Replies (90)
Bitcoin really is for enemies, tho, as it works the same way, regardless of who you are. That's why it's a commodity, like gold.
I do think Bitcoin is less fungible than gold, in this respect, but it is more fungible than fiat.
This post is fire. Keep it up Lola!
> and then tell me that I'm stupid because I have a vagina (?)
🙄 😂
We need to monitor and protect the human layer. We need to know and fund reliable core devs. We need to protect them from lawfare. We need to ensure that trustworthy people review code changes. We need to make sure that the best a state actor couldvdo is cause a fork in which we could ignore the statecoin and carry on with Bitcoin.
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.
didn't the Blocksize War show us who controls Bitcoin....
You are conflating the money with the system that governs it. Bitcoin is definitely not "more fungible than fiat" – cash is the king of fungibility.
I don't mean to put you on the spot, but these are exactly the misconceptions I'm talking about.
There's a lot of fucking trust with few people verifying in this space.
That's why I honestly dislike most "Bitcoiners"
Every cash bill has an identifier and can be tracked. No two have the same ID. They are regularly pulled in and replaced. Some are also marked, in other ways, to follow their movements. Bank money and credit is tracked through ledgers, so that is arguably more fungible, but highly traceable. What the latter has is a gigantic market, so that one could create a complex movement of the money, to obfuscate the origins.
Gold is an element and can be made untraceable and unidentifiable through melting, stretching, stamping, or otherwise reforming.
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.
And no money is separate from the system that governs it, as money loses its monetary premium outside of that system. It is the system, and the consensus governing and defining that system, that makes the money into money.
Gold is not money, without coinage or a gold standard.
Fiat is not money, without a chartered banking system.
Bitcoin is not money, without the nodes.
The blocksize war illustrated exactly what is outlined above. The majority of miners and exchanges were on the side of the big blockers. The only reason UASF was successful is because the majority of bitcoin holders told them that they can go fuck themselves with their retardation coin.
I do not think that scenario would be playing out the same today.
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 👍
awesome post.
No, there isn't. Everyone and their mother reads that code. It's the most intensely-reviewed code, on the planet.
And you can't shut Bitcoiners up, since we have our own communications protocol, now. 😁
May the best fork win.
Ignoring the fact that governments can just _make_ any miner and institution under their jurisdiction enforce compliance coin...
How much of the network do you believe would be willing to put their Dollar value at risk to ensure that "terrorists and criminals" can continue to use bitcoin?
Everyone must start from somewhere, but I mostly agree.
No one has finished evaluating or understanding bitcoin and its many facets, and it is okay to speak your understandings if you also accept that you can be wrong and are open to feedback.
I don't know how community feedback works, but if, as this suggests, people are replying with their misinformed opinions in a way that CANNOT be challenged, then this is a terrible feature where one possible inaccuracy can be corrected with another inaccuracy without recourse.
Not everyone will learn by reading source. Most of us with a decent understanding of this stuff have been exploring and pontificating for years.
This will surely require a new reminder every 10 years. For example, if the custodian of an ETF gets hacked (looking at you, Coinbase), powerful players will try to push their own Bitcoin.
Uff
to be honest princess it doesn't matter.
most people understand that BTC goes up because of increased "adoption"
if governments start buying BTC it make it go up and that's all anybody cares about
you won't be able to convince any bitcoiner to oppose BTC going up, sorry
bitcoiners are subhuman rat filth with zero principles - if they had honor they would be fighting Jews not speculating on meme tokens.
Conceptually, yes.
Practically, unless you want to suggest that your node does the same volume as coinbase, no one is going to care what you think, unfortunately.
The content you generate is consistently terrible
How can cash be more fungible if it’s tracked with a serial number and people need to launder it in order to “clean” dirty money ?
Always a pleasure to read your notes and replies.
Anything that became known as "Coinbase Pseudodollars" would lead to a hard fork. Why would anyone, who is using Bitcoin to diversify away from the USD, then stick with the USD fork?
A Bitcoin that is US government controlled has no value proposition. It's just eDollars. Fedcoin.
I get what you are saying but someone with millions to launder would have to set up probably multiple cash flow businesses in order to clean it, if they try to just buy things little by little it gives more tume for the cash to make it into a ledger and gives more opportunities for the government to catch on to the transactions. There is already advancements in bitcoins privacy like silent payments. Not a silver bullet but there are other tools like coinjoins and if the person knows what they are doing they might be able to use ecash. Development hasn’t stopped and all this can be done right from the computer. So i actually don’t agree that cash is more fungible.
