a bitcoin history lesson

tldr, in 2011 or thereabouts on founding, mircea popescu decided to require a PGP pubkey on signup for access to his MPEX exchange. A curious decision that still reverberates in the still, contemplative corners of the increasingly shrill and commercialized bitcoinverse.

" : Early on I made the strategic decision to make my exchange inaccessible to the offensively stupid poor. I do not mean the poor, poverty in itself is just a state, it means nothing. I do not mean the stupid, stupidity in itself is just a state, it means nothing. The offensively stupid poor are however not simply stupid and not simply poor. They are something like Inaba.

For this purpose I did two things : one is that I introduced a fixed fee, which while significantly lower than what you'd expect of a fee in the field is still significantly higher than the disposable income of the poor and the other is that I used technology which while widely known and amply used was still not anything the WYSYWYG/GUI crowd has ever met. Together they did in fact - I am proud to report - manage to prevent the offensively stupid poor from joining MPEx. Going through the support requests is literally a pleasure, half the time it turns out to have been the most productive part of the day.

Everyone else made the exact opposite strategic choice : as many users as possible. Sam Gumpy, bereft of articulate speech yet innerly convinced he's the Emperor of Chinaiv was good enough a user for anyone else. The net result ?

Oh, but the net result is glorious. You can read it in detail or else I shall summarize it for convenience....."

Inaba https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124441.msg1338371#msg1338371
articulates why gating mpex with the pgp wrb of trust would never work.

Mircea Popescu drowned surfing in costa rica and his sizable dragon hoard of bitcoins (as high as 100k by some estimates) is probably burnt, irrecoverable. The question remains, is inaba right, or was MP right?

History is written by the victors, and it appears that with ETFs, MSTR, and all of it custodied "trust me bro" at coinbase, the inaba side is victorious.

But sometimes history is an ouroborus that bites itself on the ass.

So we'll see!