When you buy bitcoin what you're really doing is paying to get limited signature rights to change data on a P2P network.
0 sats \ 3 replies \ @frostdragon 24 Aug 2022
What if someone just gives you bitcoin? Did someone bestow a right upon you?
Or what if you mine it? Did you work to earn a right?
This is how I think of it:
Everyone has a right to broadcast information to the network. That information is validated by the source code via the effort of the miners and the enforcement of the nodes.
You have a right to participate, because at its core, it’s all just information.
But not all information is legitimate.
Only information that can be traced back to proof of work is deemed legitimate in the context of bitcoin.
You have the right to work. You have a right to store the value of your work in bitcoin. You have a right to use that value for whatever you wish. You have the right to earn and spend bitcoin. That right is a basic human right, and it is not a right that you buy into.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @metalogician OP 24 Aug 2022
Sir, I'm talking about rights in the computer science sense. Like how you can access a folder on a network.
Your private keys give you rights to alter data. You cannot alter the data that I have the signing rights to (my bitcoin).
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @frostdragon 24 Aug 2022
If that’s the case, a clearer term might be “authorization”. “Right” is typically thought of in the legal sense.
You could say you’re only authorized to broadcast a valid transaction if you have bitcoin in your wallet. But even that’s a bit misleading - the network isn’t “authorizing users” so much as it is simply validating transactions.
Also, when you buy bitcoin, who is granting you this “authorization” to spend that bitcoin? Not the network, but the party you’re buying from.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @metalogician OP 24 Aug 2022
I don't think you understand what's being said, but that's okay. In computer science there are permissions and rights.
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