It's just two opinions, here. There's no cause to consider yours more informed or predictive.
> you are comparing a medley of experimental error-prone contraptions that have not been battle-tested with the act of handing someone a piece of paper in meatspace
- how does something become battle tested if it doesn’t get tested in battle ? We have to at least try and use the protocols to assess their viability. Also it’s not transacting p2p that’s the problem , cash is definitely fungible in this scenario but it’s the reporting of these transactions that is a problem. Go to a gas station and pay for gas and you tell me if that bill doesn’t go directly into a ledger that gets sent once a year to the IRS for tax purposes. Just because it takes longer doesn’t make it better. They can pin point your geographical location based on where you are spending the money and also create a profile of you based on what you are purchasing. The only option a person really has to obfuscate these transactions would be to launder the money and that would require a lot of money to establish businesses that generate a lot of cash flow to be able to mix it with the revenue.
> bitcoins only behave like privacy coins 1% of the time if I'm being generous, and it is the most difficult way to use them, with the most unappealing tradeoffs.
- This is true but again development has not stopped. Coinjoins/silent payments/bolt12/etc. They will get better over time.
> people in real life who have serious business to attend to, like selling drugs and staying out of jail, have drifted away from bitcoin.
- This is true they use monero now.
> even when a near-perfect privacy coin is used, they still have to do very complicated things to wash their money and they often fail. one of the most common things they do with their ill-gotten cryptocurrency is to turn it back into banknotes and wash it using traditional methods
- im confused, this sounds like you are making my point that it is much more difficult to obfuscate cash through traditional methods. Either way, both methods are difficult but with cash you need to have businesses to launder it and takes a ton of money and coordination, with Bitcoin you can try to do it from your own computer. They both have trade offs but i believe cash requires much more preparation, planning and money.
True in theory. Have you been on any podcasts to raise more awareness of this? I think it would be good.
@Danny Knowles Lola would make a good guest along with
@Lyn Alden or someone else capable of analysing this issue.
> how do you think laundering bitcoins works? it is not enough to break the blockchain analysis using a privacy tool. coinjoin and monero are not laundromats.
- True, i honestly get what you are saying but if we ever get a circular economy with bitcoin, and the person is able to use a privacy tool to break the link and deposit that bitcoin to multiple pseudonymous addresses, shouldn’t they theoretically be able to spend that bitcoin with no issues ?
ngl i am enjoying our debate. I like people that are willing to push back because i am not married to my opinions. It seems like you’re a monero maxi so im going to check your timeline later and see what else i can debate you about lmfao
Those Bitcoiners caring about censorship resistant money, left for Monero. Bitcoin is now about NGU.
You are so close to get Monero. I give you one month.
Monero is much better at that. Better fungibility. Better neutrality. Perfect for enemies. Perfect for anybody.
Bitcoin is non-fungible and everybody using it outside of KYC exchanges will sooner or later find out what "taint" means.
@ODELL get her on the show!
I honestly really love cashu, hate that it’s custodial of course but having the ability to print your own money and transact offline (as the sender of course) is just so incredible. I honestly don’t know of any other protocol that can do this. Lukechilds also proposed an ecash credit system that can let you hold a balance with a mint and only “risk” the amount money you are sending instead of the entire balance, further minimizing trust in the mint. If only there was a way to decentralize control of the mint
I thought the block size wars was a prime example that this is not the case. 🤷
Bitcoin Fog, Samourai Wallet, Silk Road, and more... There is a reason why Bitcoin has no privacy today. The main driver of that is user complacency and government pressure.
Anyone who thinks the largest military actors, largest terrorists, and largest bureaucracies (pardon the redundancy) would want individual sovereignty is an idiot. Even *if* the protocol itself maintains independence, you can bet that centralized on/off ramps (aka markets) will continue to be controlled.
Wake the fuck up everyone. Form an educated perspective and fight for it, because your Sats won't be fighting for you.
Cash naturally "coinjoins" since even if it has a serial number it passes through many people p2p and that history is not visible
Yep, if you hand me a $5 bill and I hand Billy that $5 bill and then Billy hands Jessie that $5 bill and then we ask a random person on the street who started out with that $5 bill the random person will have no ability to know.
Hmm I think Bitcoin long term value comes from it's looming ability to facilitate international trade. A state government fork would not be resisted by other states/nations. I can't see Russia or China running or mining a US controlled Bit oin fork.
