I've been doing more reading lately about the topic of "digital preservation" and one topic that comes up is how in any long running digital system, there is not point of "having preserved digital content", instead it's an endless task of "continuing to preserve" digital artifacts.
In the same way, I don't think you can say Bitcoin will ever "be a success". Rather, I'd say that it's "currently successful".
How can we ensure bitcoin's continued success?
Not to shill Base58 but to totally shill, I really think that if we're not taking the time to build good information about how bitcoin works, the protocols that it's built on, and making them really easy to access and find information about how the protocol works, we risk atrophying as an ecosystem over the next 10, 20, 50 years. It's important to me that people are able to really understand bitcoin, because without that understanding you lose some capacity to stay self-sovereign and decentralized.
I think all the work every bitcoin educator is doing of teaching people how to hold their own coins, how to run a node, how to look at mempool.space and understand what they're seeing -- this is all really important for bitcoin's continued success. :)
thought it'd be fun to outline why i think bitcoin is successful:
  • I can use it to transact with people and vendors anywhere in the world
  • I sell people things using bitcoin
  • At conferences, I can buy a coffee with bitcoin on lightning and it works
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I will like to wean my dependence off fiat and live the Bitcoin Standard. But bills and retirement funds are paid in fiat. How would you advise me to break the shackles of this fiat system?
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there is not point of "having preserved digital content", instead it's an endless task of "continuing to preserve" digital artifacts.
I'm reading this as "there's no point, but let's do it forever." I suspect it means digital artifacts need to be regularly re-preserved. Is that right?
One sadness programming brings me is that programs tend to "decay" because the environment they run in grows/changes so fast. Decay is relative in this way.
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there's no moment when you can declare "success" and consider the job done.
digital preservation is an ongoing, eternal process. I think that keeping bitcoin successful is similar, it's something that's worked on every day etc.
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Makes perfect sense.
Do you have any recommended reading on digital preservation?