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waxwing 1 month ago
On the DAO,ETC,ETH and my "bet": excellent point to raise, there. There is no doubt that the opposite side to my argument won. At the time as you'll remember it was just as obvious that it wouldn't have happened in BTC because of the "DNA" of what bitcoin even is, being so tied to uncensorability (let's not forget that it's a bit murky whether anything like "consensus" was actually reached in the ETH community; it might even be possible to characterise it as the equivalent to the new york agreement winning in btc's case; but I'd be willing to cede the opposite is possible, that the DAO coin "reassignment" was a community consensus). The DAO disaster just showed that there was a profound divergence between the communities at a not just technical but philosophical level. So yeah, another project which has a different less pure concept of decentralization might reasonably define cutoff dates, but I don't think BTC should. It's against its nature and purpose. Concretely, the tradeoffs bitcoin's design makes (e.g. no onchain obfuscation; no onchain global state and complex contracting; slow block times; etc) are all in service of that. I know that this is a retelling of history - SN didn't seem to see it quite like that, but somehow designed it like that despite himself, lol.

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waxwing's avatar
waxwing 1 month ago
About extreme scenarios like 80% of btc stolen (- I'm going to ignore the "how do you measure it" part, though I suspect that'll come back to bite us at some point!): i mean there is presumably a failure mode where trust breaks down, but it's not really about a specific number or ratio. It's about whether there's any credibility that going forward, the system will be trustworthy. Anything above 30-40% is presumably disaster-level and the project *might* just kind of fall apart. But I really don't know. I just know that if you violate the core principle of private property you've mostly already lost. Maybe I'm wrong and everyone would love it, but what's the point in bitcoin in that case, I don't see it.