Bitcoin maximalist falsehood #3: “Bitcoin is trustless.” Bitcoin does not eliminate trust. It reduces and redistributes it. Users still depend on software, hardware, developers, miners and the social consensus that determines which rules constitute Bitcoin. That social consensus is Bitcoin’s greatest attack surface. Code cannot decide its own purpose or determine which future version deserves the name Bitcoin. People do. This is Bitcoin’s politics. Core developers, miners and influencers exert significant influence over what Bitcoin is and what it may become. Defending Bitcoin against capture requires a broad network of well informed users who can examine proposals, choose their own software and reject changes they do not support. “Don’t trust, verify” is empty if users do not understand what they are verifying or have no practical choice when they disagree.

Bitcoin maximalist falsehood #2: “Never sell your Bitcoin.” Bitcoin is money. Holding $100 worth of Bitcoin may support scarcity, but it does little to establish Bitcoin as a medium of exchange or unit of account. If that same $100 changes hands ten times within a circular economy, it settles $1,000 of trade. Each time, someone’s labour, time, goods or energy is valued in Bitcoin rather than fiat. There is a difference between abandoning Bitcoin for fiat and circulating Bitcoin as money. A real Bitcoin economy requires people to earn it, spend it, accept it and price goods in it. You cannot build a monetary system by treating the money as too sacred to use.

Bitcoin maximalist falsehood #1: “Bitcoin only.” A fixed supply does not guarantee economic freedom. Debt slavery and usury existed under some of history’s soundest monetary systems. Those without money must work on terms acceptable to those who already hold enough to pay them. Once ownership becomes sufficiently concentrated, holders can impose increasingly unjust and usurious terms while still claiming the money itself is “sound.” You are not free merely because the currency used to pay you cannot be inflated. Real freedom includes the right to allocate the fruits of your labour to another currency. The credible threat that people may direct their time, production and savings into money not already hoarded by existing holders limits that power. Bitcoin should earn users through free choice. Declaring every alternative heresy protects incumbents, not users.

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#meme

This is a good read. Bitcoin was always going to become a power struggle at the nation state level. Anything capable of challenging the monetary system was eventually going to attract attempts to control it. At least for now, Bitcoin creates money through work rather than debt. But what is the end goal? Simply killing Bitcoin would not remove the threat. The idea would remain, and destroying the dominant cryptocurrency could just clear the field for something harder to control. Maintaining Bitcoin’s dominance while limiting what it can actually be used for makes far more sense. That means restricting peer to peer use through regulation, while preserving enough transparency to make those restrictions enforceable. Transparency does not stop P2P. Regulation does. Transparency makes the regulation enforceable. The declining block subsidy creates another vulnerability. As it falls, the cost of supporting or influencing hash power becomes smaller relative to the financial system around Bitcoin. If maintaining influence over mining has strategic value, it does not necessarily have to be funded by mining revenue alone. Banking revenue can subsidise it to maintain control. This is why I think Knots was too inconsequential. If it was going to seriously challenge Bitcoin’s direction, it should have thrown down the gauntlet. Privacy at the base layer, making peer to peer cash much harder to regulate through surveillance. Then a small tail emission, maintaining a permanent market for proof of work and making it harder for mining to become dependent on external financial interests as the block subsidy disappears. But the more fundamental defence against capture is competition outside Bitcoin. Maximalism is what enables capture. When one network becomes the overwhelmingly dominant alternative, controlling that network becomes disproportionately valuable. The answer is not to replace Bitcoin maximalism with Monero maximalism. It is to make sure there are always credible alternatives. Bitcoin should be challenged by Monero, and both should be challenged by everything else capable of doing the job. Different systems should compete on privacy, censorship resistance, security and their ability to function as actual peer to peer cash. Cryptocurrency was always destined to become squad wealth. There is a natural economic force behind this. A challenger has enormous potential upside if it takes ground from an incumbent. Its users, holders and developers share in that upside, attracting capital, labour and attention. An incumbent that already dominates has much less upside simply from maintaining its position. By contrast, smaller or emerging systems offer asymmetric returns: if they succeed, early participants are rewarded far more than those in established networks. That dynamic turns participation itself into a form of aligned speculation, where belief, contribution and ownership reinforce each other. That creates a persistent incentive to back credible underdogs. It can be suppressed through regulation, misinformation or force, but the incentive itself remains. So perhaps the best thing for Bitcoin is not permanent dominance at all. For Bitcoin to succeed as peer to peer cash, it may need to lose its monopoly on the idea. The goal is not the end of government. The goal is honest money, accountable government and the end of usury. That does not require one cryptocurrency to win forever. It requires credible alternatives so neither governments nor monetary networks can assume people have nowhere else to go. The threat of exit is the tension that maintains the balance. View quoted note →

