When does the madness end?

The madness is that not of the people but that of the elite. It is a somewhat designed madness, because power is threatened. Your favorite influencer will peddle this madness through the front door of your brain, so that you think you have a problem. FWIW, you do have a problem, it's just not what they're telling you it is.

You wanted to drain the swamp, but you forgot to plan for what should be built in its place and to get some rough consensus on that. But nevertheless the swamp got drained. Say goodbye to the old swamp, hello newer, bigger, and as you'll find, an ultimately more awful swamp. All the alligators are dead but in a few years you'll find the pests and viruses that took the alligators' place are more pesky, and harder to get rid of. And they'll be a problem once they have digested the corpses left behind.

Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, the Financial Times

fuck. them. Learn to think for yourself. You're not going to change the world by hoping that other people do your work for you, especially not people with a vested interest against your cause. If you want to change the world, do the work. Do not expect powerful people to be in your corner, and if they say they are, there's a good chance that they are trying to get your sats.

I propose to simply ignore the fiat maxis sometimes, because Brandolini's law applies and we need time to be productive. Bullshit isn't productive.

I read a lot of finger pointing and blaming others but very little introspection. TLDR we are a way off users being able to mass adopt.

OP by their own admission runs an Umbrel and is a Linux user. By default, this is an advanced user, deep down the rabbit hole and with the tools needed to enjoy bitcoin to its fullest (lightning + lightning address).

The reality is, though, that this is hard to set up and nothing that someone today is used to when they compare to their current financial setup: open bank account (because they want and need one), then download app and log in. Often this is the same process, now.

Custodial services can replicate this, and hence dominate (Cash App, Coinbase, Strike), but non-custodial still presents many UX hurdles.

Increasingly, with time, I am observing that a lot of this responsibility sits with developers’ choices of what they expose to the user and the language they use to describe what is happening. It’s technically bamboozling to someone trying to adopt.

And that’s before we get into Lightning liquidity and whether or not to use Cashu, Spark or Ark to mitigate the downsides.

You wouldn't expect the American media to discuss and amplify a technology that could likely and significantly jeopardize the dollar's hegemony, would you?

On the other hand, we have consistently overlooked a crucial factor that impacts the use of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, particularly for day-to-day transactions. Bitcoin's adoption by merchants will continue to be slow until we recognize this problem and embrace a solution to it.

Just as Gold cannot be used as money because you can't scrape out a little portion of Gold to weigh and pay, Bitcoin has a temporary economic challenge, which is "its fluctuating Fiat valuation. It is temporary because it is a problem that can be solved and will be solved over time.

You wouldn't see many merchants display "Bitcoin is accepted here" signs because these merchants, unlike Steak n Shake, may not have the large customer base that could ensure that all their Bitcoin sales could be a percentage of their profits, removing the need to constantly liquidate their Bitcoin sales to Fiat.

Literally every business in the world is still Fiat-run, and must balance its books in Fiat, pay suppliers in Fiat, pay employees in Fiat, and stay in business. If you check very well, a majority of businesses that currently accept Bitcoin for payments are proper Bitcoiners. For Bitcoin to thrive as a medium of exchange, people who are not necessarily Bitcoiners should be willing and able to accept it as payment.

Now, accepting Bitcoin for payment is wonderful for large businesses (like Steak n Shake in the US and Pick n Pay in SA) because the percentage of Bitcoin sales they make would likely fall within their daily profit margin. These large businesses can comfortably keep these Bitcoins and still be able to run smoothly. (This is based on the assumption that they actually keep these Bitcoins.) However, smaller businesses in your street may not have this capacity, so they would need to constantly exchange the Bitcoins they collected in sales to Fiat to either re-stock, pay bills, or do other things. This ultimately results in extra fees.

Now, giant POS providers like "Square", which offer Bitcoin payment options to their merchants, currently do not charge fees for exchanging Bitcoin to Fiat, but eventually they would (as they already mentioned), because it is not sustainable.

So, if a merchant requires paying extra fees to liquidate the Bitcoins they accepted as payment to balance their books in fiat and run their businesses, then will they not be better off just accepting Fiat (where they will still pay fees anyway)?

