Great points!

I’d encourage everyone to read nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a‘s book Broken Money. There is anthropological evidence that “2. rely on incentives” works. Specifically Chapter 4 “A unified theory of money”.

Ecash community banks in local high-trust environments are basically a social credit system. Or a “proof of punch” system to quote nostr:npub1kp7jzme0qs3wcqjjmkq6v5fm359sclhc22glhadgtmerlr0h37nsn8487l.

This is in contract to global low-trust environments that requires final settlement of commodity money. This would map to Bitcoin over Lightning (between banks and self-custody solutions).

8B people could use bitcoin today without a soft-fork with 10M community banks at an average of 800 users per bank. In reality things would obviously look much more heterogeneous with people using self-custody wallets, full custodians, ETFs and everything in between. But I don’t see why local community banks couldn’t be a part of the solution.

This is also how banking works in many places today. For example Germany has a very decentralized banking model with about 1500 banks. 70% of deposits are held at local community banks and credit unions (Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken).

My point is with all these technical discussions about scaling, we shouldn’t forget about human nature. People are more likely to adopt bitcoin if it works in a way they’re used to. We should learn from history and not ignore anthological evidence. That means relying on local trust and incentives where appropriate.