This is a must read. Bitcoin was always going to turn into a power struggle between nation states, but this power is very centralised. At least for now, bitcoin requires work for the new coins, so thee is no free ride. But what's the end goal. If it is to kill bitcoin it wont work because the idea remains a latent threat. Bitcoin losing dominance will only open up a path for other cryptocurrency to fill its place. The goal must be to control bitcoin and ensure its dominance while limiting its p2p capacity and ensure it remains transparent. Once the mining reward diminishes, mining can be subsidised by bankingbrevinue to ensure a control of hash power. This outlines how important altcoins are for bitcoins survival as p2p electronic cash. Knots shouldn't have forked to prevent spam, it should have thrown the gauntlet and introduced shielded transactions as mandatory and a small tail emission to ensure proof of work remains a profitable incentive to compete for hash power. View quoted note →

Paranoia is as unhelpful as complacency. Both delay taking the right course of action.

#meme #FTX #MtGox #Celcius #Coldcard

Growing up on a farm taught me how easily a large herd can be controlled. One person can move hundreds of animals with surprisingly little force. Once a few begin moving in the intended direction, most follow. The real effort is spent on the handful that resist, break away and encourage others to turn. They are chased down, subdued and, if necessary, separated and isolated. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the possibility that Bitcoin maximalism has always served a similar function. Bitcoin began as a challenge to systems built on monetary control, permission and unequal access. It offered the possibility of moving society toward greater freedom, fairness and human dignity. Yet many of the people who asserted themselves as leaders of the movement have replaced those broad principles with a rigid definition of ideological purity. Instead of centring the movement on the values that sound money can promote, they rally people around slogans, loyalty tests and exclusivity. The result is an in-group and out-group culture in which questioning preferred technologies, personalities or narratives is treated as betrayal. That is not intellectual confidence. It is social control. Bitcoin will always be under attack. The best defence is not conformity, but informed users with genuine choice. People must be free to compare technologies, question incentives, test claims and support alternatives without being marginalised for stepping outside an approved narrative. That is one reason Nostr matters. Open communication infrastructure can make it harder for institutions, platforms or influential personalities to control what people see and who is allowed to speak. But it is sobering to think that Nostr has been promoted largely by many of the same influencers who have worked to dominate the Bitcoin narrative. That does not mean they are all bad actors, and I am not accusing any particular person of deliberate sabotage. The problem is structural. Once a developer, company or influencer becomes dependent on funding, sponsorship or institutional support, they are no longer completely free. Even without explicit instructions, dependence shapes incentives. It affects what gets built, what gets criticised, what gets ignored and which compromises are considered acceptable. That gives independent hobbyist developers something many professional influencers and developers do not possess: freedom. They may have less money, less polish and less visibility, but they can pursue ideas on merit rather than on whether those ideas satisfy sponsors, investors or established factions. They can build tools that threaten existing interests precisely because their livelihood does not depend on pleasing them. So do not be discouraged when your work is overlooked while inferior competitors are heavily promoted. Do not assume that visibility proves quality or that funding proves legitimacy. Being ignored may simply mean you are building something that cannot be easily controlled. That is part of the struggle. Keep building.

Is there a template and guide for creating paper multisig wallets from coin toss or dice?