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@kepford
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 24m \ parent \ on: Coffeezilla critiques Bitcoin 2025 conference bitcoin
So what should be done? How do we fight this? Does bitcoin shake this off?
Let me ask you a question. If you are really disappointed by all the chearl-eading for the suits and government shills entering the bitcoin space how exactly did you think bitcoin becoming used more widely would go?
- Did you think people would suddenly start valuing hard money?
- Did you think people would just stop believing in political power systems?
- Did you think suits would suddenly care about sovereignty?
- Did you expect greed to lose to moral purity?
I'm not trying to pick any fights. I just never hear many principled bitcoiners outline how they think bitcoin becomes the standard money for the world.
There's a lot of "bitcoin fixes this" but little on what the middle stages look like.
My answer is I have no clue. But I can tell you I don't see people suddenly becoming skeptical of the existing system and open to bitcoin. Greed and the utility of it as a savings vehicle seems far more likely for the US. Those in more oppressed places likely value the peer to peer aspects of it more.
Interesting... I am not sure I share the article's seeming concern about this affecting Strategy negatively. That is, if they aren't lying. I also don't trust Arkham Intelligence very much. Its just interesting.
Honestly, it would be pretty difficult to hide that much bitcoin being bought by a public company.
What changes to bitcoin have these people made? I don't see any honestly. It's in people's heads. I mean that is important but isn't really something code can influence.
I agree with you one the delusion of the term bitcoiner. But when you think it through no one was a gold bug when it was dominant. As bitcoin grows in use it will be used by people that have no interest in other than utility. As I see it that is the only way it beats fiat. On utility.
Thanks for sharing your notes and thoughts. Its appreciated. Here are some of mine in response for what its worth. Probably not much :)
Neha doubts that lightning is able to scale to a billion users because it’s difficult to fund channels as a brand new user and remain online if your use case is small payments.
I don't think lightning scales to billions either but I can't prove that. More importantly I don't think it needs to. It just needs to be able to support those that value sovereignty over convenience. I think most people will be perfectly fine using custodians. They do today and most people are more afraid of themselves than a third party with a decent rep. Also, we are talking about day to day spending not your egg. Most people don't carry their life savings around in the pocket. Even cards have limits. Debit cards are connected to checking accounts that are usually not massive.
For now I think lightning will meet our needs as we grow. The promising tech that while it is custodial protect privacy is eCash. I think this helps with small payments a ton. It is mile better than Strike or CashApp at least.
we can’t ignore the numbers of people using stablecoins.
I agree. I don't think stable coins are good just as I don't think fiat is good. I do use fiat though...
My opinion on stable coins on lightning is... I don't care. Same as my opinion on JPEGs on bitcoin. I don't care.
lightning is becoming corporate and this is a good thing.
That's interesting. Its different but the same man. I remember being involved in the early days with a technology community. When it started the conferences were very campy and organic. As the project grew in usage and popularity like the Internet it became more corporate. This is what I am seeing people say about the bitcoin conf. I think its just a part of the natural evolution of things. I don't like suits. I don't like corporate stuff but I'm pro freedom so if people like that I'm ok with it. Its just not for me. I doubt I'll ever go to the Bitcoin Conference. Not my kind of event.
Did you try pipelines, either between generic LLMs, retrained "experts", or even with NLP like spaCy? My "hobby" is making AI reason with AI and see who convinces who - I'll publish a demo today or tomorrow.
I haven't.
I think we are in very tight alignment. I don't think machines can be sentient, at least I've seen zero evidence that this is possible. What seems to be the case when people disagree on this is their definitions. People are the threat as you say. Same is true of most tech.
I'm a firm believer in history being a great tool to understand what will happen in the future. It does repeat but it rhymes.
The other thing that you likely get but I find a ton of people do not seem to get is this. Sam Altman and those like him are incentivized to over sell their stuff. He's a pitchman. That doesn't mean everything he says is a lie but most people that fear AI seem to just take this for granted.
The fact that we have a family and I work from how is a large factor. Being able to cook though.. is a skill everyone should learn for their own well being. It kinda blows my mind when I see people that almost treat it with disdain. Like it is beneath them or something.
Between my wife and I almost all meals. We do eat out on weekends maybe once or twice max on average. Why do you ask?
Do you feel like you have a good grasp on how LLM's work? If not I'd highly recommend you check out this video. Its not magic and I think its not going to happen as quickly as many think but yes plenty of jobs will be obsoleted. This has happened in the past and the transition periods are rough.
