Perhaps calle has gone too far down the Bitcoin adjacent projects (cashu, bitchat, now openclaw -- I wondered what would change when he got pulled into the jack orbit), but I find this post interesting to consider.
USDC on base seems far more common for 402 payments now than Bitcoin. Recently, even Stripe joined the bandwagon. That’s a centralized stablecoin on a permissioned chain. Agents are starting to use fiat. It’s a huge loss, and in a race, many aren’t even aware that it exists.
The scam coins are marching on, and even fiat is evolving.
Where are the Bitcoin solutions that attract real users? Which other concept other than buying and selling Bitcoin has actually broken out of the bubble and made it to the mainstream?
Bitcoin doesn’t just happen. These missing solutions need to be built by someone. Reject the “Bitcoin wins by hodling” narrative. The devs and entrepreneurs are what keep this project alive and keep marching forward.
It’s not the scammy influencers, not the psychotic drama queens, the child-like infighting, or incompetent idiots dancing on the graves of word-class devs leaving Bitcoin.
I hope the bear market flushes all that crap away, and we can get back to building stuff instead of tearing it down.
My impression is that a lot of people are working on many Bitcoin solutions -- but building things that don't sacrifice decentralization and self sovereignty is hard.
Probably, we need a mix of scale fast but sacrifice censorship resistance and go slow but do it right.
Perhaps the real question we should be asking is what us the minimum number of people we need to use Bitcoin so that it retains robust censorship resistance?
Question back: Where are your bitcoin solutions that attract real users?
We have a bot here on SN that spams L402, not Conbase centrally issued stablecoin knock-off L402.
privacy advances for bitcoin that lead to more criminals using bitcoin: payjoin, silent payments, BOLT12.
At the moment, I don't think bitcoin offers strong enough solutions to attract users who can get most of what they want from the traditional financial system.
self-sovereign control over one's money seems to be something that people only want when a state or other entity dramatically (violently?) interferes in their use of their own money.
The things Bitcoin has to offer are not attractive to normal users. They don't want censorship resistance, they don't want self-sovereignty, they don't want to participate in a permissionless network, they don't want to be free from trusting others to tell them what their money is. I doubt that we can make those things more appealing to people who feel well-served by traditional finance.
Are you answering for calle or for you? I meant to redirect to calle, haha.
Those are good things to build, having options like that can help people in need. Not all criminals are heroin dealers. I know tens of "criminals" that are criminalized for disagreeing with their local flavor of overlord. In some cases, former overlord while they're still unbanked, still stalked by the cronies. Still being told "no". It's not just Mrs. Navalny that this has been happening to. I figure that if I know more people like that than I have fingers, there must be hundreds of thousands of people like this. These people need any protection they can get.
It's not something that will make all the
open🤡botyolo people use bitcoin of course. If you want that you have to orange pill Dario A and bam! I doubt he'd be receptive though.Is that a problem though?
I totally agree with this. I hesitated to use the word "criminals" but I went with it because it does get at the heart of what I think Bitcoin has to offer: it allows users to transact when the state (or any powerful actor...even a controlling family member) doesn't want them to.
I think bitcoin would be more widely used among people with such problems if it had better privacy preserving properties. Maybe I'm saying people who are interested in building bitcoin solutions should look for things that only Bitcoin can solve.
Things like Spark wallets or CashApp integrations will surely lead to more users, but probably in the same way that people are users of PayPal or Venmo. It just happens to be what they picked up. If something comes along with cheaper rates or more convenience, they'll switch to that. And I think Bitcoin is a very long way from winning the convenience race.
I'm not sure. Probably not, but it means that all the people working on cool and exciting bitcoin products may struggle to find the sexy chandelier-swinging out of control growth they want.
I know this yet I always seem to not think of it. This is a huge use-case. Thank you for reminding me. I am sending myself reminders for the next couple of weeks to think more about this.
I'm not convinced that it must. If you have no need or desire to "be your own bank", then you don't have to be. But the downside of not being your own bank in Bitcoin will always be bigger than the same in some government issued money.
For example, even if we were to get truly insured balances from multiple insurance companies / banks that actually compete, the Bitcoin insurance will always be more expensive than that for something that can safely be fractionalized (and thus dilutes.)
Sure, but I feel like every bear market there are too many people that need to be reminded of taking the long view (and the low time preference)
This is a great question to ask him. He spent a lot of time developing cashu and nobody uses it for anything
Acktchually... I only have 2 reasons to not use it for the playground:
npub.cashissues from the past where I lost a small amount of satsI still have
build pablos mcp-money into a (daemonless, hopefully?) cli for the clankers to useon my list, but, I for a while was thinking that I should just build it on fedi, until I needed 50GB of disk to just build all 1200+ dependency crates and then I was like "not this framework; I'm not going to review all that."But if I'm honest, maybe cashu (+ npub.cash) is a better solution for clanker use for the moment.
In the end, people may simply care a lot more about convenience than permissionless-ness and fixed monetary policy.
Another way to look at it is: people transact with USDC because it's easier, but convert it to save in Bitcoin. That's a possibility too.
We have to first understand the different ways people are thinking about and interacting with the various monies out there, and thinking carefully about how bitcoin fits into that.
There is building, sure, and we're making some progress -- but the infighting, and ceeeertainly the financialization, have been huuuge wrong-turns. Not impressed. I sympathize w Calle
The irony. Can't make this shit up.
The post is even more ironic given that his claim to fame is a neobanker IOU mint/shitcoin layer, just as often used for stables/dollars as it is Bitcoin, and every bit as permissioned.
Not understanding Bitcoin at all would be fine, were they consistent with the Cashu larp.
Cashu is acceptable to most because its a potential means to settle at Bitcoin, USDC is no different than his ecash shitcoins. You can use USDC to buy Bitcoin just as you can use Calle's shitcoin mints to buy Bitcoin.
There's no race. The only feature of Bitcoin that really matters is the irrepliceable ∞/21M.
Let the world use Visa, Stables et al to move mundane amounts. It doesn't matter what people use for that, only matters that Bitcoin is the unit by which they are ultimately measured as the world reserve currency. How those mundane revenues are stored over time.
Tether and Coinbase hold more Bitcoin than Calle ever will, perhaps they understand something Calle doesn't.
Indeed, but Bitcoin doesn't need these things... Bitcoin is. Bitcoiners who maximally want to leverage its benefits do.
These tools are useless to people that don't care to maximally leverage its benefits.
Emphasis on retains.
If no new tools were built for Bitcoin, would the censorship resistance go down from here?
Or does the gravity-well of liquidity and network-effect trap everyone in its orbit while pulling even more towards the singularity?
The number of Bitcoiners who have never read this is too damn high.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/
We have it right here on SN! Yet most ignore this wonderful site built on bitcoin. NVK hates SN
The ease and convenience of the fiat system will always override the sovereignty and power of Bitcoin, because people want things to be easy; they don't want to learn and they're already used to having someone else own the things they just use. Everything being built on top of Bitcoin is functional and practical, but it requires learning and responsibility if you want to be in control; if you don't, there are custody services to do it for you.
In my opinion, these solutions already exist, LN is all what we need, it’s powerful, improvements are welcome, and that's not the problem.
This is:
Good one. This meme.
enemas: the ancient solution that works every time, just like Bitcoin! =)
https://happybumco.com/
it's also about the number of people that use bitcoin and can still think straight, as today the proportion of clean-flesh people to the infested-flesh people is very low;
https://twiiit.com/callebtc/status/2021872878350704645