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10 sats \ 4 replies \ @Myshkin 14 Dec \ parent \ on: John Carvalho proposes BIP renaming sats as bitcoin bitcoin
I partially agree on what you said.
The idea whereby "who doesn't study profoundly bitcoin cannot be a true bitcoin user" is foolish at best. Do you understand profoundly how a car works? Do you understand so deeply chemistry to know how a specific drug is created in its details?
If you do know these things, still there are plenty of things you cannot understand. That's how constrained resources work and our attention is a constrained resource.
Bitcoin is a tool. I don't want to be an expert about something just to use proficiently the result of some experts' work. And this is how life goes about, believe it or not. Nobody is really going through the burdain of studing Mastering Bitcoin just to pay a coffee, so we need to make tools suitable for people to pay coffee even without being a technical user, which means also making the syntax suitable for their needs. Which, among other things, means also working a bit on the "marketing side" to make the bitcoin "brand" recognizable even at the fundamental unit level.
If we are so convinced that bitcoin is a tool for freedom and we believe it would be good for all humanity to adopt it, we cannot have the arrogance to say that the Crowd has the knowledge, time or resources to understand bitcoin. Realistically, 99.9999999% of people will not study it at the level of knowing that the protocol has no decimal places but only units.
Overall the proposal is not to "dumb things down for people"...John is not proposing a technical change, not proposing a consensus change, not even proposing to force anyone to adopt it.
The gist of the proposal is "Bitcoin has achieved some brand positioning with its bitcoin name, the protocol and the currency are easily recognizable basically by anyone now. Why can't we leverage that recognizability to name the basic unit after it?".
We go about crying that shitcoins get attention, but we don't want to work a bit on the Bitcoin branding to make it easier to grasp at the user level.
If we believe in the silly story that "you've to study at least 100 hours to be a true bitcoin user and I'm not going to create any compromise to make your life easier if you don't want to study it" then I don't know where we're headed.
A tool "for anyone" that is used only by 4 bastards is not "a tool for anyone" because nobody cares about it. Bitcoin shall became a tool "used by anyone", where users will have different levels of understanding of the topic. To make it "used by anyone" we need stupid-cuck-user-level communication. Which is also simplifying how we name stuff.
I think people can 'use' Bitcoin, for example pay for things with Lightning, without knowing how Lightning or Bitcoin works. And let's face it... lightning is complicated.
Having said that... people now and likely well into the future will purchase and 'use' sats almost exclusively. When people trade their fiat money (dollars or euros) for 'sound money' like Bitcoin the units they will encounter almost exclusively will be Sats.
If and when the exchange rate of Bitcoin is 1,000,000 dollars/btc (in 10 years or so?) will people still say 'oh I can't afford a whole Bitcoin?!' No! It will be 1 sat per cent and easy for folks to understand
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Everything is complicated when your truth is built on a flimsy platform. Certainly lightning is different. It's getting easier all the time. At the same time learning anything is as the French (? not sure of this source) saying goes: "Pain is the trade going into the apprentice."
There are thousands of people trying to make Bitcoin and Lightning easier to use. The trick is that understanding the fundamentals brings you closer to being one of those thousands. As with all technology, when things go well no one is crying and when things don't work everyone is mad. Sometimes it is a matter of asking for help. I am guilty of not asking for help so I get mad and then when I am really bent out of shape I let go and take a long walk.
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I really like lightning, use it everyday and honestly I think it's a marvel.
Is it perfect? Nope. But wow if you get a few good channels setup it's cheap and quick to transact real Bitcoin.
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Thank you for extensively responding and not trolling.
Do you understand profoundly how a car works?
Yes, and you should, too! Don't drive a car unless you know how to check the tires, lubrication, fuel, cooling system and what do if you have different driving scenarios like ice, snow, flooding, sand, mud, lane changes and all three basic information that you will need when the situation comes.
Chemistry and drugs are also something that we need to understand. How do these things make us sick. Knowing that you don't know is also important. This means that by ignoring the free accessible data you are ignorant!
Changing the name of something is not education it's changing what is already in use to bring in people who will want to change things further. Like GitHub changing the term master to main in order to make people not butt hurt.
In a manual transmission there is a master and slave cylinder. That's a fact. Changing the name doesn't change the function but it obscures the function and requires memory by rote and not investigation or understanding. The slave serves the master and the master serves the slave. Understand is to be underneath supporting the idea. You don't have to agree but you understand how it works.
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