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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @oomahq 16h \ on: Bitcoin as Real Dissent bitcoin
Good read.
Reminded me of The Politics of Obedience, a libertarian essay written 472 years ago. Same core idea.
To give a clear-cut definition of spam this common misconception that "transactions bid for blockspace" has to be dispelled first:
Transactions bid for (more or less timely) confirmation, not space in blocks.
In fact "purchasing blockspace" is an undesired side effect to real Bitcoin users. If a new type of address was introduced whose transactions were half the size of the current ones a lot of users would adopt the new format just to pay half the fees at any given feerate. If you could confirm your transaction by purchasing no blockspace at all you would (and that's the idea behind LN: a single onchain tx supports a theoretically infinite number of offchain balance updates of that tx). This dynamic leads to a virtuous cycle where tx footprint gets smaller, users pay less fees, and so more users can use the chain.
On the other hand spammers are true purchasers of blockspace, something that Bitcoin is not designed for (and thanks to the SegWit discount they even get a 4x cost reduction byte per byte). This leads to a vicious cycle where only just a few spammers can quickly purchase all the available blockspace, spike the fees and so less people can use the chain.
Bottom line, since the legit group of bidders want to minimize their purchase of blockspace, while the spammers want to maximize it (and even gets a discount) there's only one possible outcome that we've already seen plenty of times: denial of service. Obviously all that is immaterial to the fees. If someone paid 10 bitcoins in fees to inscribe a hi-res video over the next 1500 blocks as one huge tx per block, that's still spam.
I don't get where this idea that fees are a spam prevention mechanism came from. Fees are just to bid miners for transaction confirmation.
As a counterexample, spam completely obliterated the UTXO set in the 2023-2024 period while fees where generally very high.
True, but most countries in the world impose capital gains taxes and FIFO accounting in order to use and spend Bitcoin "legally", which is still a pretty onerous interventionist policy.
This combined with Bitcoin's intrinsically superior SoV properties is enough to drive it out of circulation almost completely.
Repealing CGT is mandatory for Bitcoin to thrive as MoE at scale. I visited Lugano last year and I was amazed at the number of businesses where I could pay with LN (even real state agencies advertised they accepted payment in BTC). Switzerland doesn't have CGT.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe disagrees :) Excerpt from the Gresham's Law Wikipedia article that you linked:
Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe said that "so-called Gresham's law" only applies under certain conditions, largely a result of governmental interventionist policies. In his 2021 book, Economy, Society, and History Hoppe states:
You might have heard about the so-called Gresham's law, which states that bad money drives out good money, but this law only holds if there are price controls in effect, only if the exchange ratios of different monies are fixed and no longer reflect market forces. Is it the case that bad money drives out good money under normal circumstances without any interference? No, for money holds to exactly the same law that holds for every other good. Good goods drive out bad goods. Good money drives out bad money, so this bezant was for something like 800 years considered to be the best money available and was preferred by merchants from India to Rome to the Baltic Sea.
Even though contemporary currencies are not backed by nor made of precious metals I can think of a similar real-life situation to the one you described in the blogpost: when one fiat currency pegs to another and then (hyper)inflates away (e.g. the Argentinian peso in 2001).
An free one, to boot. I have no affiliation with Ocean besides believing that the work they're doing is awesome and important.
I believe mining pool centralization is the prerequisite for transaction accelerators, not the consequence. Hence why I think it's important to promote the emergence of more real mining nodes in an incentive-compatible way like they do.
Having said that I have no quarrel against other pools with the same goals. A week or two ago I spoke with someone involved with DMND and he told me they were still in private beta, hence why I did not make Sv2 a focus of the article.
I've been instinctively avoiding debt all my life.
However as I started to understand how fiat money works I'm realizing (cheap) debt is an important tool to keep one's head over the water line (granted, not for buying your primary residence).
In your bio you have the famous quote "People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people." from V of Vendetta.
A system like that where everyone depended on the goodwill of the government to meet their basic needs would be the exact opposite.
However taking responsibility of your own funds is very different than taking responsibility for someone else's. The stakes are much higher, especially if the amounts are non-trivial.
In other words I trust myself with my own self-custody, but I wouldn't ever want to be in a position where I can lose someone else's savings (people close to me that trust my judgement, to make things worse). Maybe the group of potential Uncle Jims is much smaller than the group of people who know how to self custody.
This chart says that both are turds falling from the sky.
There's no reason for Europeans to exchange their EUR for USD, nor for Americans to do the opposite. There are better options for both.