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121 sats \ 8 replies \ @tomlaies 12 Oct 2022 \ on: What kind of insane culture embraces toxicity? bitcoin
People who say
as arguments for Bitcoin are not real Bitcoiners. Or at least have not understood the real Bitcoiner mindset yet.
The aspect of Bitcoin they are looking for is "permissionless" which is one of the very fundamentals of Bitcoin. If anyone can enter the ecosystem in a permissionless way, the censorship resistance is a side effect - and that's by design.
People who come to Bitcoin because of "censorship resistance" are just political Edgelords. Thy are not here because of Bitcoin and they will go when it's not in the political discussion anymore. They are not on our side. They are not loyal. Don't trust them.
How do you measure permissionless-ness?
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It's not measurable since it's binary - either anyone can participate or not.
What you probably mean is not the Bitcoin-world itself but the access to that world. That can be tricky to measure and I have no answer to that question. If you have access to physical fiat cash and can exchange it for Bitcoin on a Bitcoiner-meetup or via cash by mail ... than your access is pretty good.
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I mean the Bitcoin-world itself.
If someone can stop you from making a valid transaction, it is not permissionless.
Another way to say it is presence of censorship means its not permissionless.
Therefore, goal of censorship resistance is key, it's how you get permissionless-ness.
If you use permissionless only to refer to onramp into system, it's not relevant to this convo.
Permissionless also must mean you can get any valid transaction included in a block.
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If someone can stop you from making a valid transaction, it is not permissionless.
You're confusing permissionlessness with censorship resistance again.
Being permissionless means that anyone could make a new asymmetric key pair and as soon as they found somebody that is willing to transfer money to that address without anybody else knowing he can make a transaction. No kyc, no asking permission, no nothing.
Every miner processes their transactions by default - because it is in their own self interest to do so (incentivization). But it is their fcking right to mine whatever the fck they want - it's just not in their own self interest.
That's being permissionless. It's more natural, more meta and better that "censorship resistance". It's like on a medival market place.
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I think where we disagree is that I don't believe the code/protocol is innately permissionless. It requires people using it in a certain way to achieve that. This is why I think censorship resistance is a more fruitful name for what we want to focus on. I disagree with the idea that Bitcoin is inevitable.
If we get to a place where only companies run nodes or where most BTC is held by third party custodians or where mining is more centralized among large publicly-traded companies, I don't think it's given that Bitcoin continues to be useful.
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Okay, let me put it in other words:
Censorship resistance also means that you have to force somebody to process everything - no matter if they want or not. Bitcoin is better - in Bitcoin you can do whatever you want - you could censor random people, you could play with 42 million Bitcoins instead of 21 million Bitcoins, you could encode blocks different, whatever. It would just be dumb and against your own self interest since nobody would play by your rules or you'd loose opportunity cost.
The Bitcoin protocol incentivizes to play permissionless via a hard, decentralized money instead of enforcing it . Incentivization is better than forcing people to do something.