Agree totally with all those points. I can't even parse the Ulbricht discussion anymore. If the dude put a hit on someone else then he should be in jail, and I don't find that to be morally ambiguous stance. If he was just making a marketplace for people to sell weed, that's another affair. The bitcoin narrative is that he's a saint, and the mainstream narrative is that he's a villain, and I don't trust either of those sources and have no time to DMOR and untangle truth from fantasy.

But yeah, the original monetization stage is so fascinating for what it means for society. That's the source of my love affair in this space. What does all this mean? There's the "bitcoin fixes this" response, in which we enter into a new utopia, but that's not satisfying to me at all, nor plausible. But I do think, on the 50 year timescale, it means society will change foundationally.

Would dearly love to see someone dig into that, hard. The Ulbricht saga would be a lens on it for sure.