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Yesterday the mempool cleared, an event I didn't believe I'd see again (discussion 1, discussion 2), given the current moment: ordinals, Trump, 100k, all of it. This hit right as I was digging into some big-picture questions about what could make btc an enduring money-like-thing in the long-term. It's easy to get lost in the current moment, forget that the game is way longer than you think. (And also shorter, but that's a different topic.)
One of the SN "similar post" suggestions was this one. I missed it at the time, but it seems exactly right: if btc is going to survive at all, and do what it can potentially do in the world, we are vastly, stupidly early. 16 years later, people all over the entire earth aren't even using the fucking chain intensely enough to fill up blocks at 1 sat/vb, even after the year we've had. And some number of SN people have not set up non-custodial LN wallets, even after all the sound and fury leading up to it. The principal use case, at scale, seems to be to hold paper bitcoin, and do nothing with it.
That's either a deeply optimistic thought, or a deeply pessimistic one.
I'm always surprised when I see people posting those adoption curve memes and putting us past the earliest stage. No one I know in real life is even remotely close to adoption (in the sense we tend to mean it).
Consider that there are only hundreds of regulars on SN and this is considered by many to be the best way to earn sats.
That bitcoin is having any impact at all, at this stage, is crazy optimistic.
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I wonder if part of the problem is that really "early-ness" is a vector and not a scalar. Like, in some ways we are clearly not early.
Component 1: Trump talks about bitcoin in public and is doing stuff related to crypto. It is a macro-geopolitical conversation, it's not neckbeards hacking Lisp and talking about homoiconicity. From this perspective, btc is super late.
Component 2: But, as you say: I know vanishingly close to zero people who have ever made a btc transaction that was not just putting a buy order in Coinbase. From this perspective, btc is super early.
A question I have is if the magnitude of the vector will ever approach what it could be if it had non-trivial magnitude in its components. Can we ever get beyond "early" in component 2, really? Can component 1 maintain its magnitude if component 2 stalls out here?
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Can we ever get beyond "early" in component 2, really? Can component 1 maintain its magnitude if component 2 stalls out here?
I think so and no.
Imagine how much more open to accepting bitcoin in commerce someone would be who already owns some investment bitcoin (especially when NGU).
It's the Jonathan Haidt persuasion thing: people are like elephants (emotions) with riders (reason). If we can get more of the elephants leaning our way, it'll be easier for the riders to steer that direction.
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287 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 2h
My hope/fear is that bitcoin is easy to gain exposure to, being this abstract financial thing, but slower to adopt as MoE because it's so deflationary right now. It feels like the deflationary boogy man keynesians are said to be afraid of playing out.
My other fear is that bitcoin's culture is relatively anti-builder, e.g. none of the major influencers are builders and the few that are are more of CEO/talkers/dealmakers that don't talk about building much at all, and consequently bitcoin has very poor utility.
Also, unlike SV, the people allocating venture capital in bitcoin aren't former founders or early startup employees, they are largely private equity and finance people. Perhaps this is what VC looks like when built on a deflationary asset. Bitcoin's elites are all holders from a generation ago or big fiat winners that've parked their wealth in bitcoin recently. SV's elites made fundamental stuff a generation ago that we all use.
This is probably just all earliness. I hope our world is only full of dinosaurs for the moment and we're a few genetic mutations and astroid impacts away from getting the real party started.
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My current half-assed theory of history is that it will take a bunch of boom / bust cycles before MoE is even remotely possible, mostly for the reasons you said: if price keeps generally creeping up on shortish timescales, it's just a vehicle for speculation, and people are incentivized against using it as money, even aside from any tax or regulatory frictions.
Eventually someone will yell "hey nobody is actually using this for anything" and make a convincing case about how it makes no sense to have a store of value that you can't, like, exchange -- a value grounded only in fiat -- and for whatever reason conditions will be just right for that message to take hold and to unwind the narrative. The price will collapse, and we'll be in a winter for a while, a longer one this time, perhaps exacerbated by the utter lack of a fee market and eviscerated mining incentives given price dump + block reward evaporation.
Ironically, the price hemorrhaging will disperse btc more broadly than it had been dispersed thus far. The restrictions vs most kinds of building will be lifted because hardly anybody will care anymore. People might actually start to use btc at something like scale. Maybe nostr will take off. Then the whole thing will start over.
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I still don’t understand private equity
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9 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 1h
They’re like house flippers but do it with businesses. That’s the closest thing I can think of. Not a coincidence that PE also thrived hard under ZIRP.
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That’s a very good analogy
They buy a business with zero interest financing
Then make renovations
Then sell within 5 years for 5x
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Buying a house with 20 percent collateral is a leveraged buyout
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The idea that the legacy fiat powers would just sit by and allow Bitcoin to invade and takeover their hegemony is common but misguided. Faced with an asymmetric new competitor standard practice for existing monopolies and cartels is to capture and control them. This is what the bankers have done to Bitcoin...and nobody even realises.
With a cunning combination of tax obligations arbitrarily imposed upon anyone using Bitcoin as a MoE and the threat of withdrawal of fiat banking access to any business daring to accept Bitcoin use of Bitcoin as a P2P payments protocol has been obstructed with huge success.
Extensive FUD against Bitcoin has also contributed and the master stroke is allowing it as a speculative commodity which has enabled bankers to profit by providing ETFs.
The rapid accumulation of Bitcoin into US domiciled institutional custody is significant. Within a few years they will at current rates hold most Bitcoin ever issued. That results in capture and control of most Bitcoin in a form that inherently prevents its use as a P2P payment protocol. It also inflates the price, blinding with greed, the majority of Bitcoiners, to what is happening.
Without most people, even Bitcoiners, realising the bankers have captured and controlled Bitcoin- rendering it a harmless and easily manipulated speculative commodity...soon to be mostly held by US institutional custodians.
Bitcoin no longer poses any real threat to the fiat debt slavery bankers cartel and their key market advantage- hegemony over MoE/payments.
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I'm not 100% clear on whether you think the price will survive this centralization and capture. If so, you seem to be saying that, contra this comment, price can be high while actual P2P use is negligible. Yes?
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36 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 3h
Many people won't arrive until they have no other option. That will be the suddenly phase.
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36 sats \ 0 replies \ @Aardvark 4h
It feels like we're pretty early. I feel like this election cycle it's getting a lot more traction with people I know, but they're all still skeptical.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 3h
Because people are retarded and don't want to fuck fiat and make it obsolete. They even go back and put fiat over LN (tether). And that is not even all, they even sustain that putting fiat on bitcoin it will help bitcoin adoption...
People are really retarded.
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People are lazy and easily led away from freedom and into capture and control. They are easily farmed ~ and fiat is farming people.
The fiat debt slavery bankers cartel has been managing your government for decades if not centuries - they own the narrative and the lawmakers and they know how to lead the proles and continue their hegemony while giving a shallow illusion of freedom and democracy.
You thought Bitcoin could free you... Its now just another commodity plaything in the custody and control of the bankers.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fiatbad 3h
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