What struck me most that morning was the irony. I was at a farmers market, a place that represents local food, small producers, and community resilience, and yet even there, we’ve accepted the idea that every transaction must flow through the same centralized financial rails. We tell ourselves that it’s about ease, but what we’re really trading is privacy, resilience, and a small but meaningful piece of our sovereignty over how we spend the fruits of our labor.
A glib "bitcoin fixes this" won't change anything. A lot of work must be done to show why bitcoin is different.
I was just at a major amusement park this weekend and we were told that the park is now entirely cashless. I asked "Isn't that illegal?" and the park attendant just shrugged. I later checked, and it is indeed not illegal. I guess people are just ok with it, like boiling frogs.
The educational materials are out there. Anyone who wants to learn can learn. At this point, the problem isn't bitcoin, or bitcoiners. It's the people themselves.
I'm seeing this happen more and more.
People will be OK with it until they fall out of favour or their new coin doesn't work to buy them a hamburger because it was programmed only for a soy burger.
I laid in bed just this morning thinking about how fantastic lightning infrastructure is. My node, talking to other network nodes, no intermediary, to maintain channel state. No bankers, no government, no issuer. Just purely magic internet money. What a timeline.
Yeah it's damn cool but people are just lazy and are willing to go with the past of least resistance. Wide is the path that leads to destruction
Cash is very clearly on the way out (more in the states than Europe, I can't speak to other places). There is no way to save it.
The question is just what will replace it. Credit cards have the first mover advantage. Maybe PayPal or Google/Apple pay type apps take over -- but our hope is in the greedy politicians who think they should be able to surveil and control every transaction. If the financial control regime is inconvenient enough, maybe there's a move towards the things that disregard such regulations...and as far as I can tell, there's only one of those that can actually do what it claims (Bitcoin).
If guy can't get a credit card then maybe he will do more than shrug.
if "Bitcoin Jesus" took his epithet seriously, he'd have been working his way up corporate ladders from the tiniest shithole credit union he could find after hitchhiking, rather than shilling financial fireworks.
The thing is they market credit cards to anyone with a pulse, and even some without. The name of the game is make it easy to use, consequences be damned.
Yeah, I'd sort of assumed that the "this is legal tender" message on US currency meant that places had to accept cash, but in fact, that's not the case.
probably some fucked up "... and find out" from sovereign bullshittery about whether an amusement park is "places" or territory
That's what I thought too. Turns out, the gov't will regulate all sorts of alternative currencies and tell you what you can or can't use to pay for things, but then they won't even guarantee that merchants will accept the one physical note that the gov't itself issues, preferring to force you to rely on private companies' payment networks
I agree, but for people angry about cashless options, it's at least a starting place. Obviously bitcoin's also electronic and doesn't involve handing over bills, but it does involve a greater degree of privacy and anonymity than credit cards, and that's a wedge.
(To be clear, I definitely don't mean we should glibly say "bitcoin fixes this," just that we should use this as a conversation starter.)
WRONG; rawdog bitcoin gives you neither better privacy nor grayer anonymity than data-sucker cheap credit, let alone debit cards.
let's not pretend it is 2014; every fintech startup that has gone beyond one "runway" has got feelers to the data brokerages.
bitcoin only fixes anything after metaphorical [not a joke, although it's about a touchy subject][^1]; solar flares don't drive the point home.
~meta why aren't there spoiler tags in the new formatter? I deleted the rude part entirely...
Here on SNs we have the chance to build and demonstrate a virtual 'farmers market'- one of ideas, news, views discussion, debate and creativity - all on a sats denominated P2P V4V platform.
Yet even here some who posture as serious Bitcoiners cannot be bothered with the small effort required to attach show and use LN wallets.
The chains of lifelong enslavement to centralised authority are hard to throw off.
But if we can do it here - it can spread and grow.
If we cannot do it here, then it may not.
There is nothing inevitable about BTC fixing everything or anything much for that matter - it is just a window of opportunity that has been opened slightly for us but we must push on through if it is to succeed.