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2814 sats \ 43 comments \ @Scoresby 4 Nov bitcoin

Over the weekend, I failed to orange pill my little cousin

First of all, he's not actually my cousin. He's the child of my cousin's son. English does not have a word for this and I don't know if any other language has such a word, so I'm going to call him my cousin.

We were at my other cousin's house because some other family came in to town for Halloween (we trick or treat en masse to maximize candy returns). After dinner, I found this cousin of mine sitting by himself somewhat awkwardly. He's 14 and often sits by himself, so I came over and started talking about what comes most naturally to me: Bitcoin.

How I begin orange pilling

In most cases I begin with the question "Have you ever used bitcoin?"

It catches people off guard a little because outside of our splendid bubble most people think of Bitcoin as something in which you invest, like equities and nobody goes around asking, "Have you ever used your nVidia shares?"

The question did not catch my little cousin off guard. He just said, "I have a little Solana and Ethereum, but I need to get some bitcoin."

Yes, you do, little cousin! Yes, you do!

I offered to send him some sats right then and there, because I know first hand how magical that experience can be. But unfortunately, he does not possess a phone.

I applaud this decision from his parents. Fourteen year olds probably shouldn't have phones, even if it does make orange pilling a lot more difficult.

Preach, teach, or leech?

So, now I am confronted with a decision: I wasn't sure whether to start in with censorship resistance and why Bitcoin is so awesome or to push a little on how shitcoining is doomed to failure or perhaps to try to make Bitcoin sound sexy and cool and steal a little of the crypto allure.

First off, when pitching bitcoin to someone for the first time, I don't think it's a great look to frown at the other things they have chosen to do with their money.

Bitcoin is supposedly this permissionless and voluntary thing. I don't think we are going to win new hearts and minds by telling people that they are bad.

So, I decided to tell my little cousin about cool things like Predyx and Stacker News. As exciting as prediction markets and micropayments are to all of us, he was less than interested. It probably didn't help that I felt the need to briefly explain how bitcoin on lightning is different than bitcoin on chain. And that I thought I should bring up self custody and some of the virtues of that. It turns out that lightning is really complicated to explain to someone who doesn't really even have an idea of what Bitcoin is beyond "it's crypto."

Failure

Since things weren't going well, I asked him what he planned on doing in the future. He said he wasn't sure. He said he had recently sold most of the crypto he had and was maybe going to put his money in the stock market.

I suggested that he might do better if he put it in Bitcoin and pointed out how the price of bitcoin was significantly higher now than it was this time last year.

He agreed and said the same thing happened to his crypto. He had bought Eth in April at $1500 and just recently sold it at $4200. He had done similarly with Solana.

I said, "Well, Bitcoin is still better and you're probably gonna lose all your money" and then I decided it was time to go home.

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364 sats \ 12 replies \ @elvismercury 4 Nov

This story stands in for a lot of stories, I think, that the btc world needs to come to terms with: if people don't have a real felt need for the thing, you trying to talk them into it is unlikely to work. It turns it into the usual hard-sell, like when those guys come to your door and try to convince you that your house is infested and you need them to come in and spray chemicals everywhere to kill whatever is infesting it.

The response to this is usually educate them, so they develop an urgent need for the thing and there's something to be said for that; but jesus, could there be anything more plentiful than examples of where this is fruitless? The least controversial advice in the universe is probably that if you eat well and exercise most kinds of disease are optional, and you will feel better almost immediately in every aspect of life, and it doesn't even matter tremendously what "eat right" means to you, and "exercise" means to you, since anything aside from the current default would be a vast improvement for almost everyone.

And yet even this behavior, which should provide the most visceral possible lesson than every self-interested person should embrace, goes ignored.

I am evolving toward a new understanding, and it involves looking at what is the real, honest-to-god, actual use case for btc, as demonstrated by the actual humans inhabiting the actual world, and not how imaginary people ought to behave according to us. That understanding has implications that I'm trying to work out.

177 sats \ 8 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4 Nov

actual use case for btc

Here are the three biggest imo

debasement resistant savings
cross border payments / globally portable asset
micropayment driven apps like SN

42 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 4 Nov

I think these are use cases, e.g., btc can be used to do them. But how much is really going on?

If we adopt a working definition of "use" to be something like where have people sacrificed their time and money to transform it into btc? then when you look at the person-money and person-hours so invested, I think #3 is effectively zero; #2 is negligible; and #1 also minimal, at least, if you divorce the "speculation" use case out of it.

I am just making all of this up, so reasonable people can disagree. I have no insight into shadow banking and how much fiat Russian oligarchs or CCP elites have secretly pumped into btc. I'd be very interested in analyses that pull fewer things out of their ass than I am doing here.

143 sats \ 4 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4 Nov

I think these are use cases, e.g., btc can be used to do them. But how much is really going on?

