bitcoin's effective use needs a third party. bitcoin developers have utterly failed to deliver scalable self-custody. now they are only able to scale via custodians. this is why you see so many people cheering for things like cashu, or institutions buying bitcoin and leaving it on coinbase. it is scaling via custodians. in a mass adoption scenario only ultra wealthy computer nerds and banks will be able to own their own coins, and everyone else will be forced onto a custodian whether they are responsible enough for self-custody or not. the custodians will have the power to nullify all the other benefits, even the fixed supply, because they are issuing IOUs.
And what if you’re wrong and developers continue to improve second layer solutions that don’t rely on 3rd parties?
fucking do it. I'm still waiting. please knock my socks off. I expect bitcoin to give me scalable self-custody that doesn't require a degree in installing gentoo, and I expect monero-level privacy at the same time. but it doesn't have that right now.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Why do you not expect bitcoin-level returns on your monero bag?
a lot of people are into cryptocurrency (yes bitcoin is one of those, satoshi called it that) because they expect returns. and they won't interact with anything that they are not certain will give them returns. they may even think that's all there is to it. if you are one of those people you are gonna be really confused when you meet someone who doesn't care as much. I don't need returns to convince me of utility. it's nice when it happens. ideally I should be getting both. but if I am getting returns but not the utility I want, I'm not going to think that's enough for me. if that still confuses you, too bad.
I literally don't think that bitcoin is going down the path of scalable self-custody. I think most of the developers either don't care about that anymore or they are too chickenshit to do any opcodes that may be required. it's going to take a lot of shifts in the community to change my mind about this. if it happens, I will be very happy. but it is very frustrating for me to sit here and see people shilling ecash as a replacement for monero right now and bragging about all sorts of things that actually haven't been accomplished yet and might never happen at all. I'd love if bitcoin actually became good enough to replace monero. fucking do it.
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