This reminds me of Charlie Munger's quote, "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome”. Charlie has a keen understanding that human behavior is defined by those acting in their self-interest. Is this self-interest "greed"? Having this discussion (or debate) without clearly defining the term I fear would result in people talking past each other.

I think you'd both agree that stacker news and the value-enabled web changes the incentive structure. Self-interest doesn't change, but the incentives in this community align to the SN community and bitcoin values: sharing BTC info, helping others, and contributing.

While this community would still thrive in without zaps (see Reddit), I would expect to see a far more engaged membership contributing a far higher quality of content.

This is really sick and excited to learn more.

Here's a great breakdown of how it works and the value https://medium.com/hackernoon/azteco-bitcoin-for-the-masses-fc17f8ca1df0

But Azteco is building the easiest way to buy Bitcoin, through vouchers. They have vendor sites which are like virtual "ATMs".

This could help unlock the normies to send BTC instantly without interfacing with a bank, charity, or exchanges.

Given 2.2 billion are unbanked, this unleash a immense amount of value for e-commerce worldwide.

Thank you my friend!

Thank you friend!

Thank you!

This is a very good question and something worth asking yourself if you are an inquisitive and critical thinker, "how could I wrong in this situation?" And if so, what could be our blind spot?"

Don't listen to those blindly accusing you of FUD of shitposting. It's worthwhile to seek the truth. We all have our path of self-education.

If we are to spend so much of our time, dollars, and personal attention, isn't this a worthwhile question to ask ourselves?

While severe failures of the network or outright ban's have been handled before - what if due to other forces we just see a plateau of price action? What if Bitcoin plateau's for 20 years? Would a potential 'failure' be sudden? Or gradual, and if so, would be able to identify it ahead of time?

There are some things that I would just point out to help you come to your own conclusion on this.

While the Bitcoin price can drop 80% over the course of several months, and sentiment along with it, the structural changes underlying the bitcoin thesis don't change as quickly. Bitcoin protocol adoption, network security, the macro and monetary environments, and investments in bitcoin ecosystem are larger generational "waves" influencing the (creation of) and adoption of BTC. And over the past 5 years, we've only seen an increase in all of these areas: greater news coverage, greater mining investment, network security, network adoption, government support, and so forth. For your own research, I would try to understand and stay abreast of these themes to know for yourself. Bitcoin adoption metrics are a simple place to start.

This is the premise of A Brave New World! One of the finest sci-fi books of all-time. Could our populace sleepwalk into a blissful existence and not care about the values Bitcoin stands for? Is Instagram the new Soma? I find a few issues with this (so did Huxley)

First, one thing that will not change is human behavior, which is that humans desire to be free, self-express, and act in their self-interests. Policies which censor, ban, or in generally impinge on human rights will find opponents, just look throughout history. I have faith in humanity in this regard. This is why we are here.

Two, math. Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources. While there are scarce resources there are unmet human needs. My belief is that governments, through the printing of money, are unable to provide this perfect utopian society resulting in a subservient populace. In fact, any policy or ideology attempting this only seem to make things worse. While we in the West could possibly imagine this scenario, plugged into our VR sets, just ask our compatriots in the global south, who's living standard erodes at each new printing of a peso or a lira. Unless we unleash unimaginable wealth creation through AI or free energy, we'd still need a neutral reserve asset to ensure the the productivity gains hit society. If not, more printing, more inequality, more strife, more upset people looking for a way out.

I believe, just as others have pointed out, that Bitcoin isn't "the app". Bitcoin is the technology and the protocol that enables people to build those shiny new things. It's worthwhile to revisit the first principles of Bitcoin and imagine not just the implications for society, but the applications we can build were we to fully scale Bitcoin through scaling applications like Lightning!

These "shiny new things" which you consider bearish for Bitcoin are the exact things that make everyone so bullish. I'd try to pick a few sources of information (podcasts, twitter) and stay updated on the absolute rad things being built with Bitcoin (this site!). I personally feel we are approaching an inflection point of embedding lightning into the web, which unlocks an embedded user experience missing for widespread bitcoin adoption. Your mom won't own a hardware wallet. But she might 'zap' her nephews post on nostr using her 'internet wallet'.

Also, I'd think about all the varied areas of expertise continually being sucked into the Bitcoin universe: not just tech bros and zerohedgers, but humanitarians, energy experts, the defense industry, public policy makers and so forth.

Lastly, I'd find it acceptable to challenge your assertion that we haven't already succeeded. Is it actually true we are still in the "who knows" phase and waiting for some magical moment to arrive that indicates Bitcoin has 'won'? It's considered a commodity by the SEC, it has Senators and Congressmen stating they are "HODLing", it is legal tender in several countries, it's being mined by Bhutan (and possibly more), generally accepted by the institutional finance, and has recently decoupled from growth stocks. How do you know we haven't won?

I hope this helps and have fun stacking!