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in a free society people barter goods for services, goods for goods and vice versa. a dentist gets half a cow for his service, a carpenter gets five chicken for his work. what if the dentist has already enough meat in his freezer and no meat fits in? the carpenter has no space for the additional chicken. he needs to find someone to barter the chicken with. these problems created money. a neutral exchange of funds, no matter what a business partner has to offer.
every single money in history became corrupt and finally ended. the usd, eur and many other currencies will end in the same way as the argentine peso and the venezuelan bolivar: as worthless toilet paper.
what money will the world use? new created money? based on what?
bitcoin was designed as P2P money by satoshi nakamoto, as a means of exchange for goods and services between people without middlemen and without third parties. he crated bitcoin in the massive bank fraud of 2009 when the world economy came to a standstill.
today bitcoin is not used as money. it was hijacked by politicians who want to extort a certain value of it, whenever it is used. it cannot be used as money because it can be tracked and traced. it has no privacy (as written in the whitepaper of satoshi nakamoto). some voices who own a lot of bitcoin call for bitcoin as a store of value in order not to anger banks and central banks and in order to show them that bitcoin can coexit with them.
bitcoin was created to replace the banks and above all the central banks. it must be the primary goal of everyone who owns bitcoin to replace banks and central banks.
in order to replace banks and central banks, bitcoin must be used as money. in order to be used as money, bitcoin must have privacy like fiat cash.
the current narrative of a store of value does not work. bitcoin has lost (net)value in the last three years. all hopes for the halving, for the bitcoin etfs got destroyed. bitcoin does not perform.
bitcoin is proof of work. it does not matter how many bitcoin anyone has, the influence is not greater than someone with much less bitcoin. the community has the power, not single bitcoin rich characters. this is the case for proof-of-stake networks: the richest people win.
therefore we should all strive for a change . we need to make bitcoin great again we need to make bitcoin money again. it was money, you could pay for almost everything with bitcoin. those days are over. almost no company accepts bitcoin any more.
we need to push for privacy and for fungibility.
what do you think?
I 100% agree with you. I think the best place to start is with merchant adoption at your favorite bars or the farmer's market. The way the current narrative has been shaping around bitcoin is store of value vs medium of exchange. It is important to support projects and wallets that are looking to enhance this, not riding the number-go-up train that everyone on x and youtube have been cheering for. Every week I try to educate a few people and get one vendor to accept. It definitely isn't an easy process!
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You're right. Merchant adoption is very crucial in the whole process.
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L1 Bitcoin is not very usable for payments, esp. in high fee times, however on Lightning it's very usable, fast and comfy. Why not convince more people to use lightning network for payments and on-chain for saving?
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The legacy custodians of the fiat debt based monetary system have slyly engineered things to make it very unlikely most people will ever use Bitcoin as a MoE. Why? Because Fiats monopoly position over MoE is the basis of its power. Look at how SWIFT works. Look at how any monopoly/cartel works.
The classical response of a monopoly or cartel to an innovative asymmetric new competitor is either obstruction or capture and control or a combination of both... With Bitcoin they have made sure that MoE use of Bitcoin is obstructed and to some extent captured and controlled.
How? In nearly all jurisdictions the use of Bitcoin as a MoE creates a tax reporting nightmare that very few people would ever want to impose upon themselves. So most people who do stack Sats do so as a speculative commodity SoV investment. So Satoshis original intention of creating a revolutionary decentralised P2P payments protocol alternative to the fiat MoE monopoly has largely, subtly been diverted. In addition to the near universal KYC mass data surveillance of Bitcoin ownership has been achieved by only allowing a small number of CEXes banking access and thereby preventing substantial growth of KYC free DEXes.
The ETFs further subtly entrench this narrative of Bitcoin being a speculative SoV commodity rather than a MoE. The legacy fiat debt slavery power brokers - bankers and governments - are well on their way to capturing and controlling the protocol...they have certainly successfully and slyly managed it away from its original revolutionary purpose.
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I’m just sad that Jack Dorsey has not switched on the ‘pay with bitcoin’ function directly into the Square terminal yet. They have significant merchant adoption.
The biz owner doesn’t have to do anything as they can just convert the sats straight to $. And then of course there can be an option for the biz owner to stack the sats if they are sensible. They could also incentive the biz owners with lower merchant fees.