I get what you guys are saying but we can’t control what people do with the cash once it’s in their hands and it is more likely they will spend it in a business that reports earnings to the IRS or worse deposit it in a bank. The scenario you guys are bringing up only works if you are spending small amounts at like a mexican hot dog stand. It’s not many businesses that can justify bringing in large amounts of cash at a time. IMO, from the governments perspective, both cash and BTC can be traced so what matters is how it is obfuscated and how difficult it would be for an individual to do it themselves. Thats why i say for cash you need a business like a strip club or something to justify bringing in so much cash and you’d need multiple because eventually they are going to ask themselves how is it that all this dirty money is mostly being spent on this one strip club. You need a lot of money or people you trust that have these businesses which is not ideal. I get that bitcoin has a long way to go and needs more tools for privacy but i still believe you are more likely to succeed cleaning a ton of money at once with BTC than with cash and thus making it more fungible.
ok cool that's what I was thinking...
Definitely hard to guess what's going to happen with something we've never seen in the wild, at a time when information is globally distributed like never before. Game Theory is on!
First of all, gm. Secondly, —
> that's fedimint.
Yeah but fedimint is just a big multisig. I just wish there was some sort of consensus mechanism for controlling a mint. It’s just a thought, i’m not smart enough to figure these things out and maybe cashu’s design wouldn’t even allow for something like that.
> mints can either be treated as an unlicensed money transmitter,
Agreed. I don’t see any regulated institution using cashu, it’s too private for them.
> or begin using the KYC feature that calle is working on right now
- Yeah what’s that all about 🤦🏻♂️lol
> perform fractional reserve free and clear.
- yeah this is definitely a deal breaker for cashu.
> the trick is to provide scalable self-custody and privacy without shapeshifting into a different species.
- Yep. Do you think any of the newly proposed soft forks will allow for this to be done on layer 2’s ? How about Ark and Bitvm2 ?
💯💯 people think just running a node with zero economic impact weight behind it somehow affects soft forks. Spoiler alert, it has literally zero impact.
Monero solved that.
Policies that are carried out from the head of the Jewish state have little to do with the average Jewish person. Fact.
Also, the value of fish and most other things 'go up' with increased adoption, as they can be used as a medium of exchange. Another fact.
How is speculation on anything different to speculation on anything else? Still, it has been happening and encouraged long before Bitcoin. Yet another fact.
TLDR fed
The block size war was indeed a case when the will of the majority of network participants won out over a few very powerful actors. If the magnificent 7 wanted to hard fork the internet, so to speak, and coordinated, it would happen. Bitcoin resisted such an attempt.
Economic nodes were a big part of winning the blocksize war. Sure, individual node runners ran and signaled UASF. The nail in the coffin for S2X was exchanges declaring the original fork is BTC, and listing futures markets for the fork tokens, which demonstrated the market valued BTC way more than S2X.
Holding BTC doesn't give one control over the network directly...fiat incentives can begin to exert negative influence over the network though. The economic nodes are a big part of how things have played out and will play out.
Worst case scenario...a new soft fork is built and disseminated to miners and exchanges (which are most of the economic nodes) that only permits paying to addresses on a KYC-ed and approved list kept and updated by some govt agency. Will that create a chain split? You bet. Each fork, bitcoin & cuckcoin, will have a different value. The network effect power will trend towards the economic value of each chain.
No one stayed with bcash after a few years...messy, but ultimately definitive. It'd be a much messier situation in the scenario above.
kill yourself you dumbfucking reject
True to a large extent. And unfortunate that xmr is NGD
I also suspect that as more enemies of the US adopt Bitcoin, it will not just chill and watch it happen. It seems inevitable, but not necessarily good news.
There will be increased pressure for censorship, whether it be through exchanges, miners or developers (pressure existing ones, or introduce new ones and persuade economic nodes to use them through force or propaganda).
Bitcoin has favorable properties to resist such pressures. E.g. a general reluctance to deploy protocol changes, lots of people and small businesses (hopefully) running their own nodes. The (relatively) simple nature of the protocol also helps to make it easier to call out blatant attacks. E.g. "this new line of code downloads the AFAC list".
Bitcoin might not end wars but it will drastically reduce the amount of money governments can spend. Infinite money equals infinite wars.
Increased pressure to censor will also incentivise other countries to increase mining capacity
They will always fund wars, to believe otherwise is naive, & the notion that bitcoin fixes everything is nice but absurd.
Sure, but more mining capacity doesn't help if the protocol itself is captured. Or if the majority of miners is forced (and money printer subsidized) to reorg non-compliant blocks.
They will try to gain control in one way or another.
Just imagine that in some way you are able to control most aspects. The biggest power anyone ever had?
