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17 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 3 May \ parent \ on: All the World's Txns bitcoin
I dunno what "at all costs" means concretely, and I don't what preponderance of counter-evidence you're referring to. Can you expand?
"At all costs" means introducing a new consensus that is not Bitcoin, basically a shitcoin "pegged" to Bitcoin that introduces unknown incentives into Bitcoin itself through a potentially deleterious fork.
The counter-evidence is the fact that fees are still only 10% of block subsidy, and they're not even in an up-trend despite FUD over things like jpegs.
There's also nearly 0 new demand for self-custody relative to adoption. This is evidence we've reached a self-custody maximum, not because it's expensive, but because Bitcoin isn't here to obviate credit.. it's a measuring stick against the Cantillon effect of central banks with added systemic optionality.
Anyone interested in self-custody has had ~15 years to decide that. Hell, even the fake maxi's on Nostr are mostly ECash simps these days. New adoption is going to off-chain governance, like ETF's and Corporate Treasuries.
Even 10s of millions in Liquid astroturf marketing can't find a meaningful userbase.
Reality is Bitcoin is NGU tech first and foremost, as much as Agorist-minded folks like myself would like to see more means of exchange.
Now, hopefully the observations supporting a self-custody maximum are misleading, and new tools (like those I'm working on for that matter) re-accelerate self-custody and make it viral as MoE... But even then Bitcoin could still onboard a billion to Lightning with existing batching tech. The knocks on Lightning today are largely downstream of the high-time-preference stupidity and wastefulness of mobile nodes. Just imagine how much more efficient Lightning will get when bozo's aren't buying unstable channels tied to one mobile device.
At the end of the day, the scale ceiling is nowhere in sight, so the conclusion we must draw is that it's a red herring being exploited by scammers with the help of of their virtue-signaling useful idiots.
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Thanks for the reply.
What about this hypothetical scenario: major governments stop being adversarial to btc. Tax law changes s.t. buying coffee is no longer taxable event. Now people can use it for MoE if they wanted.
I take your comment to mean:
a) nobody really wants that, so scaling isn't an issue and won't be an issue in any conceivable near-term
b) if they did start to want that, there would be a variety of signals, including upticks in self-custody and demand for blockspace
If b) happened, would you then believe that scaling shortcomings were inevitable and needed to be solved, by something like PS's proposal, or something else, and it could be handled at that time? Or are you saying that even in that case, existing infrastructure is up to the task?
In other words, I'm trying to figure out if your principal objection is timing (it's not a problem yet, it's more harm than good to pre-solve it) or something more foundational.
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I believe in that scenario, the current state is up to the task,
Digressing, I also think that's the case now and not a hypothetical. My thesis is Bitcoin is a white-hat psyop by NSA/military intelligence to save America from the Triffin dilemma and inevitable global reserve collapse. We're just watching this op, among many others, like a movie🍿
In any event, US adoption ends in it becoming a foreign reserve backing the dollar, the US Treasury and it's foreign peers basically becoming giant ECash mints (see ECash Act)
Why is this path inevitable? Because anything else requires destroying Bitcoin as we know it. No scaling proposal can accommodate the ridiculous hypotheticals of ~8BN people using it to buy coffee self-custodially and remain Bitcoin. At best, we're talking a peg, with a weaker form of consensus.
We already have pegs without destroying the base layer, so there's no rationale to add risk to the base layer because a peg is inherently a downgrade.
Reasonable scaling improvements (optimization within current design space) are marginal by comparison so they tend to not be as exciting. They are also unquantifiable until they are actually needed- and we have the real data necessary to quantify them.
Scalooors like Paul and the CTV clowns do a disservice by taking resources away from projects that want to get us to that very achievable milestone of 1BN users.
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