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131 sats \ 3 replies \ @Scoresby 7 Aug \ on: Spending or receiving bitcoin isn't actually using bitcoin bitcoin
I'll take the bait.
One time I was trying to convince a friend that they should learn about bitcoin. To show them how easy it was, I helped them download a mobile wallet and sent them a little onchain. This was some years ago and I think they have since lost their seed phrase.
Last year, I wrote some things on Stacker News and got zapped a bit. I was using an ecash wallet and I don't know what kind of wallets the people who zapped me were using. Eventually I swept those tokens or credits or whatever you want to call them to my lightning node, and together with some other sats I earned via selling posters, eventually swept it all to an onchain wallet.
Sure, along the path there were all kinds of custodial things. For all I know, the people who zapped me and bought my posters were paying via an exchange or even some arcane wrapped bitcoin thing. I never checked. I ended up with sats. Amazingly, the sats I got for my posters and writing have increased in purchasing power by quite a lot.
I'm of the mind that all stages of that process were using bitcoin, but it sounds like you only think it became using bitcoin when it got to my cold storage and sat there. That doesn't make sense to me.
Bitcoin is digitally native money. I couldn't sell my posters as I do without bitcoin. I don't want to use credit cards or paypal because I'd have to give them a big cut and I'd have to completely kyc. Lucky for me, I can pay for my web hosting in sats as well, so I've never had to connect my legal identity to my bitcoin poster selling identity.
Same goes for Stacker News. I don't know of anywhere else that's using micropayments like they do here. The fact that I can pick up 10k sats occasionally by writing and posting something is excellent. I've made far more money on SN and nostr than I have ever made through X or Adsense or anything.
These seem to me to be novel ways to use money on the internet that are only enabled by bitcoin -- which I think is a pretty fair definition of using bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not some toy.
Size matters.
Bitcoin is an economic network, its about the network's economic weight not the number of users.
Bitcoin will fix everything, not minor inconveniences.
We are living under tyrannical communism and bitcoin will crush this.
If you are doing things that are part of that process either in a meaningful way, or at the very least, in a way that represents a large portion of one's economic potential, you are using bitcoin.
Otherwise, I think "playing" is the suitable word to describe its use in payments. Most people "building in bitcoin" are not serious people, building games and toys.
Just high time preference intellectual laziness at the end of the day, living in the fiat world they are prone to such things.
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Interesting. My mind jumps to number of users when thinking about network effects. But, no. of users * wealth within the network is a better metric.
Bitcoin is an economic network, it’s about the network's economic weight not the number of users.
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If you looked at the tail end of his post, you'll see that he said "Get Triggered."
Bro knows what he's doing, except he doesn't understand Bitcoin, which I doubt is the case..
Lol
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