Fortunately you can only control 1 thing:
- Your keys
What do you mean by captured? There is no way to force every node runner to run a specific version. Transaction fees will incentivise miners to operate in other jurisdictions and mine "non-compliant" blocks, no?
That incentive can be compensated with fiat payments. For every "bad" transaction you don't mine, government pays you 3x the fees in fiat. At the current fee levels they could afford doing that for centuries.
You don't need every node operator to cooperate to force a bad change through. But even if you did, you mislead people through propaganda, malicious or coerced developers, etc.
SegWit2x failed at both of these approaches, but they were rather incompetent.
Which are useless if your address is blacklisted at the protocol level. Or even confiscated like what CSW tried to do (incompetently).
Are you assuming that all global governments will act in unison?
No. Just have the majority of hash power under the control of US corporations and friendly / obedient countries. Force those to reorg others that don't comply. After a few demonstrations of a willingness to do this, most other miners won't take the risk of getting a stale block. All of that for the price of a Tomahawk.
Bribes to foreign miners are even cheaper: show us proof you mined a block that didn't include (top of mempool) sanctioned addresses and we'll compensate you 3x for lost revenue.
(maybe I shouldn't give such detailed instructions to future CIA readers :-)
Proper mining pool decentralization should mitigate this to some extend, so it's important to work on.
Assuming the US holds a lot of Bitcoin by the time this happens and that ETFs allow people to cash out, what is the incentive for them to harm the network and crash the Bitcoin price?
I think maintaining the integrity of the social layer is equally important. Especially in states with a lot of hash power. The scenario you are suggesting implies that the people in government is not interested in holding Bitcoin on a personal level. I think ita becoming the opposite in the US?
But the free market aspect of bitcoin should be able to outcompete that. They can try to organize themselves on an international level but if your addresses get blacklisted you can just increase your fees.
It's not ideal for sure but at some point some miner thinks this will be to good to ignore and enforcing blacklisted addresses seems a very futile endeavor since you can easily hide the traffic of your mining operations through tor or a vpn.
> maintaining the integrity of the social layer is equally important
I think that's exactly the point
@L0la L33tz is making. Don't just assume Bitcoin inevitably wins without effort.
Indeed
As the saying goes: markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid. Most people will probably just use other means to move value if Bitcoin becomes unusable for a few decades.
> hide the traffic of your mining operations through tor or a vpn.
I'm not talking about censoring pool internet traffic. Rather to reactively reorg "bad" blocks. The mere thread of that should cause most rational actors to self-censor. Even if you offer 10x the block subsidy in fees for a single transaction the US government can easily afford reorging them all and wasting your money. But as I said above, at those prices that are cheaper ways to move value.
Having closely experienced tentacles of government on my life and movement, I've been with you on this from the start.
Ok, so let's brainstorm ways to do this effectively. How to ensure we keep winning.
1. Supporting people like Lola who take action.
2. Talk about Bitcoin to family and friends.
3. Debunk FUD.
4. Elect bitcoiners
...
With 4, it's probably more efficient to orange pill existing politicians than to get bitcoiners elected?
Ok you are much more knowledgeable on this subject than i am.
I just wonder if the US will be able to do these reorgs and for how long. If the money is on the side where the US has no jurisdiction will we not see an increase in mining on parts of the world that do not agree with this? And how will they then organise reorgs if they do not have the capacity from mining operations within the US? Do you think the government will throw tax dollars at it to have their own mining infrastructure?
Sorry if i'm overseeing something simple. I know very little on this subject.
Definitely up against bigger villians, this is the next test for Bitcoin being able to hold the line against infinite fiat money allocators who can co-opt the layers around Bitcoin should they choose to do so, like you say social, mining, and on-ramps/off-ramps and even bitcoin adjecent software companies are all up for grabs adjacent and very few interact directly with the base layer itself
My node my rules can only get you so far!
The fight is only begining!
Lol my node my rules...incomes jpegs to break your rules!
Fund the war with what? It depends on what is accepted as payment; if this is only Bitcoin then they will be limited.
Of course there are many ways around that, trying to force it upon everyone.
Was thinking on same line, what if govt. buy the miners or make them move some where else. By jurisdictional laws they can do whatever they want. Look at Ross , Assange and others. But I do believe that as humans we have the weapon in the form of Bitcoin if we play well we can win.
@BaleNorge The recent Jeff booth podcast from the Bitcoin infinity highlight these things.
The Bitcoin Infinity Show
The Bitcoin Infinity Show
The Bitcoin Infinity Show: A bitcoin podcast with Knut Svanholm and Luke de Wolf, exploring Bitcoin and freedom tools
Haven’t finished fully while biking and have to listen again. Shokzprorun on bike were not that good.