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I 100% agree. I'm not sure if he's/they're waiting for lightning to further mature... or if it's a regulatory and compliance question that they're waiting to solve and address first...
But yes the Square payment terminals accepting lightning with a big QR code. The big QR code is just right... there. I just keeping waiting for the opportunity to scan one with a Zeus app, load the invoice and tap 'pay' lol. Then we'll really be getting somewhere.
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bitcoin is beautiful. astounding how it works and everyone who has used it will agree. https://bits.monospace.live/. bitcoin is fascinating. you can study it for years and you will still not know everything about it
i cannot say the same about lightning. it certainly has a value for discussion boards like stacker or nostr but it will never be mainstream with all its limitations and complications.
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With all due respect I hope you're wrong. I really like lightning
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 21 Aug
I hear this argument a lot from crypto people who like to ignore lightning. When lightning works it is cheap, instant and private (enough). IDK, cause that sounds like cash to me.
Maybe it could be better with better ways to pathfinding, having more liquidity and more decentralized.
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Started running my LND node a little while back. Coinjoined a utxo, sent it 'to the lightning node' then used it to open a channel with an exchange, I think all over TOR (which it defaults to).
Have used it to send and receive to stacker news, and even bought a small bitrefill gift card a little while back just as a proof of concept - it worked! Then connected it to Zeus to use remotely on the iphone
Honestly it has been very impressive and easy to set up and I am not a technical user (for example programmer) at all
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money has many definitions and meanings. many many books have been written about money. yet, people are still struggling to explain what it is!
if we insist on describing bitcoin as money, and we cannot accurately convey what is money, that's going to be a slow and painful orange-pilling journey. yes, it's helpful to call it money, because so many people want "money," even though they cannot describe what it is they want (and what do they really want out of life!)
bitcoin is written precisely in code, no less no more, no caveats - there are occasional forks and updates, and they are all precisely written in the public repository of open source software. commands, 1's and 0's.
1 bitcoin = 1 bitcoin bitcoin is bitcoin money is a psyop designed to confuse.
i like breedlove's definition: attention allocation technology. if bitcoin is money, one would translate "i want money" as "i want to allocate my attention using bitcoin technology." everything that's not bitcoin is worth less attention.
don't try to make bitcoin into money or anything (you can't - it's gonna be whatever it is, and that's enough) - simply use bitcoin and figure out what it's good for. there are many creative use cases beside capital and currency, like communication and authentication. i can't wait to discover more use cases. it is deceiving to tell people that bitcoin's #1 function forever is and always will be money.
i have a dream, that one day the concept of money will become obsolete and we will simply use bitcoin.
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That's really beautifully put, awesome.
If I may... I would like to vent a little as many folks, particularly on twitter and even on Youtube, really aren't "using" bitcoin at all. I would even suggest that 'using' Bitcoin, like sending and receiving sats and sharing ideas here on SN is relatively uncommon.
Instead some people keep their sats on 'exchanges' and so they really aren't 'their' sats and they really aren't using bitcoin. Maybe tangentially as the bitcoin 'held for them' protects their purchasing power... however Bitcoin ultimately is money and is capital and is designed to flow and to facilitate life. Here on SN 'the sats flow' to facilitate communication and the sharing of ideas and that's 'using' bitcoin. Buying bitcoin on coinbase/another exchange and having it sit their for an extended period... probably isn't using it to the same degree. Your keys your coins and all that.
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thank you stacker.news is a nice community and an influentional one in bitcoin
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in switzerland you can buy a ferrari with bitcoin. i am not saying that i am interested in ferrari or any other cars. i like to ride bikes.
we need to make it work worldwide whatever it takes whatever changes are necessary we can do it as a community no one is more powerful that the bitcoin community
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For me at least. I don't plan on using Bitcoin for trivial things like coffee or burgers.
I plan on using it for life changing things: surgery, illness or retirement.
Why spend a hard asset instead of the toilet paper known as fiat ?
You can't force people into MoE when world economy is collapsing left and right. That on itself is fiat AF.
IMHO I believe Bitcoin is the tool to preserve the little wealth that we can. It is a save and flee technology.