So, the issue that slows Bitcoin's acceptance by merchants is an economic one, and not necessarily unpopularity or technological issues. It is the fact that the world still runs on Fiat, and you can't change that overnight. However, we can find a way to integrate Bitcoin as the base money that the Fiat world runs on, and from there we can easily switch fully to pricing everything in Bitcoin.

Now, how is this possible?

"FIAT CHANNELS" - This is a Lightning implementation that enables the creation of Bitcoin derivatives on the Lightning Network. With this technology, and a hedging mechanism, we can create any Fiat currency IOU's, where Bitcoin is the underlying asset being transferred to and fro. It uses a Host/client mechanism where the Host is any entity running a Lightning node with the Fiat channels plugin, and the client is any wallet client (custodial or non-custodial) that has enabled this technology, e.g., Valet (https://github.com/standardsats/valet)

You don't have to trust us; this protocol is completely open-sourced. Anyone can review it, contribute to it, and tweak it as they like.

GITHUB - https://github.com/standardsats/fiat-channels-rfc CONCEPT - https://standardsats.github.io/

Fiat channels enable merchants to accept Bitcoin payments on Lightning without worrying about volatility. This ensures that they can run their businesses, balance their books, and pay bills without any need to convert from Bitcoin to Fiat, and hence no extra fees.

Interestingly, in Valet (our wallet software) application, where we already have this technology demonstrated, users can at any time exit from Fiat channels back to self-custodial Lightning usage by draining their balances back to their normal Lightning channel. This ensures that merchants can always move their profits to self-custody after balancing the books.

There are other implementations of this idea through differrent approach by other people, such as "The Money socket" by JD (https://socket.money/leatherpaper).

The conclusion is that we need to first integrate Bitcoin as the base money while fronting Fiat as the actual value. With time, when Sats hit parity with even a Cent or the dollar, following a wide understanding of Bitcoin and constant use as base money, then we can easily ditch the dollar and price squarely in Bitcoin.

Unfortunately, the mainstream Bitcoin community has given little attention to this protocol that could completely change the game.

And yes, there's also something of this nature implemented by Galoy, and currently available in the Blink wallet.

This is the future, and the earlier we look at it, the better.

We Americans are cucked

Bitcoin is mainstream, CNBC can't go 15 minutes without talking about it, it's ETF's embarrass the flows of all other ETF's, hundreds of millions of phones have near instant access... and several nation states-- including the most important one- have admins full of Bitcoiners and are irretractably incentivized to to keep the momentum going.

Bitcoin's job has always been to put a check on central banks and give people an option to save, everyone has that optionality now.

We have a proper unit of measure to put the central banks in check. Visa/PayPal are not the central bank.

Bitcoin has won. The game theory has won.

SoV is Act 1 in a 3 act Play.

Act 1 must come before Act 2, and it has.

MoE is Act 2

Act 2 simply broadens the aperture and is a reinforcement.

You want to know why more people don't have Bitcoin? They don't have money to save, at all. No wealth to protect, no units to account. The golden billion as is often referred too is really more like the golden 200M.

That's an economic failure, not a Bitcoin one.

But, Act 2 has begun, only because Act 1 is complete. Act 2 broadening the aperture is how you save the people not party to the golden 200M

Lightning enables people with no wealth to save the ability to EARN Bitcoin in a disinter-mediated way.

It's early Act 2, and the tooling sucks. The incentives to build bad tooling are stronger than the incentive to build good tooling (fake L2's and scam forks vs. self-hosted Lightning tools).

Act 2 does not have the benefit of Act 1's game theory, so there are fewer actors, which means we need more mechanical leverage (tooling).

The United States is the financial capital in the world: literally, as the world sources its fiat money from us at a premium. Just as there's "Big Pharma" and "Big Dairy," there's also "Big Money," and we're it.

And just as smaller clinics, organic farms, smaller dairies, etc, all find it harder to operate in the states where "Big Pharma" and "Big Dairy" are at their biggest, the United States is inclined to be hostile to a P2P digital cash system. And I don't just mean "the federal government," but everyone representing or participating in legacy finance here.

It's hardly an insurmountable problem—it is in fact in the process of being surmounted—but there was no reason to expect the "Land of 1929 and 2008" would adopt faster than friggin Lugano. It's Hamilton country.

