not understand what it involves.
The Princes of Yen documentary is well worth a look...sounds like its based on a book which probably would be worth a look too.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @leaf 4 Oct
I'd just ignore it. In my opinion, bitcoin is fine regardless.
If you're the type of person who cannot use the internet without wanting to understanding the details like tcp/ip, bgp, etc., then maybe it's something you'd be interested in exploring.
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36 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 4 Oct
I wonder one thing: what makes the author think that Core is pro-ordinals?
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121 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 4 Oct
Lets take an analogy:
We have a nice little town. One of the "town laws" we had was no strip clubs. The actual manner the specific law banning them was pretty basic and easily circumvented.
The town lawyers said, its pointless playing a cat-and-mouse game of crafting new language since that will simply be bypassed also in time. So, they took a different approach, lets just rigorously enforce our "business license fee" scheme and these businesses will either succeed and pay taxes or die away.
Now its true that the towns lawyers are not "pro strip clubs", but they are "pro economically viable strip clubs"
This is not a great analogy, but I think it gets at the heart of it. The Core developers are not "pro-data storage" but well they are "pro-economically viable data storage".
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 4 Oct
Or: do they not feel like playing cat and mouse games, because it would be expected of them to play said games?
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36 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules 4 Oct
I am inclined to sympathise with the position of the author but it's just AI slop.
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36 sats \ 1 reply \ @035736735e 4 Oct
It is true that conviction can fade when proximity to power becomes tempting...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 4 Oct
Absolutely- look at the history of nearly every revolution and the end result when the revolutionaries gain power!
Human nature is one of greed and hypocrisy.
This, I will argue is why we need good governments and it takes most of us engaged in fighting for a good government to get close to having one.
The Libertarian mythology that 'free markets' will deliver utopia is just a myth- private interests will inevitably abuse their market dominance when and where they are allowed to due to lack of government regulation of cartels and monopolies and other rentseeking parasitism.
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