I don't think there's much point drawing a sharp differentiation between savings and speculation. All choices to save in a certain asset vs another is a speculation on their relative future exchange rates.

So i'd say 100% of bitcoin holders are engaging in debasement resistant savings.

It's hard to know how many bitcoiners are using it for crossborder. I think a more relevant metric would be, what % of bitcoiners who have a need for crossborder payments, use bitcoinf or cross border payments. An overall % of the whole population isn't helpful because few people need crossborder payments to begin with.

similarly for usage of micropayments. How many bitcoiners use things like nostr and SN to zap?

174 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 4 Nov

I don't think there's much point drawing a sharp differentiation between savings and speculation.

You're free to define the use case as you like, of course, but if there were a safe "preserve my current buying power" option that I had high faith in, I'd re-allocate a bunch of my btc stack to it. Hoping for "btc to $1m" loads on a different principal component than "don't let my money get inflated away" in my own mind, and I don't think I'm alone there.

Put another way: I think the overwhelming amount of ETF money that flowed into btc was not stemming from the "preserve my savings from the melting ice cube" mindspace. I don't have a lot of friends who have actually bought btc, but 0% of those that have are worried about monetary debasement. It's probably relevant that these are just normal people I know, not cryptotwitter doomscrollers.

I think a more relevant metric would be, what % of bitcoiners who have a need for crossborder payments, use bitcoinf or cross border payments.

Disagree again. The crucial point that I want to make is that you can't condition on bitcoiners. Well, you can, but that's a different question. The question I want to ask is:

A: m(use btc | need cross-border payments)

not

B: m(use btc for cross-border payments | bitcoiner ^ need cross-border payments)

Where m is the magnitude of value realized by that use case.

I believe the distinction to be crucial to get at the market-sizing question: if you need something that bitcoin ostensibly provides, and you're not using bitcoin for it, that's telling; and if there isn't much absolute need (e.g., small m) for the thing itself (e.g., cross-border payments, micropayments) then that's also telling; and (a subset of the previous) if you need the thing, and are using btc for it, but you are of little economic consequence because you're a poor refugee, than that's also suggestive of btc's future purchasing-power prospects.

69 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4 Nov

The question I want to ask is: A: m(use btc | need cross-border payments) not B: m(use btc for cross-border payments | bitcoiner ^ need cross-border payments)

The problem with this framing is that m(use btc | anyone) is already pretty low, so m(use btc | need cross border) will also be low simply for the first fact. It doesn't really tell us much about whether bitcoin is good for that use-case.

The reason I want to condition on holding bitcoin is because it tells us more about whether bitcoin is actually useful for that purpose. If m( use btc | need cross border) is low, that could just tell us that few people know how to use bitcoin, or even hold any bitcoin.... it doesn't tell us whether cross border payments is a good use case for bitcoin.

My sense is you just think that that there's no demand for the use cases of bitcoin, not that bitcoin isn't useful for them. That is, your contention is:

"Even if m(use btc | have btc AND need cross border) is high, m( need cross border OR have bitcoin) is low" ... and similar for debasement resistance.

Basically, the things bitcoin is good for, few people care about.

72 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 4 Nov

My sense is you just think that that there's no demand for the use cases of bitcoin, not that bitcoin isn't useful for them. [...] Basically, the things bitcoin is good for, few people care about.

That's what I'm afraid of, yeah. With a slight tweak:

It's not so much "few people" as "small resultant m"
What btc is good for, and that people do care about at large m, is a certain type of speculation. It is demonstrably the case that this is so.
What is not demonstrably the case is that the m is very large for the common catechism that we can all recite, about how btc is sovereign uncensorable non-state money, blah blah.

Most of the response / advocacy is invariably aimed at category 2, and thus SN is replete w/ calls to educate the ignorant masses about the Good News of btc, get them to spend their sats on hamburgers, etc. I'm glad people are doing this. I bet it's doing work in the background. In fact, I'm confident that it is. But it's not moving the needle right now.

I'm coming to believe there's a nuanced and complicated relationship between type #1 value, and type #2 value, that I want to explore.

129 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4 Nov

Yeah, I agree with you. I posted in another comment on this thread that I think a realistic outcome for bitcoin is that it becomes the Tor of money. Still around and being used, but never achieving mainstream adoption

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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @jasonb 5 Nov

Agreed, and I think these four rival those also:

seizure resistant savings
digital payments without credit card or bank fees, keeping money local
digital payments with anonymity or synonymity
secure savings for the vast amount of people in the world who can’t legally have a bank account

132 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake 4 Nov

debasement resistant savings

this is the only approach I use for orange-pilling anymore.

my orange pill was something similar.. I had been "Investing in the stock market" for a few years, when I realized that index funds were just socialism (thanks Matt Levine).

when I found bitcoin, it made better sense to me than "investing" so I stopped buying tax advantaged index funds for the gains and jumped right into saving in bitcoin.

