I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I do believe that Bitcoin has to become something that people who don't care about Bitcoin use (whether they know it or not) because it is the best way they have to solve a problem -- so, yes, we should care if it is a Bitcoin Company.
On the other hand, so much of the stuff that is done "on Bitcoin" is just a bunch of shit and really they might as well have used a Google docs.
Here's Berg on the companies he's excited about:
Bitcoin infrastructure providers are shipping multi-asset protocols. Payment apps are integrating stablecoins (Hello @CashApp). The rigid "Bitcoin-only" mandate is dissolving, because when you have tens of millions of users (or strive to), you serve their actual needs, not your Twitter bio. It turns out people want to do more with their money than stack sats. They want to pay for things. They want to borrow against their Bitcoin. They want USD when they need USD. They want optionality.
And:
For years, Bitcoiners dismissed other chains as centralized garbage, destined to fail. Most of them are. Still, onchain systems, even ones that made tradeoffs Bitcoiners find distasteful, have captured real market fit. Stablecoins move hundreds of billions of dollars on chains that aren't Bitcoin. Users chose utility. They chose speed and low fees and programmability.
But I disagree. It may be product market fit to give a cools-sounding name something people already have (kyc banking?), but the whole point of this Bitcoin thing was to build something they didn't have: peer to peer money.
Berg is right about this, though:
Not every financial transaction requires those properties. Most don't. The market figured that out faster than the maxis.
But I think he misses the mark when he tries to apply it:
Partners who would never align themselves with "Bitcoin maximalism" will happily integrate neutral financial infrastructure.
I'm not convinced that the financial system will happily integrate with censorship resistant money. It may be compelled to do it if there is enough demand, but I believe it will be kicking and screaming and with much legislation.
Ultimately, I think this is where Berg gets it wrong:
Bitcoin won. It has ETFs. Corporations hold it on their balance sheets. Institutions treat it as a legitimate store of value. The battle for legitimacy that defined this industry for years is finished. Bitcoin is now a normal asset in a diversified portfolio, held alongside equities, bonds, and real estate. That's victory. That's what winning looks like.
I'm not looking for Bitcoin to have legitimacy. I don't consider having an ETF winning. I consider strong guarantees that the state cannot stop me from using Bitcoin winning. I consider winning people widely accepting bitcoin for goods , people wanting to get paid in bitcoin for work, people abandoning their banks.
IMO, the way to build a good bitcoin company is to build a good company
Bitcoin is money, not product. The product is always gonna come before the means of payment.
This!!!!!!!!!!
Sadly, we have somehow lost touch with the understanding that "Bitcoin is money" and not a product.
The technical narrative for Bitcoin-only is that by introducing extra features that aren't used for Bitcoin, unnecessary complexity gets introduced, which makes it harder to protect against bugs, at minimal gains. This has nothing to do with Twitter bios or other virtue signaling, but with engineering fit-for-purpose, secure applications for Bitcoin.
Yes indeed. I still get laughed at for being the Bitcoin guy
We definitely haven't won.
I can't hardly spend Bitcoin anywhere in town.
I know it's a chicken and egg problem, but do you think the bigger barrier is not enough consumers who want to pay with it, or not enough vendors who want to accept it?
It is both, but "not enough merchants/vendors who are willing to accept Bitcoin payments" is the current leading cause.
Demand often influences supply, and in this case, the merchants are the demand. The moment businesses across various industries, especially retail businesses, start demanding payment in Bitcoin, people will eventually begin to view it as a viable payment option. But then the problem of "unwillingness to spend Bitcoin will arise," because Bitcoin is viewed largely as a store of value, even by most core Bitcoiners, and I will tell you why.
Oftentimes, on the timelines, under posts that advocate for the need to spend Sats, you'll see subtle comments like "why'd I spend the better money? I'd rather spend the bad money and keep the better money", and you see this from acclaimed Bitcoiners. You then begin to ask, when do you then spend Bitcoin if we claim it is money?
Another subtle pointer to the fact that even we Bitcoiners do not necessarily regard Bitcoin as money is the continuous wrong application of the popular mantra "Stack Sats, HODL, never sell".
