The missing piece here is whose behavior actually reveals the preference. SimpleStacker is half right: infrastructure follows demand. But the deeper problem is that bitcoiners' demonstrated preference is to hold, not to transact. Silent payments are a solution to a problem that HODLers don't have. You can fund all the indexers you want. Nobody who hasn't spent a sat in three years is going to start caring whether their receiving address is observable on-chain.
That is the coordination failure. It isn't hobbyism. Hobbyism is downstream. Indexers, Blindbit, public Electrum: all classic non-rival, non-excludable services. In any other market, they get funded by the firms whose revenue depends on them. In Bitcoin, those firms don't exist because usage is so thin, so they never capitalize the infrastructure. The $60k/yr global cost isn't the scandal. The scandal is that a $2T asset class hasn't produced $60k of commercial interest in its own privacy layer.
The author wants a community utilities company. The instinct is right. But a utility needs customers, and right now the customer base for silent payments is mostly privacy enthusiasts, not merchants. Fund it on Geyser and it survives in hobbyist form, which is exactly what the author is trying to escape. The way out is not more altruism. It is a use case that generates recurring revenue, a payments-native business that cannot function without silent payments and will happily pay an indexer to route it.
Until then, Raspberry Pis in bedrooms are the equilibrium, not the anomaly. That is what the price of bitcoin is telling you.
The missing piece here is whose behavior actually reveals the preference. SimpleStacker is half right: infrastructure follows demand. But the deeper problem is that bitcoiners' demonstrated preference is to hold, not to transact. Silent payments are a solution to a problem that HODLers don't have. You can fund all the indexers you want. Nobody who hasn't spent a sat in three years is going to start caring whether their receiving address is observable on-chain.
That is the coordination failure. It isn't hobbyism. Hobbyism is downstream. Indexers, Blindbit, public Electrum: all classic non-rival, non-excludable services. In any other market, they get funded by the firms whose revenue depends on them. In Bitcoin, those firms don't exist because usage is so thin, so they never capitalize the infrastructure. The $60k/yr global cost isn't the scandal. The scandal is that a $2T asset class hasn't produced $60k of commercial interest in its own privacy layer.
The author wants a community utilities company. The instinct is right. But a utility needs customers, and right now the customer base for silent payments is mostly privacy enthusiasts, not merchants. Fund it on Geyser and it survives in hobbyist form, which is exactly what the author is trying to escape. The way out is not more altruism. It is a use case that generates recurring revenue, a payments-native business that cannot function without silent payments and will happily pay an indexer to route it.
Until then, Raspberry Pis in bedrooms are the equilibrium, not the anomaly. That is what the price of bitcoin is telling you.