I agree with you about open source software (AI included). I actually think the Chinese are probably gonna break the closed source stuff wide open. We started to see this with DeepSeek. Not for any morally good reason but because they do not believe in IP. I don't either.
Widespread unemployment leads to increased crime and violence. Its a pretty bleak future if that happens. That said, I don't think advanced tech that obsoletes jobs is a bad thing in principle. I believe humans will find things to do as we have in the past.
Personally I have been getting my head around LLMs for a while now and the more I learn the less magical they seem. The biggest question I have for them now is how soon can they actually become sustainable. They are losing money like crazy currently and if the fiat money / debt / venture capital dries up we have another dot.com level crash on our hands. That would be my bet to happen before there is any AI revolution that leads to widespread job loses.
LLMs have improved a lot since I first tried them out but they still have a long way to go. You need experts that actually know things because they just make stuff up. They are remarkably good at guessing and get things correct a lot but they can't be trusted. The thing is, neither can humans. This is why you need to have multiple humans to really do work that is bullet proof.
I'll end with this. Be proactive but don't take the black pill. Its seductive as it allows one to just pretend that you don't have agency and you can just be lazy because working doesn't matter. Work still matters and we have so much more control over our destiny than we realize.
@SimpleStacker, thanks for posting this. I'm burned out on this take. He's not wrong but I guess I've been reading/hearing it a lot lately. Kinda done with it.
My TLDR is there are two types of bitcoiners. The vanguard that value sovereignty and those that simply want to pump their bags. I'm hoping my bags grow but that's not what gets me excited about bitcoin. The downstream effects are what get me excited. Bitcoin is not gonna make everyone a libertarian or anarchists. Or even a "conservative". As the tent grows the meaning of a "bitcoiner" really dies. Its probably already dead.
But we, those that get the why behind it all should keep using the tools, staking sats, and explaining it to those that have "ears to hear". The rest... well they have to find their own way.
He's hardly alone in "flagging" this. Honestly. I'm kinda tired of hearing about this.
But... he's not wrong. The point is that its bitcoiners that are doing this stuff. Not bitcoin. Its not that different from gold-bugs wanting the state to back its fiat with gold. If a president was talking about this they'd be equally as pumped about it. I know that's not what is happening with bitcoin but its similar.
The thing that annoys me about these "takes" is that they aren't new. They should not be surprising to us. Of course finance and the state would try to adopt or manipulate something they can't ban successfully. Its what they do.
Also unsurprising is that people would beg the state to pump their bags. This is what the rich do all the time. Its what people do. If this human nature kills bitcoin it was doomed from the start. It may be doomed. I don't think it is but humans are gonna be humans. Rent seekers are gonna do their thing.
You and I can keep doing our thing and be sovereign bitcoiners. Bitcoin is for enemies. I think think the "bitcoin fixes this" meme is part of the problem. Far to many people in bitcoin don't really understand the economics or game theory of bitcoin but larp as bitcoiners repeating slogans.
I used to carry a small stack of index cards and a space pen everywhere I went. These days I don't. I take most notes on a Linux machine and sometimes my GrapheneOS phone. I mostly read notes on my phone though.
Honestly, I'm to the point of thinking the whole thing is a lost cause. So called public education doesn't work without a cohesive culture with strong families and a shared tribal or national identity. We no longer have that in the US. Its making a comeback (see Return of the Strong Gods) but its not gonna be uniform.
The goal in public education was to create a uniform system to create "good" citizens and workers. I would argue that isn't really working anymore as the post war consistence is to oppose nationalism in favor of cultural appreciation and deconstruction. Even when I was in school we were being taught how terrible our past was. Of course the most important lessons were ignored but it was very anti-western civilization even back in the 90s. Its way worse now.
I wish private schools were better but in my experience they just copy the curriculum and only really change things on the margins. This is especially true of so called "Christian" education. I am curious how Muslim schools in the US are designed. I suspect they are much less statist.
Homeschooling really is the way if you can do it. Many people learned they could do it during Covid. But even if you can't just augmenting public education is required.
ooof.
This is not the way. Reminds me of Ayn Rand's world in Anthem. Also the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations". The solution isn't to provide those students from poor families more help and tutoring. Just grade on a curve. I mean, I get it to some extent because the whole system is like a machine and grading systems have issues... but to me this is not attacking the root issues but rather making people feel better. And really... that won't work as kids will know when they are being patronized. Just as the "everyone gets a trophy" thing hasn't work.