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191 sats \ 9 replies \ @Fabs 1 May \ parent \ on: Bitcoin paradigm shift thought experiment bitcoin
I'm simply not a fan of the average human being, which has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
In regards to Bitcoin, I'm convinced of it on a personal level, and want to escape the coming financial shit show produced by the powers that be.
Maybe it'll be adopted en masse once the banks of the average Joe also hold bitcoin, or maybe it'll be a fringe-currency / escape hatch forever, who knows.
We're fifteen years in and the overwhelming majority still thinks it's a scam, if that ain't telling you something about the average Joe, then what?
I'm simply not a fan of the average human being, which has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
In my experience people are both better and worse than are commonly believed. Sometimes I'm blown away by what humanity is capable of, and sometimes I feel like if we were all wiped out it would be broadly good for the larger universe in every way that really matters.
Those two views are hard to hold in your head without going mad, admittedly.
We're fifteen years in and the overwhelming majority still thinks it's a scam, if that ain't telling you something about the average Joe, then what?
Here's how I think of it: btc is such a giant mindfuck on so many levels. The amount of foreign ideas that upend other things is staggering. It's cliche to say that you can think about it and read about it for years and still not be close to exhausting it, but that's been true for me. Seven-ish years of reading and thinking and it's still really weird. This thread in one of the book club discussions elaborates on this. This one also seems relevant.
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I'm in that first thread! Either SN forgot that I zapped a bunch of those comments or I forgot to zap them.
Fifteen years is basically no time at all for a revolutionary technology to take hold. For instance, the steam engine was invented in the early 1700's and it took almost a hundred years for it to be adopted at a transformative scale.
People are fairly comfortable, so it's not reasonable to expect them to upturn their apple carts.
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My sense is that the two are related. I'm a very skeptical person, and the amount of learning I had to do before any of this seemed not completely idiotic was astounding. If it takes, say, ten hours of labor before that happens, then it's not surprising at all that most people's opinions are what they are. If it takes more than ten (which it did for me) then even more so.
That's such an ingrained human tendency that I don't fault you for disliking people over it. I've certainly complained about it in other contexts.
For the most part, we aren't reasoning creatures. We're rationalizing creatures. We recognize that a view might be socially acceptable and we adopt a rationalization for believing it.
For instance, the steam engine was invented in the early 1700's and it took almost a hundred years for it to be adopted at a transformative scale.
Yes. And think how obvious the benefits of the steam engine were, vs btc, solving a problem that many people in the West don't even think they have, whose most vocal advocates are, to most people, insane, using paradigms that make no intuitive sense.
I'm astounding that things are as advanced as they are, honestly.
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