0 sats \ 7 replies \ @Scoresby OP 12 Oct 2022 \ parent \ on: What kind of insane culture embraces toxicity? bitcoin
How do you measure permissionless-ness?
It's not measurable since it's binary - either anyone can participate or not.
What you probably mean is not the Bitcoin-world itself but the access to that world. That can be tricky to measure and I have no answer to that question. If you have access to physical fiat cash and can exchange it for Bitcoin on a Bitcoiner-meetup or via cash by mail ... than your access is pretty good.
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I mean the Bitcoin-world itself.
If someone can stop you from making a valid transaction, it is not permissionless.
Another way to say it is presence of censorship means its not permissionless.
Therefore, goal of censorship resistance is key, it's how you get permissionless-ness.
If you use permissionless only to refer to onramp into system, it's not relevant to this convo.
Permissionless also must mean you can get any valid transaction included in a block.
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If someone can stop you from making a valid transaction, it is not permissionless.
You're confusing permissionlessness with censorship resistance again.
Being permissionless means that anyone could make a new asymmetric key pair and as soon as they found somebody that is willing to transfer money to that address without anybody else knowing he can make a transaction. No kyc, no asking permission, no nothing.
Every miner processes their transactions by default - because it is in their own self interest to do so (incentivization). But it is their fcking right to mine whatever the fck they want - it's just not in their own self interest.
That's being permissionless. It's more natural, more meta and better that "censorship resistance". It's like on a medival market place.
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I think where we disagree is that I don't believe the code/protocol is innately permissionless. It requires people using it in a certain way to achieve that. This is why I think censorship resistance is a more fruitful name for what we want to focus on. I disagree with the idea that Bitcoin is inevitable.
If we get to a place where only companies run nodes or where most BTC is held by third party custodians or where mining is more centralized among large publicly-traded companies, I don't think it's given that Bitcoin continues to be useful.
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Okay, let me put it in other words:
Censorship resistance also means that you have to force somebody to process everything - no matter if they want or not. Bitcoin is better - in Bitcoin you can do whatever you want - you could censor random people, you could play with 42 million Bitcoins instead of 21 million Bitcoins, you could encode blocks different, whatever. It would just be dumb and against your own self interest since nobody would play by your rules or you'd loose opportunity cost.
The Bitcoin protocol incentivizes to play permissionless via a hard, decentralized money instead of enforcing it . Incentivization is better than forcing people to do something.
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Okay, first of all: you said that very well. Thank you. I agree, and I like how you think about it.
But in this permissionless world, where anyone can do whatever they want (and this truly is one of the most beautiful things about Bitcoin), it is possible that a large group of people could work against their own incentives to achieve some external goal (eg. governments don't like a world with permissionless money).
Bitcoin should not have rules against this, but Bitcoiners could have traditions or a culture that lessens the damage such an actor could cause, because they could cause damage, no?
“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
(honestly, I wrote all the above, and I was thinking, but if a thing can't survive by the strength of its incentives alone, can it survive at all? Because I think I'm implying that Bitcoin need or is somehow better if there is an external culture that supports it. Thoughts on this?)
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ask yourself, in a permissoned world, who enforces the policies? they are the ones who give permissions. That's the problem with enforcing rules, you need a ruler. The ruler will sooner or later be corrupted. IMO it is better to work with incentives and disincentives.
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