Can Bitcoin succeed without widespread adoption? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

This post was inspired by the thread A Cypherpunk Disagreement That Lives On, specifically the question of the relationship between a libertarian society and individual freedom.

I tend to believe freedom tech is only freedom tech when it can be used unilaterally, without anyone's permission. You can't free yourself from your oppressor if the freeing requires their permission; if they were happy to give you such permission they wouldn't have enslaved you to begin with. As Larken Rose put it "Perhaps the most valuable thing the "Great American Experiment" accomplished was to demonstrate that "limited government" is impossible. There cannot be a master who answers to his slaves."

However, the term "unilaterally" is nuanced, because life benefits from cooperation and community. Networks rely on the network effect, and the economy is one of the most important networks. That's one of the lessons of Austrian economics: peaceful cooperation (trade) increases specialization and productivity. Agorists emphasize community building, because gray and black markets are illiquid and inefficient with few people using them. The more people want to be free, the easier it is for you to be free as an individual. Therefore, people's lack of a desire to be free can be seen as a negative externality for the freedom seekers.

I can't use encryption in communication with others or benefit from mesh networks if I'm the only one using the tech. Bitcoin, being money, requires a network of people using it - for its monetary value, but also as a technology (nodes, miners, devs).

I don't know what the current Bitcoin adoption is (however we define it), but let's say it's 1%.

And let's say our society is, for the most part, not interested in freedom money and Bitcoin adoption stays at 1% for a long time. Can Bitcoin still succeed? 'Success' meaning benefiting those individuals who choose to benefit from it, which may include its use as a SoV or a censorship-resistant MoE.

Some random thoughts:

Even at the current adoption rate, bitcoin is already liquid enough for the needs of most individuals.
Fine art has a very low adoption rate as a SoV and is less liquid, but despite that it has worked for centuries as a SoV.
Monero is much more niche, fewer have heard of it than of Bitcoin, and yet it has worked so far as the MoE it was intended to be.

You could say it's not successful as a MoE if you can't pay with sats for your coffee, but then, do many people care for paying for coffee in a censorship-resistant way? As long as the government doesn't ban coffee that is, or get much more eager to freeze people's bank accounts - in which case adoption may increase accordingly, making it a self-balancing system.

I could fantasize about how much freer I'd be if the masses chose bitcoin over fiat, but it's their choice to make. Bitcoin is not benefiting me as much as it could in an ideal scenario, but it's benefiting me as much as the externalities of other people's choices allow. And they're not going to adopt it as a solution to a problem they don't think they have.

If it's currently under-adopted, it's also undervalued, and that just means I'll be rewarded more with NGU as well as the technical know-how if / when government coercion or inflation increases, mitigating the current negative externalities of low adoption. It's a hedge against state aggression. If that's low then I'm relatively free (and freer than most) and if it goes up I'll be ahead of the game too thanks to the cheap sats I stacked when few wanted them. Isn't that a success already?

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 56m

Great post.

This passage reminds me of when I discovered PGP in a very early message board. I was very excited about the encrypted email potential until I discovered that not a single one of my clients could be bothered to take the few extra steps needed for privacy.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 2h

I see bitcoin as already being very successful. It's provided an outside option for everyone in the world.

Even if adoption stays low, knowledge of its existence has positive effects. Other financial institutions will have to improve, at risk of losing customers to bitcoin.

Also, merchant adoption will grow, even if they don't become real bitcoiners. If one percent of potential customers will go to a competitor who does accept bitcoin, then they'll start accepting it.

We're so early, the game theory has only just begun to play out.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 2h

Isn't that a success already?

Problem is we don't know how good of a "hedge against state agression" it is. We kind of have to wait and see what happens when/if a state really attacks it.

in which case adoption may increase accordingly, making it a self-balancing system.

This is the hope. Increased threats from state (financial controls, gov't money debasement) will hopefully lead to increased adoption. But we don't know at what level of state aggression a person's threshold for adopting bitcoin is.

The more people want to be free, the easier it is for you to be free as an individual.

You are spot on with this and I think it is true of bitcoin specifically, as well. So it makes sense for anyone interested in it to try to make bitcoin easier to use and understand so that the level of state aggression at which it becomes an attractive alternative is as low as possible.

Whether we think it has succeeded or not, it makes sense for anyone who wants censorship resistant money to continue to put effort into increasing bitcoin adoption. Because with more adoption, we get better censorship resistance.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SatoshiNakanodo 2h

For me it is succeeding, and so, yes.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 2h

Bitcoin's success is in the eye of the beholder, much to the dismay of many there's no consensus as to what Bitcoin is or what its goals are. Those are personal projection and nothing more, what you're really asking yourself is, "am I being realistic?"

For example, your entire framing can be undone with one different assumption. Assume a faction within government created it, what does that mean for it's success and the implied role in the world for it?

The definition of adoption is another assumption altogether, as it's mere existence has impacts beyond its immediate users. Do nuclear weapons prevent war if they're never used?