249 sats \ 5 replies \ @siggy47 3 Dec 2023 \ on: What's really scarce in btc? bitcoin
I'm having trouble understanding the distinction between network effect and your collective commitment term. Maybe I'm not understanding collective commitment. For example, the bch example could be interpreted as purely network effect. I'm not saying that's all it was, but keeping that "bitcoin" name meant a lot.
The intended distinction is that network effects are a function of a bunch of things, so if you want to dig into network effects, you want to look at the inputs that ultimately give rise to them.
The point is not to nitpick or introduce useless terms, but to talk about what it is that's valuable and scarce -- it's not simply that there's a line of code that checks to see if emission is within compliance, that is not why there will only be 21m btc. Or rather, it is that, but without a bunch of other stuff, that one line of code is useless. It's a smokescreen.
For a while, bch had a lot of hashpower, a lot of miners, a bunch of devs, fiat inflows from investors, shills, etc. But they didn't have the ineffable fabric tying all of it together, it didn't have the narrative cohesion. The commitment of the various participants in the ecosystem was small and did not hold together. Entropy quickly took over, and now it's dead.
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Okay, sticking with the bch example, I believe whichever side won would have had that argument. But for the UASF and really dumb tactical errors on the big block side, bitcoin would have big blocks. Gavin Andreson was as OG a bitcoin guy as you can get, but he picked the wrong horse. Was he a part of the collective commitment? You can just say no, but the winners get to write the history.
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I agree that it was a closer thing than the modern narrative suggests -- as you say, the winners have formed the story in a way favorable to themselves -- and it could easily have gone the other way. (It's a fun exercise to steelman the big block position, there are compelling arguments to be made there.)
I'd say that, in the early days of btc, there was a giant and (it later became clear) somewhat nebulous commitment as to what btc really was, at its most fundamental essence. Satoshi himself was unclear about this in the way he talked about it at first, which should be no surprise, since the essence of the system was revealing itself in the environment in which it found itself, and these things can't be foreseen in systems of non-trivial complexity. In the course of the blocksize war, the different commitments were crystallized, and in the end one held together better. In parlance bitcoiners seem to like, the commitment that held together became a Schelling point.
But many participants would have been happier with either, I'm under no illusion about that.
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Yes. That's a good way of looking at it- Bitcoin's commitment was crystalized, and had essentially evolved. This line of thinking supports the idea that asking about a particular current controversy "what would Satoshi think" is irrelevant.
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100%. It's also interesting to think of the power of Satoshi (or really, any prominent figure) in terms of coelescing these kinds of commitments; and how that changes with time, and the nature of the enterprise.
I expect that if Satoshi had returned six years ago (or whatever) like Gandalf the White, his opinion on the blocksize war would have had great impact. I suspect that if he returned, now, with a hot take on Ordinals, that it wouldn't matter much.
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