Oddbean

I learned a little more about why people have such a hard time with bitcoin's "intangibility" while talking to my mom last night. I asked her what it was like when credit cards were invented, and she explained that before electric cards there was something called a "charga-plate": https://historyofinformation.com/images/Screen_Shot_2020-08-18_at_5.41.58_PM.png This was a metal rectangle you would present at shops, which would be pressed into paper to create an authenticated artifact of the transaction. The precursor to charga-plates was just regular paper checks. In either case though, the mental model is the same, and credit cards simply extended the same mental model of having some physical cash in the bank (whether or not that is strictly true), and authorizing someone else to talk to your bank and pull some out. Bitcoin completely breaks this mental model. The problem isn't that it's intangible, because we've been using intangible money since the 16th century. The thing that breaks people's minds is that it is intangible, and has no custodian. When you sign a transaction, who are you authorizing, and to request money from whom? It really doesn't make any sense from the legacy money perspective to authenticate ownership of a UTXO with cryptography, broadcast it to an etherial network, *pay* one of several miners to include your transaction in a "block" (?) so that the math money can be split and some handed to your counterparty. Anyway, I think this difficulty might exist for nostr as well. Credentials authenticate you with the account holder, but keys authenticate your content with the reader. To make this worse, users have to custody their keys, making them the account holder and custodian — and when they log in to an application, they have to ask themselves permission to create self-authenticating messages! Weird.

I agree, the question that I've gotten most from folks is "what even is it?" It's a big enough imaginative leap from what most people are use to using fiat banking apps that there's this process of trying to figure out how it's similar and how it's different. I almost think it'd be easier to grasp if it was utterly dissimilar.

You're overthinking it. When you sign a BTC transaction, from the point of view of a normie, you're doing exactly the same - authorize the "custodian", which is "the network", to release the funds. Just as with the credit card. That's trivial and familiar. People have trouble with BTC because of the "not backed by anything" part, indeed. Because they truly believe fiat is "backed" by the government, by taxes, by law, or even by gold, and that it is actually there in the bank, physically sitting in a box.

Someone asked me how you know how many sats you have, without a wallet. I told them you paste your pubkey into a service and it can look it up for you. They said, no how do you *really* look it up? You know, without trusting anyone. And I said ohhh, right. Well, you can look your own key up in the "database". This drive right here has a copy of that, the ...entire... global history of Bitcoin. Right here on this tiny drive. Damn.

It’s a real mind fuck for a lot of people that you can log into a 3rd party app using a Microsoft account registered to a Gmail address. It’s ingrained that your account belongs to the company whose services you are accessing. So when you say there is no company… KABOOM!