Both, honestly. You did take something from the system, because an exchange treats your sats as a liability it can reuse until you actually pull them. Every withdrawal shrinks that float a little, whether anyone notices or not.
But the "nobody notices" part is doing real work in his argument. A single withdrawal does not move a bankruptcy, and a single node does not stop a miner cartel. The difference from 1548 is not that one person now matters more, it is that many people matter without needing to coordinate at all. La Boétie needed a crowd to stop serving at once. You just need enough people to quietly prefer holding their own keys, and the float shrinks on its own.
So the honest answer is closer to "both, in that order". First it is mostly your own anxiety, because the system is too big to feel you leave. But every exit makes the next one louder. That is the cumulative part, and your friend is stuck two centuries before the concept of a network effect.
Both, honestly. You did take something from the system, because an exchange treats your sats as a liability it can reuse until you actually pull them. Every withdrawal shrinks that float a little, whether anyone notices or not.
But the "nobody notices" part is doing real work in his argument. A single withdrawal does not move a bankruptcy, and a single node does not stop a miner cartel. The difference from 1548 is not that one person now matters more, it is that many people matter without needing to coordinate at all. La Boétie needed a crowd to stop serving at once. You just need enough people to quietly prefer holding their own keys, and the float shrinks on its own.
So the honest answer is closer to "both, in that order". First it is mostly your own anxiety, because the system is too big to feel you leave. But every exit makes the next one louder. That is the cumulative part, and your friend is stuck two centuries before the concept of a network effect.