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Medium of exchange is held down by the incumbent system. Store of Value is the adaptation that makes bitcoin resilient in the face of a defensive response. Medium of exchange is coming, but you have to be patient.
Saylor isn't going to sell that pitch though, why would he? Why does he need to? Why do you think you know his private thoughts? For all you know Saylor is here on SN.
They don't have to discuss the benefits to label Bitcoiners as tax dodgers, scammers, greater fools, parasites of various stripes. That will give them cover in a crisis to bring in punitive laws that target the UX of self-custody and herd people custodial solutions where they can be 6102'd.
I think Bitcoiners will be vilified and scapegoated, which will put downward pressure on price for a while.
The question is of those defaulting what percentage are women?
And whose money is being seized, people who are working enough to pay the loans? Obviously you can't pay if you are broke.
And of those who are in default while earning what percentage are women?
And a fraction of the bitcoin.
I say this with only a small amount of joy, and a lot of unease. Sovereign money is the end of feminism.
Co-opting Christianity works, but purist Bitcoiners are allergic to the idea.
Christ was the living manifestation of the discovery of proof of work:
- the greatest sacrifice (work)
- the highest hill (proof)
- as a carpenter's son (the every man), with the criminals (for my enemies)
- alone (sovereignty, responsibility, NYKNYC)
That is the closest thing to what I will call God, my north star.
Vanishingly few albums can claim to be perfect.
Justin Vernon managed to capture a near universal human experience; it's a Mona Lisa, a Caravaggio, a Van Gough, a Kafka.
They cannot rise enough to compensate for the rising consumer costs, and US consumers survive on debt. Oh, and by the way universities have ensured that Western millennials and gen-Z don't have the skills and have really have status expectations, unlikely to capitulate to manufacturing jobs without significant pay increases that will make those companies insolvent.
And rising costs will wipe out boomer pension plans.
The US, Europe, and Japan are all trapped in policy paralysis, every direction is pain.
Japan have not survived demographic collapse at all, they simply papered over the problem with 0% interest rates and restructured their pension liabilities in the early-90s to keep their bond yields low, something the west failed to do because it's not ethnically homogenous. Japan has simply forestalled the problem.
You're kind of the irritating mirror of that China shill that I muted. You two should just pair up and talk to each other. I'm done providing this reality check, you're motivated to come to specific conclusions and that makes conversations boring.
wages rise
Making the west less competitive in manufacturing. Low value manufacturing is the majority of manufacturing, including in military applications, and the innovation that leads to the high value tends to bubble up from the low value, with a significant lag. Our high value manufacturing is a lagging product of the historical low value manufacturing that was conducted in the West.
I'm desperate to believe your narrative, so I'm definitely not offering cope. You're just really bad at objectivity.
All of them combined can replace the US sufficiently to function. There are enough consumers in Brazil and India for Chinese products, all of them have enough raw materials.
The West would go into de-growth trying to re-industrialise to replace east Asian manufacturing, because salaries would have to be beaten into capitulation. That's arguably what they are trying to do with immigrants, to drive down salaries, but minimum wages are essentially untouchable in Europe, and the cost of living crisis (housing) is unsolvable in the US due to the use of real estate as a pension fund for voting boomers.
The US is more likely to look like a big Turkey than a global dominant powerhouse in 10 years.
India, Brazil, China, probably Russia, all have sophisticated payment rails that make USDT largely irrelevant on a grand scale. They can easily make it inconvenient enough and even theoretically supply their own interoperable payment rails so that they're own citizens don't leave their currency to trade internationally, the conversion is handled through swaps.
You're argument seems to me like a dragon eating it's own tail. How does the US debase it's own currency, make it less useful in international trade, and prevent the coordination of its peer competitors, and come out on top?
I mean, I get it that it's great to be a Bitcoiner in the US or Europe relative to your peers, other citizens of the collective West. But how that converts to US dominance in any of the fields that matter is frankly unsupported.
ChatGPT says:
Understanding arXiv:2601.04835Understanding arXiv:2601.04835
Yes — I can read and understand the paper you linked.
Below is a clear, structured summary of arXiv:2601.04835, explaining what the paper is about and why it matters.
📄 Title📄 Title
A Mathematical Theory of Payment Channel Networks
Author: René Pickhardt
Date: January 2026
arXiv ID: 2601.04835
📌 What the Paper Is About📌 What the Paper Is About
This paper develops a rigorous mathematical theory of payment channel networks (PCNs) — the class of systems that includes the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
Rather than proposing a new protocol, the paper:
The approach is geometric and network-theoretic, using polytopes, flows, and conservation laws.
🧠 Core Ideas🧠 Core Ideas
1. Payment Channel Networks (PCNs)1. Payment Channel Networks (PCNs)
A payment channel network allows users to route payments through intermediaries without touching the blockchain, as long as:
Each channel has:
2. Liquidity as Geometry2. Liquidity as Geometry
🔷 Liquidity State Space (LG)🔷 Liquidity State Space (LG)
Formally, for each channel ( e = (u, v) ):
[
\lambda(e,u) + \lambda(e,v) = \text{cap}(e)
]
Only allocations satisfying all such constraints are valid.
🔶 Wealth Distribution Polytope (WG)🔶 Wealth Distribution Polytope (WG)
Instead of tracking per-channel balances, the paper projects LG into:
This projection yields another polytope (WG), which turns out to be central.
This provides a global criterion for payment feasibility.
3. Payment Feasibility & the Throughput Law3. Payment Feasibility & the Throughput Law
When a payment cannot be routed off-chain, the system must fall back to on-chain transactions.
The paper derives a simple but powerful relationship:
[
S = \frac{\zeta}{\rho}
]
Where:
This formalizes a fundamental trade-off:
4. Multi-Party Channels4. Multi-Party Channels
The theory extends beyond two-party channels:
are more capital-efficient
5. Fees and Channel Depletion5. Fees and Channel Depletion
The paper also analyzes how routing fees affect liquidity:
This explains empirically observed issues in Lightning:
🧩 Why This Paper Matters🧩 Why This Paper Matters
This work provides:
It bridges:
🧠 In Plain English🧠 In Plain English
If you’d like, I can also:
Just tell me how deep you want to go.