This is a good mantra that served its purpose in the early days when there was a need to have faith in this technology, hence the advocacy that people who believed in Bitcoin should hold on to it, which would probably convince others to do the same, growing faith and adoption, and strengthening the network.
However, at this time and now, that mantra often sounds like "Hold your Bitcoin because the price will increase." You also realize that it certainly shifted the talk from Bitcoin being money to people, including many Bitcoiners, speculating on Bitcoin's fiat price, the same Fiat we are hoping Bitcoin replaces as money.
The question then is, "If we are holding Bitcoin because we hope that it'd hit another fiat ATH, does it suggest that there's a price it may get to and we can then liquidate (cash out), or does it suggest that we do not actually believe in our claims of Bitcoin eventually replacing the traditional financial money?"
Merchants/vendors are mostly not willing to accept Bitcoin as payment, and even users are rarely willing to pay with Bitcoin.
On the merchant side, it is partly due to the not-so-clear regulatory borders of Bitcoin (but regulation clarity can always be improved as adoption increases), so we can say that it is largely because Bitcoin is volatile against Fiat money, and a lot of businesses run on the Fiat system. Accepting Bitcoin for payments means accepting volatility on any business capital kept in Bitcoin, and a majority of small and medium-scale businesses (the actual supposed catalysts) may not have the capacity to run such risks. Those who manage to accept Bitcoin for payments end up liquidating them instantly, which results in exchange fees and sometimes rigorous processes.
So if there's no immediate economic incentive to accept Bitcoin for payments (except for speculation that the fiat value may increase), why would a merchant that runs their business on the Fiat system do that, especially when they stand the risk of having unstable business capital, or paying extra fees to liquidate back to Fiat?
The same way a Bitcoin user would ask, "Why'd I spend Bitcoins that could potentially increase in Fiat value?"
So maybe the Fiat system will not necessarily be replaced by Bitcoin, but it could become the basis/standard/foundation on which fiat money runs, and perhaps that is when Bitcoin wins. Legendary Hal Finney of blessed memory also envisioned this when he opined that "in the future, there'll be banks running full Bitcoin reserves and issuing their own currencies backed by verifiable Bitcoin".
Eric Yakes and the Epoch team have largely also covered this in several of their reports on Bitcoin banking, explaining how this may unfold. Albeit predictions, a critical review will show that they're pointing in the right direction.
For Bitcoin to dominate everyday payment, it'd have to be much less volatile against Fiat or, say, stable. This will happen in the long run. Maybe in tens or hundreds of decades, but the process starts now. It starts by building products on Bitcoin money.
To enable merchants to comfortably accept Bitcoin for payments without worrying about volatility, we designed Fiat channels, a Lightning implementation that enables the creation of Bitcoin derivatives.
Fiat channels were coined from the original protocol, Hosted channels. It is a custodial lightning solution with a cryptographic fraud-proof.
Here are more resources:
https://standardsats.github.io/
https://github.com/standardsats/fiat-channels-rfc
"Consumers" don't even know the Lightning network exists. Or 'crypto' reminds them of the president's crypto-scams so they... avoid it
Ain't that the truth. While I have met in the wild a few people who were in to Bitcoin, I've not met a person who knew what lightning was.
These people are morons.
It depends on perspective, the idea "layered money" supports both the view of "tightly focused, mostly ossified Layer 1 Bitcoin" and also "auxiliary services that are built on top of it". It doesn't represent any sort of contradiction....
Look at the legacy system and how it grew: (a) Layer 0 money (Gold), (b) Layer 1 money (Treasuries), (c) Layer 2 Shitcoins (USD), (d) Layer 3 Electronic Transactional Money (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, credit).....
Yes its all shitcoin based, but thats not the point....the point is that complex systems grow as orthogonal layers. This is because there are distinct requirements and pain points that each layer is trying to solve which aren't shared by the neighboring layers.
We should expect Bitcoin ecosystem to grow in an analogous way.
Eventually, the traditional financial system will integrate Bitcoin, albeit unhappily, because it does not have a choice.
https://twiiit.com/bergealex4/status/2011767028823310817