143 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 4 Nov

the real, honest-to-god, actual use case for btc

I'd put it even stronger: we need use cases that can only be achieved by using bitcoin. Cross border payments (I did some work for people based in Portugal and we settled in bitcoin which was delightfully easy) might fit the bill. But that's not even quite what I mean.

Maybe it looks like in-game money for gamers or tipping and payments for adult industry or marijuana industry people. People will gravitate to Bitcoin when they have to, when it's the only way to do something they really want to do.

This is one of the reasons I like SN so much. It's a thing that can't really be achieved with anything else (I suppose we could all buy CCs with credit cards and then shuffle them around and withdraw back to some banking app or something, but I think it would be way more clunky than lightning and probably illegal unless kyc'd and regulated).

144 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 4 Nov

This is one of the reasons I like SN so much. It's a thing that can't really be achieved with anything else

Agreed. The 'unique use' is a good criterion, I think; but it must be united with actual demand. Actual demand for SN, or Nostr, which can only be realized w/ btc, is low, and shows little sign of growing, as best I can tell.

This doesn't mean it never will. But I sense negligible actual demand for it right now, which is something to consider given the obvious benefits of SN vs any other thing. And yet most people are not hungry for those benefits, and I don't believe anyone will be harangued into it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 4 Nov

they develop an urgent need for the thing

Agreed. Bitcoin will never be "useful" if there's no "need". The thing is to find where that "need" fits well.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @adlai 5 Nov

I think you might be exaggerating with "immunity" in the post title. Granted, I didn't hear the entire conversation, although it seems that you had a rather open-ended conversation just sharing ideas, and because the kid already had heard of crypto, you weren't fundamentally shaking up his worldview e.g. by explaining inflationary economics.

Many people I know have heard of Bitcoin for years, talked about it several times without immediately "accepting" or "rejecting" the idea, and eventually realise the value proposition over time. I'd call it "immunity" if five years from now after having a few more conversations on the topic, he tells you that he doesn't consider Bitcoin any different from the rest of "crypto".

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @Cotton 5 Nov

This is the fiat mindset in action. It forces kids to be gamblers.

He's chasing the casino wins on SOL/ETH. He hasn't yet felt the pain that makes him seek sound money. He'll learn the difference between gambling and saving. The market will teach him.

When he's ready for sovereignty, he'll remember this talk. ⚡

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch 5 Nov

First of all, he's not actually my cousin. He's the child of my cousin's son. English does not have a word for this and I don't know if any other language has such a word, so I'm going to call him my cousin.

In German we would call that a “nephew of second degree”. I believe the genealogy jargon in English is “first cousin once removed down”.

102 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4 Nov

I think it is wrong to start by explaining what bitcoin does, but better to start by explaining what bitcoin is. A decentralized ledger of transactions that nobody controls, everyone can write to, yet somehow everyone trusts. Something we've never had before.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby OP 4 Nov

Fully agree that it is wrong to explain what bitcoin does. but I disagree that it's helpful to explain what bitcoin is -- unless speaking to committed libertarian-type folks.

I doubt my cousin cares very much at all about decentralized ledgers or whether or not a third party mediates his financial doings. This is partially why I thought Predyx and SN would be good points to begin: maybe he is curious about prediction markets and he could spend some sats in figuring out how they work. Or perhaps he could spend some sats to post here.

Unfortunately, the not having a phone thing kind of stalled all that out. I guess I could have explained what it would be like if he did have a phone or what it would be like if he tried these apps out on his computer when he got home, but it doesn't have the same kind of zing.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 4 Nov

But that's the thing. I don't know if you really can orange pill someone about bitcoin unless you emphasize those things. Otherwise, why not ethereum? It's important why proof-of-stake is not money, and other such things.

On that note, I'm someone who thinks that a possible scenario for bitcoin is that it becomes the Tor of money. Not dead, but never mainstream either.

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 4 Nov

That's a good analogy. I could definitely see that world playing out.

You may be right when you say otherwise why not ethereum, and maybe it is just my ignorance, but I don't see anyone building micropayments apps for crypto. It's all defi maybe farcaster and base, but my impression of those is not so much micropayments as trading and finance stuff.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @rootmachine 4 Nov

I admire how some are very attentive when orange pilling. I always wonder, why some people live into a sort of auto-sufficiency and are not willing to do a small research on their own before taking any decisions when someone hints them with a deal.

112 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 4 Nov

censorship resistance

Feature, not a benefit to most, which fails the second step of the Feature > Benefit > Close pipeline

permissionless and voluntary

Same, feature, not necessarily a benefit to most.

