Brunswick @Brunswick - 3mo
Jack has his finger on the pulse of american society. He is worried too many people think of bitcoin as something alien and tech-bro-ish. He was also at the time working to push Block toward enabling lightning payments at their terminals. This had regulatory, social, taxation, and technical hurdles. No doubt his board was in "wait mode". He needed to strike fear in the people around him to light a fire under their asses so they aren't late to the table. I think he has a good point, but, you're also right. It's unrealistic to think adoption can happen in a year or a quarter. El Salvador proved that even government policy can't force adoption. First everyone needs to understand that it IS a SoV. It's when people insist on being paid in BTC that it becomes a MoE.
Brunswick @Brunswick - 2mo
Apparently, I should have only written the first sentence because your response disregarded the context entirely. You're suggesting Bitcoin is Betamax while the dollar or Tether is VHS or DVD? That’s incoherent. First, Betamax wasn’t a disc; it was a higher-fidelity cassette tape, often associated with wealthier early adopters and regarded as a more "European" format, while VHS had broader American market appeal. In that light, Betamax is arguably more analogous to Ethereum or Monero: technically advanced, niche, but less widely adopted. VHS is a better analogue to Bitcoin - simple, robust, and "good enough" for the market. The decisive factor in the Betamax-VHS war was distribution. Rental stores overwhelmingly stocked VHS. I was even given a Betamax player as a kid because the donor couldn’t find new releases anymore. As for videodiscs: they were optical, analog, and fragile. Though they may have offered high fidelity when pristine, they degraded rapidly with use, like vinyl. DVDs, by contrast, introduced digital encoding and error correction (similar to audio CDs), which solved those longevity and usability issues. It’s wrong to reduce Betamax's failure to a binary “better vs. worse” dichotomy. VHS succeeded not by being superior in quality but by offering a compelling total system: cheaper, easier to duplicate, easier to maintain, and better supported by content distributors. Betamax was overengineered, under-marketed, and failed to reach critical mass. The same fallacy - oversimplifying technological adoption to technical superiority - is common among altcoin advocates. Clinging to the Betamax narrative is like going down with a shitcoin. It’s also why comparing Bitcoin to Betamax (a failed format) is a poor analogy. If anything, fiat currency is the legacy medium - closer to reel-to-reel film - while Bitcoin is VHS, then DVD, then Blu-ray, advancing with each protocol enhancement, scaling solution, and integration. Another overlooked factor in Betamax’s demise was hardware design. VHS players benefited from iterative mass-production improvements. Betamax units were difficult to service - you had to partially disassemble them just to access key components like rollers and heads. This maps more cleanly to something like Monero: opaque, harder to interface with, and costly to maintain. Transparency and modularity matter - both in tech and in money. Regarding Dorsey's concern: I share your instinctive dismissal. In that sense, we're both “Betamax maxis.” But the core point of my original post is that Jack is more attuned to the mainstream cultural current, especially among youth, than either of us. His observation reflects your own: Over 60% of American culture doesn’t care about Bitcoin. Dorsey argues this is a strategic liability - that adoption must be pushed, not waited for. And he’s in a Spiderman-like position at Block to do exactly that. We may disagree with Jack on whether mass adoption is existentially necessary. But your own statement - that Bitcoiners must enable market participation by integrating into platforms like Square - implicitly supports his premise. The actual disagreement is over strategic necessity: does Bitcoin risk dying in irrelevance if we don’t act now to drive adoption down to the point-of-sale layer? As for your “don’t spend your Bitcoin” comment, I’m a spend-and-replace advocate - not because I think it sways fiat-maxis, but because it builds infrastructure, supports the circular economy, and tests the rails. It’s technological stewardship, not evangelism. My belief is that monetary adoption emerges more from demand below than from edict above. That’s the distinction between Austrian economics and MMT. Dorsey’s narrative blends both frameworks - organic and institutional - which may be why it feels impure or contradictory. But perhaps it’s precisely that hybridization that reflects the current inflection point.
