Nostr View

675b8 - 3d

Honestly, while I've always liked this guy, this is a superficial point of view. 10-13 years ago, do you think it didn't occur to people that popular success for bitcoin would inevitably involve most users not understanding, and not *caring* to understand, its deeper philosophy? That if govts started investing, they wouldn't subscribe to cypherpunk philosophy? The point was, and is, that bitcoin needs to be able to keep functioning as intended, even when it is being used by actors that don't believe in those principles. Another very typical mistake is this assumption that it's failing because nobody uses it. Particularly with Lightning, but not only, it is actually very widely used for payments. It's a big part of my everyday life, so I get sick and tired of every "expert" telling us it's not used. A bit like desktop Linux ... And the "I want a pony" fantasies of infinitely cheap infinitely private infinitely scalable bitcoin I'll leave aside for now.

0
1
3

675b8 - 3d

Yeah I tend to agree with your last paragraph there. Idealism is needed in the world, and has significant benefits "below the surface" of one's life. And he's right in the general thesis of "it's inevitable that there is a straying from the original principles". But the original principles never disappeared in Linux, nor Bitcoin (heavily overlapping in FOSS ofc)

0
1
3

675b8 - 2d

2nd paragraph: I think it's just debatable. The basic mechanism you point to is clearly something that has to be taken into account (anon set size). The ecash one is particularly interesting because, many years ago I used to be fond of pointing out: if you want information-theoretically perfect privacy, you need to use Chaum's ecash type scheme (digicash), except, it absolutely didn't work because it was centralized and so it just stopped existing. Clearly systems like zcash and monero made different, more nuanced tradeoffs. I continue to be doubtful about Chaumian mints. The new extra ingredient is Lightning, but debating the merits of that hybrid is more about LN than Chaumian cash imo. Imo the value of Chaumian mints is in more in scenarios where anonymity is valuable for an ephemeral client server relationship. Examples: Tor, Lightning routing nodes, coinjoin servers or generally buying digital services from a persistent online entity.

0
0
3

675b8 - 2d

I've never believed that the community is what counts. Anything that works as a currency is functioning to overcome the limitations of human community at larger scales. A currency that depends on community will eventually fail.

0
1
3

675b8 - 2d

Let's take a networking protocol: is it in that sense "made of people"? I'd say mostly no: it just defines behaviours that any participant can follow. When it comes to money, the nuance is I guess that since we have to have a *consensus* that's so global (now i think about it, DNS does have a similar problem, hence namecoin, lol), the behaviour of people at large scale (think 51% attack) matters, and so, we want a system that has the minimum expectation of "good" behaviour (so we expect something like economic rational actors). Now I think about it like this, it's obvious that one can go further than what I just said before: Bitcoin only really works *because* community doesn't work, at scale: if enough bitcoin users coordinated properly such that they trusted each other fully, they could steal from the minority. So Bitcoin's design reflects (correctly imo) the failure of the concept of community, at scales >> Dunbar's number.

0
0
3

675b8 - 2d

Thanks! I am mostly talking about custodialness, and central control. And it is also true that claims of really strong privacy are really hard in any system; in this case, since there is a central coordination point, that can be a reason those claims fail. I think coinjoin is a natural fit with Lightning (dual funding, but not only that, e.g. batched opens).

0
0
3
Showing page 1 of 1 pages