He said he wasn't sure. He said he had recently sold most of the crypto he had and was maybe going to put his money in the stock market.

This is the signal, peoples driver to do or not do things boils down to either fear or greed.

He bought crypto out of greed, he sold it out of fear of loss.

He's buying stocks because stocks always run over time. If they tank, it's not a shot to his ego because it's the consensus thing to do, fear is muted.

People do fear being bad stock pickers, which is why so much money passively goes into indexes. Individual stocks come with key-man/management, and sector risks.

Orange pilling should leverage this, stroke the fear that otherwise they risk being a bad crypto picker by not going with consensus and unlike stocks it has effectively no management risk.

With the fear assuaged the appeal to greed is an easier onramp, stocks perform over time, Bitcoin out-performs stocks. Why does it out-perform stocks? That's where the features come in, they're the how in how does it out-perform.

114 sats \ 6 replies \ @DarthCoin 4 Nov

tell my little cousin about cool things like Predyx

You are out of your mind telling to a 14 yrs old kid about gambling...

Anyways, good intentions are welcomed

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @DP0604 4 Nov

I honestly wish someone had told me about Bitcoin when I was 14, it would have been amazing ⚡.

2 sats \ 3 replies \ @DarthCoin 4 Nov

where was your father?

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @DP0604 4 Nov

He was with me working, earning in fiat money 🫰 and immersed in the rat's wheel 🛞. I have just woken up, I discovered Bitcoin thanks to a friend.

2 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 4 Nov

ok where was this "friend" 15 years ago ?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DP0604 4 Nov

We are both from the same country and we were both earning junk money, he discovered Bitcoin before me and I met him when I emigrated.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Wumbo 4 Nov

Good Old Andreas. Speaking Wisdom

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei 4 Nov

Judging by your convo, I predict that his standpoint in regard to crypto is that he can make a killing via trading. Hence, to ask him if he has used Bitcoin threw him off as he doesn’t see it as a viable currency in his daily life. Neither is he appealed to it because he has already made money from ETH and Solana. Why switch to another asset and lead to the same (profitable) outcome (at best)?

I get a little of where he’s coming from because I used to shitpost for Moons at r/cryptocurrency. When the price of Moons soared, I managed to sell my bag for about $10k. Quite exhilarating, actually. Haha.

I think 14-year-olds are mostly interested in sports, music and girls. Probably sex. If he gets to know how he can use his Bitcoin to buy sporting gear/music equipment/ clothes to attract girls, maybe your orange pill will turn out to be more successful.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @stack_harder 4 Nov

did you ask him why he picked sol and eth specifically?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 4 Nov

I did not. that probably would have been a good approach -- showing interest in another person's interests is a great opening. If I had to guess, I'd say he picked them because his dad told him they were good.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 4 Nov

At least he's going through the process at a young age. Ask him what makes a good money and give him a few years.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 4 Nov

I agree that giving him a few years is likely the path. I am not sure that his temperament is such that a conversation about what makes good money would be fruitful.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @327c19b153 4 Nov

second cousin once removed. Also I've found its not even worth the energy trying to orange pill these kinds of people.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 4 Nov

second cousin once removed

I used to hang out with some native american folks and they pretty called everybody cousin, aunt, or uncle. There is a simplicity in that.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @Wumbo 4 Nov

I think you let his lack of phone limit your options.

Just a thought for next time:

Pull up a custodian lighting wallet like https://coinos.io on Your phone
Click dice to create new random username and password for him.
Use one of your other lighting wallet to fund this new coinos wallet. To show him how easy it is.
Then email him or write down on a piece of paper the username and password.

This way he can access it when he gets back home. I am assuming a 14 year old has a computer. Especially if he is selling Alt Coins.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 4 Nov

Great point. He does have a computer. I could have played it that way and it would have been good. I find that once I proceed down a conversational path, I am not very good at shifting to a new one. It's something I need to work on.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 4 Nov

He's the child of my cousin's son. English does not have a word for this and I don't know if any other language has such a word, so I'm going to call him my cousin.

In Portugal, we don't have a single word for that family thing. We just call them cousin or third-degree cousin! ahaha

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @SwapMarket 4 Nov

Intriguing! Found this chart. That child of your cousin's son is called "first cousin twice removed" lol

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Sandman 5 Nov

They boy is such a smart boy. AAh! I wasn't really expecting a14 year old boy to be engage in the financial market, but then a good applaud to the parents for enlightening him this early. Hopefully you will meet with him again to let him known that we only have one true digital currency that can never be counterfeited.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Machiavelli23 4 Nov

I exactly how you feel. I’ve only successfully orange pilled 3 person (my brothers and my son) I’ve tried orange pilling my coworkers but they stuck in fiat cash mentality.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @035736735e 4 Nov outlawed

stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.