@Derek RossDoggie coin fixes this because if you can switch to doggie coin when you see Bitcoin is imperfect, you'll be one step closer to switching to the next fork that solves problems with doge when you see dogecoin is imperfect - and if doge is full of devs and operators and users who came from seeing Bitcoin was flawed and its devs wouldn't fix it, maybe the next fork that solves doge's problems will just be the next version of doge itself
You seem ready to be surprised how dumb people are. That's great, but I'm ready to not be surprised if people are dumber than you think.
Only the parts that matter
I definitely support OP_CAT though it looks like many developers are leaning towards CTV and CSFS based on a chart i saw earlier. Do these op codes complement op_cat or they an alternative ?
Well no government is ever going to give up its power & therefore won't let bitcoin be the only form of payment. Other forms of payment will always be available.
Excuse the late reply, just got off my 9-5.
>
https://hackmd.io/@abdelhamid/cashu-starks
- Yo what is this dark magic lol STARK with POL! this is amazing. Great article. It really seems to improve a lot of stuff. I specifically love that this can help avoid fractional reserve and if i read it right, it can also allow for a sort of unilateral exit from the mint? Wow just wow. Can’t wait for OP_CAT (not just for cashu of course but for every other layer 2 that can be made). I guess next big challenge now would be finding a way to avoid the mint from being able to rug everyone at once.
>
Soft-Fork/Covenant Dependent Layer 2 Review
On-chain wallets achieve a roughly 1-1 mapping of transactions to transactions:for every economic transaction that a user performs, roughly one blo...
- Thanks for sharing this as well. I’m going to read through this now and get back with you.
As I see it, the problem is that if BlackRock and others get to hold a large portion of the BTC, they can fork off to a bad chain, e.g. one requiring KYC, being censorable, etc. and leave the real free bitcoin still working, but since it now lacks all the value put in by these companies, the price would drop off a cliff, and with it, the influence in society of holders of real bitcoin. The real bitcoin would suddenly be at a huge disadvantage in attracting people who don't care about freedom, which unfortunately seems to be the vast majority, and even many who do, out of sheer necessity, the same way we currently still have to use fiat literally to stay alive.
The past years have brought a swarm of new people into Bitcoin, and these posts and comments show how hard we failed them.
First off, to address the majority of commenters in Anita's post that also like to spam my posts with the same nonsense (and then tell me that I'm stupid because I have a vagina (?)), in the Bitcoin network, you do not get to vote for anything. Your node allows you to control the rules that your node runs by. That's it. That's all it does.
There is no voting in Bitcoin.
Second, miners run profit oriented businesses. This means that miners follow the rules adapted by the nodes with the majority of economic activity.
In the event of a hard fork, it does not matter how many nodes you run – if the majority of nodes generating profit for miners apply new rules, those are the rules the miners will follow.
Bitcoin positions do matter to the extent that they generate economic activity.
I understand that the voting analogy can be helpful, so here's one that you can make: in Bitcoin, you vote with your feet.
If a large exchange was to signal for, say, a Bitcoin compliance fork, you can threaten to pull your money out – to the extent that the exchange still allows you to.
Lastly, what Anita is referring to in her post is Bitcoin's social layer.
Bitcoin is run by humans, and humans can be influenced.
Humans can be influenced by setting positive incentives, such as gov subsidies or developer grants, or by applying violence, such as threatening to throw the people running and building Bitcoin in jail.
This is a reality of human nature and should not be controversial - How to prevent such actors from influencing open source development is often discussed in the open source community.
If this topic interests you, look up Operation Orchestra at FOSDEM.
Let's remember that the memes are not always your friends.
Influencers spent the past few years so focused on "hyperbitcoinization" that half-truths about how Bitcoin works are now taken at face value.
Because so many "Bitcoiners" now genuinely believe things like "Bitcoin can't be censored," "one node equals one vote", "Bitcoin is for enemies," or "everything is good for Bitcoin," we have created a culture that believes paying attention to the creation of an adversarial environment is unnecessary.
These memes are mental shortcuts. They are true to some extent, but do not reflect reality.
In the case of my posts, next to the obviously snarky comments here and there, the majority of commenters are not posting these things with bad intentions - they genuinely think that this is how Bitcoin works.
If you are an educator, influencer, or in any other way have the capacity to better explain these things to people, _please_ take the time to do so.
The memes are fine to get people interested, but we all need to do a better job at combating these misconceptions. The future of BTC could depend on it.
