You are discounting the fact that Bitcoin is a money that competes against other monies, so the people who hold it and produce it have an incentive to keep it the best money. Why would someone destroy the value-proposition of their own product, when the value of that product is set to go up forever?
Under duress? This would produce obvious nonsense and we would hard-fork away and continue on, without them.
Replies (6)
We are talking about two very different concepts here.
In the arguments I am making, I am referring to the success of Bitcoin as the success of a censorship resistant monetary technology, while you seem to be referring to the success of Bitcoin as an arbitrary Dollar number.
I would argue that the majority of Bitcoin holders don't really care about censorship resistance at this point, they care about the Dollar value – meaning that changes undermining Bitcoin's censorship resistance would likely be little opposed by economic actors (many have in fact already spoken out in favor of things like sanctions), therefore *not* reducing the price of BTC.
Your argument therefore should actually go the other way around:
Why should someone decide _against_ keeping their money on the dominant value chain to protect censorship resistance, when a fixed market cap – not censorship resistance – is considered BTC's value proposition by the majority of economic nodes?
This is an important point. Bitcoin holders are not dumb, ETF holders maybe are not as informed. But they would surely take note of the stink kicked up by holders should some large economic nodes (i.e. institutions) start being stupid. ETFs are also businesses. The best ways to go out of business are to loose the confidence of your customer or destroy your product. Trying some softfork stupidity would do both. Miners are also not dumb. They would surely forsee the stupidity of institutional soft fork attempts and the risk they posed to their profits. I'm not saying all this couldn't happen, it just doesn't seem likely imo.
No, my argument was the right way around. If they care about the dollar value of the money they produce (which they obviously do, otherwise they would not sell it), then they should care about the destruction of the use cases that make the money attractive to those who hold it.
They don't have to personally care, they just have to worry that we care. Even if only a subset of us abandoned their efforts, the dollar purchasing power of their money would quickly collapse.
That makes more sense, then. I didn't catch on that you were talking about changes in censorship resistance. I agree these are less likely to be opposed than ones that affect other monetary properties. You should make it clear that it was you're referring to because it seems there is some confusion around it 👍
And you can't shut Bitcoiners up, since we have our own communications protocol, now. 😁
Those Bitcoiners caring about censorship resistant money, left for Monero. Bitcoin is now about NGU.