Maybe never as a MoE which is the only way it really succeeds as an alternative to fiat. As a speculative commodity it has already succeeded but in that role it does not replace or even challenge fiats MoE monopoly. Whats needed is more of us to fight for the right to spend sats and that seems a very slow process- maybe it will never happen and Bitcoin will remain as it now largely captured and controlled by the bankers and governments as a harmless KYCed and taxed speculative commodity.

The madness ends when Bitcoin stops being a bet and becomes infrastructure.

When people use it not because they’re excited, scared, or ideologically aligned, but because it’s simply the most reliable way to store and move value.

Until then, volatility, hype and confusion are part of the discovery process.

It is even worse in the EU. Where I live, I am literally the only one who cares. Maybe when cash is outlawed and taxmen start counting every penny the sheeple will wake up.

I’m not waiting to see any good and directly information about bitcoin spread by TV channels companies. Where I talk about it or see people talking about it the concerns are almost the same as ever. Mainstream will not happen, they will fall for ETF and any shitschemes as flies, this is happening already, this because they don’t want sovereign money, they want fiat. I had a experience yesterday hearing a conversation about solutions for state and fiat crap, the proposals as ever the same shit – “vote, revolution, statist bullshit”. I tried to argue why fiat is so bad, but people don’t want hear me talk about bitcoin, I’ll let they drown in fiat shit.

This is mainstream, nocoiners complain about fiat and state thinking in how they can create more fiat using iou, running away from bitcoin solution. Fuck mainstream.

Because we have to stop pricing bitcoin in fiat and make it an independent unit of account: https://bitcoinawareness.substack.com/p/suddenly-could-happen-now-if-unit

First off, I don't expect the fools on tv or in wsj, bloomberg, ft and the rest to see Bitcoin for what it is anytime soon. Their whole careers are built on the system as is. They're experts at snuggling up to the warm underbelly of the state. Their first experience of the cutting edge isn't going to come until it cuts them away from suckling on the government's teat.

The thing it comes down to is that Bitcoin really is blackmarket money. Blackmarket money isn't money used by enthusiasts or fans, it has people who use it because it's the best (sometimes only) way to solve their problem. But people in the US don't feel like they have a state problem yet. They haven't been convinced that they are suffering from a big brother problem.

I don't think we get any kind of widespread adoption until the USD becomes harder to use to break the law and people realize they need money that lets them break the law. (If I'm right about this, you'd expect places like China, N Korea, and Iran to have higher adoption, though -- so, either I'm wrong about how oppressive those regimes are, or there's something else I'm missing here).

So adoption is probably (hopefully) going to increase most in places outside the US. And I see that as a good thing.

On paper the US is often framed as a leader in financial innovation yet when it comes to actual transactional use of Bitcoin or Lightning it is far behind several European countries and even some developing nations. This is not an accident.

Part of the problem is that in the US Bitcoin has been financialized into an asset class rather than embraced as a medium of exchange. The focus has been on ETFs spot price speculation and accumulation rather than building consumer level payment rails. That narrative dominates because it fits within existing financial institutions and lets Wall Street monetize it without changing the underlying payment infrastructure that everyday people use.

Europe by contrast has pockets of real-world adoption not necessarily because they have fewer regulations but because in certain communities and regions there is interest in creating tangible use cases. Switzerland’s Lugano is a perfect example of a city embracing Bitcoin as an economic experiment and committing to actually making it spendable. That type of civic decision-making matters because adoption ultimately grows when merchants see value and users can spend with ease.

Watchman Privacy: 211 - Naomi Brockwell: Nothing to Hide Starting from: 00:33:34

Episode webpage: https://watchmanprivacy.com/

Media file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/watchmanprivacy/Naomi_Brockwell_Nothing_to_Hide.mp3?dest-id=2727836#t=2014

Was just listening to this and I thought it was a nice add-on to your post. Someone who is deep into privacy and has ​been involved in Bitcoin and crypto for some time either does not know about the lightning network or chooses to ignore it.

If people really wanted to be freed from the fiat debasement/slavery, Bitcoin wouldn't be needed.

if you search for "hyperbitcoinization" there are many many good insightful posts about this on Stacker News

I believe lighting payments are stepping stone towards Bitcoin mass adoption.

Cuando los mismos desarrolladores no le pongan limites regionales.

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