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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @clr 13 Jul \ on: Is Trading Just Glorified Gambling? The Uncomfortable Truth Most Traders Avoid nostr
What does this have to do with Nostr?
Thanks for sharing your point of view. I just would like to understand if you want to answer:
- I imagine that coming from gold, you view Bitcoin as an improvement to gold — digital store of value. But gold already failed as medium of exchange and unit of account. Fiat is better for those two purposes (you cannot make digital transfers with gold).
- Circular economies as socialism: I don't disagree, and Satoshi himself was a socialist under that lens: he donated his time, wrote the software, gave up riches, fame, recognition, etc., for bitcoin to succeed. I think comparing the circular economies with a Ponzi is not correct because bitcoin itself is valuable worldwide, even outside of their circle.
- Telling family and friends: when I discovered bitcoin, I couldn't stop talking about it. I had the same thought, but I also thought that they didn't have enough money as to alter the price significantly.
- When I see this point of view, it always seems to come from people who live in "developed" countries and have fiat privileges: I don't know about you, but I assume you have several bank accounts, credit and debit cards, and whatnot. If your fiat privileges were revoked for whatever reason (bank accounts closed/frozen), maybe you would like to be able to spend bitcoin easily and have a wide bitcoin acceptance in society. That's why I want bitcoin to be accepted as MoE and ultimately UoA and I don't think that makes me a socialist (it's ultimately for selfish reasons).
- How will you flourish in a society where transactions are surveiled, tracked and blocked and using bitcoin is heavily punished? The "rational" economic analysis never accounts for tyranny. You will probably be among the richest guys in the prison and you will be able to purchase tuna cans, a radio, pay for phone calls... but is that really the future you want for yourself?
They can always resign. They've put themselves in a political/priestly position, so it's normal that they attract criticism.
Also, I get it. It sucks to be out of your depth and things to be out of your control, especially when most of your wealth/power/purpose/whatever came from this thing. But you were never in control of it.
Good point. It looks like politics attract the worst kind of people and political problems don't have a solution. But I still think that it's good that people are trying to bring awareness to the problem (most people don't even know). The more people think by themselves, the less damage politics/politicians/priests can do.
I haven't read the code, but I'm sure that Knots' latest version's code is way more similar to Core's latest version than Core's latest version to Bitcoin's code written during the Satoshi era.
So let's not scare people from running whatever software they deem appropriate. Calling Core "the one" doesn't give it magical properties.
And, again, I am not vouching for Knots. Solely stating that Core doesn't and shouldn't have a monopoly over what bitcoin is.
Satoshi was a benevolent dictator. He was respected and trusted to have the last word over what was merged. But he left, and we are now on our own.
And his software wasn't named "Bitcoin Core". It was just "Bitcoin". The "Core" developers started naming themselves and their software "Bitcoin Core" long after Satoshi had left.
Core currently the reference implementation.
What is a "reference implementation"?
[A] reference implementation [...] is a program that implements all requirements from a corresponding specification.
I'm afraid that the issue we have is not with the implementation, but rather with the specification itself. It's about Bitcoin's purpose.
Alternative clients are a menace.
Yes, a menace to Core. We are not supposed to get consensus dictated by fiat. We are supposed to find emergent consensus.
Satoshi was always right — must be in lockstep, other clients are a menace
Every new version of Core is "another" client as much as Knots or any other alternative.
And I am not evaluating Knots on its merits or lack thereof. I just want competition and debate of ideas and their implementation (clients / software).
Other ideas or clients being a "menace" — that's what a fiat statist would say ("This is dangerous to our democracy.").
I'd say focus on increasing the appearance of value. Maximum impact for minimal cost.
- Make it look clean, tidy and impersonal. For showing, try to remove family pictures and anything too personal or flashy.
- If you want to spend money, I'd say painting the walls will give a good appearance for not much money.
- Fix anything that's broken and can fix yourself easily or can be fixed for little money.
others are calling for [...] deregulation to keep the crypto paper trail more anonymous
KYC is dangerous.
Basically all this drama is about making standardness rules for OP_RETURN outputs identitcal to consensus rules.
Yes.
So why was the 80-byte OP_RETURN limit never a consensus rule in the first place? I suppose that because Core never made it so.
This is the danger we are facing. That the Core church is getting to define what bitcoin is, because most people just run Core's software and go along with whatever they do. We need competition in churches. It's a shame that in 2017 and later many developers went on to making competing forks that have gone nowhere. I hope they come back to bitcoin and help people understand that bitcoin is not Core.
PoW isn't the only thing that counts. It's not the only consensus rule.
How so? When bitcoin gets widely used, let's say the majority of miners start awarding themselves more bitcoin. They would just need Core to provide a convenient excuse to distract people. After all, with which other coin that nobody uses do you intend to trade?
Some might say: "The people would revolt!" Well, now we have central bankers and their cronies stealing >2% of humanity's output every year (the inflation target, and this doesn't even account for productivity increase due to technological progress), and I don't see anyone revolting (in fact, most people love this system).
If the current Core version does not mine transactions with OP_RETURN above 80 bytes, why is it considered a standardness rule instead of a consensus rule? Who or what determines that?
At this point, given the rationale in this discussion, what's stopping miners from giving themselves a higher block reward or whatever? What's the point of nodes verifying blocks if PoW is the only thing that counts?