I just finished reading Hijacking Bitcoin, by @rogerkver with @steveinpursuit, and with a foreword by my buddy @jeffreyrspencer

I will say that it is extremely well written and organized and well argued and researched. It is a very professional job. I learned some things from it. I appreciate his writing it. I could point to some defects I see in it, some things that were left out--like a definition of "Bitcoin Maximalist" or a few other fairly minor omissions, but I was impressed by the deft way the technical material was presented and woven together, combined with the history, the players, and so on.

In the end, I am not persuaded by his case, because of a difference in opinion about the emergence and role of money and the idea of what role a cryptocurrency might play. I think the way the argument was presented was biased or weird in some ways. They keep talking about what bitcoin was "meant" to be or what Satoshi's "vision" is. This sounds cultish to me. The tactics of Core/Blockstream -- none of them are rights violations and this is just people with different views of the nature of the system and its purpose. It played out. BCH still exists. They can make their case that people should "adopt" BCH whatever that means. The conspiracy theories permeating the book are embarrassing. Vague allusions to some dude who says he worked in intelligence and and investor who is a member of Bilderberger? Come on. But then I despise conspiracy theorizing; it's embarrassing. There are other criticisms I could make but I do not want to pettifog or be nitpicky or petty.

I think money solves the problem of barter: double coincidence of wants, and the inability to calculate. Then the state captures it, and ruins money. The promise of a decentralized, peer-to-peer and uncensorable digital asset promises to solve this problem and restore money to its original role and even improve it since in most ways it is superior to gold. All this bullshit about smart contracts, the "promise of the blockchain," NFT bullshit, using a blockchain "as a registry": I think it's all bullshit. I don't think crypto is needed to solve the "problem" that a Venmo has already solved. This is silly.

Moreover, the (implicit) whining that there was like a 5 year window when Bitcoin could have "gained adoption" for "cheap payments" before Venmo, Zelle, PayPal etc. were in wide use, is just ridiculous. Come on. First, this solves no huge problem. It's minor. Second, it never could have since it never could be "used" for daily transactions in today's world because of capital gains taxes. Capital gains taxes are the primary barrier to its "adoption" as a daily currency, plus the fact that dollars/fiat work fine for transactions--at the present time. They just are not a good place to store much of your wealth. Everyone already knows this. That's why no one stores all of their wealth in dollars. They chase returns in other assets to avoid inflation. Real estate, stock market index funds, and so on. Sometimes gold, as the relic of the failed gold of the ancient days.

So I see a digital money, during its adoption phase, as a place to put your wealth instead of more costly and inferior "stores of value" like gold, real estate, artwork, and so on. I can only hope that when it supplants gold and other assets for this function then at a certain point the political climate will change enough to allow it to be used, probably with various sidechain solutions, for daily payments etc.

I have mentioned some of this previously at https://stephankinsella.com/paf-podcast/kol337-wasabikas-15-you-dont-own-bitcoin/ etc.

Re the nonsense of "smart contracts": https://stephankinsella.com/2022/02/libertarian-answer-man-smart-contracts/

So I am glad Ver wrote this book and learned some things from it--while maintaining some skepticism at much of his claims since his bias stands out quite often--but remain unpersuaded by this large-block perspective. I still think it is almost inevitable that we will someday have a decentralized, inflation-proof and censorship-proof cryptocurrency as the single world reserve currency. Which one it will be, I do not know. Of the 30,000 cryptos that exist, my guess is it will be BTC because of network effects and it's good enough and close enough to an ideal money and so far superior to gold and fiat that it will be the one that wins out, at least for some period of time. So that means it's stupid to "use" or spend it at the present time since we are in a unique period of history when we may be seeing the adoption phase of a new money. That means its value will go up a lot. So you hold or HODL it and then eventually its value gets high enough and/or plateaus and political factors change so people do and can start using it more regularly (and after sidechains are perfected). So right now I view BTC as a speculative investment, based on the hope that it will someday replace all world fiat.

I also don't think of money as wealth, which a lot of people implicitly seem to do. I think this is a big mistake a lot of people implicilty make. So this means that it doesn't matter what is money; it doesn't have to be permanent or stay the same. It's a tool like property rights. There is no reason money cannot change, if a better one comes along. If Money1 is in use for X years and evaporates and is replaced by Money2, no wealth is lost since money is not wealth. The money premium just shifts from one to the other. So what?

E.g, if BTC is adopted in 10 years and lasts for 30 years, fine, it serves the function of money during that time, and if a vastly improved BTC-Hoppe comes out after that and somehow "dislodges" the first one and the world shifts to it, so what? No wealth is destroyed, since money is not wealth. Money is a sui generis good, not a consumer or capital good, not wealth in and of itself. And for this reason I do not expect Bitcoin Standard World to be one where people keep most of their wealth in cash (BTC), if only for diversification/risk sake. I would keep say 5% of my wealth in BTC for liquidity, and the rest in other real-wealth and perhaps income-earning assets, just in case BTC has some massive glitch and fails or gets replaced by BTC-Hoppe.

That's my take. I could be wrong about this and do not pretend to be an expert, but ... this is my opinion.

nb @saifedean