pull down to refresh
15 sats \ 3 replies \ @quark 30 Mar 2023 \ on: Digital Euro to have built-in limitations, "It will never be as private as cash" bitcoin
Some time ago, I did ask some nocoiners what they think about the coming digital euro and some didn't even know what it is and the others were positively excited about it. The future doesn't look good if this would be a good representation of the majority of people.
There are a lot of people who trust the system implicitly and want the convenience. I don't think it matters what the majority want to do. They're welcome to it.
If we're persistent enough, we can have our preferred system too. Look at the Amish. They're an extreme minority that doesn't comply with anything the state makes everyone else do.
reply
The Amish* are able to have a small parallel economy only because their religion prohibits them from doing things that would make them politically/econonomically significant. As a result, the US can afford to ignore the small Amish parallel economy.
But Bitcoiners are not economically and politically irrelevant. Bitcoiners are very active in technology, business, and politics. In a CBDC world, Bitcoiners would be like a white-hot flame in a cave. No nation-state will be able to ignore Bitcoin. There is a good chance that Bitcoin will soon become an existential threat to the top nation-states -- and they will treat Bitcoin as the national security threat it is.
(* There's more than one kind of Amish and there's also Mennonites. I'm skipping all that complexity, because it's irrelevant here.)
reply
The context here was that most people would be perfectly content with CBDC's. In that world Bitcoin isn't an imminent existential threat to the state and we are a small minority (bigger than the Amish*, but still small).
They would be willing to invest more in bringing us to heel, than with the Amish*, but the point is that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. If we can make it not worth their while, they will leave us alone and pretend we don't exist.
If we're in this other scenario, where people are drawn to Bitcoin, because they realize the state is horrible, then it is a fight for survival. In that case I agree with your assessment.
reply