Jay @Jay - 5d
Bitcoiners: We are the most adversarial thinkers on the planet. Spaceboi: Hi I'm a professional adversary. I wrote a thesis you can use as a basis for your adversarial threat models about Bitcoin. Bitcoiners: Fuck you, spook. Bitcoin is Money. #softwar
I mean, the thesis is a first principles approach to building up an understanding of what Bitcoin. You're not going to get the same cookie cutter description of Bitcoin you get everywhere else. But differing from the norm doesn't make it wrong.
I haven't seen any analogies in the book that misrepresent Bitcoin's actual workings. But I'd say they do misrepresent popular narratives around Bitcoin. What it does, which I realized only after a long while, is build a conception of what power projection in cyberspace would look like and make the case that Bitcoin fits the bill, and in doing so fulfills all of the narratives people have about it. If you can project physical watts in cyberspace, you can have all the things like perfect money, trustless global consensus, a peaceful revolution etc. So you can come back around and rebuild the narratives from first principles in a way that makes them even stronger.
No, what's the mistake? The Bitcoin that people hold is represented in the UTXO set, and the sum of that set is fixed. But the amount of electrical power you have to expend to gain the authority to execute transactions to change that set goes up with time and approaches infinity. The three hundred odd pages preceding this example go a long way in helping me get the point. Which is that there are a lot of benefits to having control authority of the keys behind UTXOs in such a system and in having control authority of the physical power needed to execute transactions from those UTXOs.
