~ Rich Hickey

I was once at a software dev conference and there was a guy that did a talk about making your app faster. It was very entertaining. He proceeded to go through many examples of things you can do to your application to make it faster. My favorite by far was removing all your tests. He said, this will speed up your build times, pipelines, deployments, and development time. He was right. If you remove things like testing from an application it appears to make everything faster and easier. But, as with everything there are tradeoffs.

~ Thomas Sowell

Along the path of my bitcoin journey like many others I fell into the shitcoin trap. I heard the criticisms of bitcoin like it is too slow. Its slow at processing transactions. Its development has slowed. You can't get any changes into bitcoin. These criticisms made sense to me at the time. But there was something that bothered me. People that made these criticisms never talked about the tradeoffs. They never talked about why these decisions were made. They never talked about the threats to bitcoin. I mean really, they never even talked about WHY BITCOIN WAS NEEDED! That's the biggest one that still stands out to me today with shitcoiners.

So, is bitcoin slow? Slow as compared to what? Its not slow compared to fiat. Just as most people that are into crypto don't understand bitcoin these people don't understand fiat. They don't understand final settlement. Its just magic. As a software dev things that appear to be magic bother me. I wanna know how it works. I've done some work with fiat payment systems over the last 15 years and I can tell you that it isn't magic. It also isn't fast. There is a huge level of trust involved as well as risk. This is really what convinced me that everything but bitcoin is a huge waste of my time and energy. That's the best case scenario. Worst case they are just scams.

When I meet someone into crypto I try to ask them questions. I like to know why people think what they think and do what they do. I like to learn. I usually ask them what problem does this thing they bought solve. I try to feel them out on how they view the relationship of the state to the individual. Usually they don't have a good answer other than they want to get rich. Its pretty much just a stock. And most of the time they do not have a problem with the state. They don't like the team opposite to their team but they don't really understand the problems with fiat money and how it fuels the war machine. I will ask them why they don't hold bitcoin. They will say it is too slow. Its gonna be replaced by some newer and faster token. I always leave the conversation disappointed in their lack of curiosity, skepticism, and imagination. Sometimes, they also hold bitcoin though. And they seem to get that its limited supply is worth paying attention to. But usually that's the best I can hope for.

I still feel like I have a lot to learn about bitcoin and how it works on a technical level but I've learned enough to have more confidence in it that any other store of value or medium of exchange. Bitcoin is not slow. These people that think it is slow are comparing it to their inferior projects that have ripped out the most vital parts of bitcoin and replaced it with speed. Just like I could remove tests from my software projects and speed things up, that would create other problems. Problems I want to solve.