Oddbean new post about login | logout I've used Cash app and have been pleased with it. No issues except for some amount limitations which increase through use. Swann locked up my bitcoin for nine days before I could move it into cold storage which is ridiculous and worse than a bank that has to have 3 days for a deposited check to clear before you can use the funds.
In a future where base layer bitcoin becomes out of the average persons reach I fear this will become the default bitcoin experience. How do we avoid the banking system 2.0? Perhaps inflating the money supply has been solved but we are straying away from self sovereign permissionless money.
No one has created a technology that allows the entire population of the world to cheaply hold sovereign control over all of their money in any amount. #Bitcoin is the only technology created that separates money and state, and creates a sovereign monetary supply and ownership system, but it never scaled at that layer, and neither does anything else. It simply means we need to invent it. And we have the base layer to build it on. We’ve already found practical 10-50x scaling without a base layer compromise, and I can’t see why there is some hard wall preventing us from continuing to scale it out. Just because we can’t imagine it as this very second doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
What I mean by this is to counter the idea that we are “straying away” from sovereign money. We are not. It is the only thing we haven’t lost. The difference is that many many more people are finding out it is desirable to have this, and no technology yet can bring that to 8 billion people.
I agree that there is no better solution and like you am hopeful for what scaling solutions the future will bring. You are correct in pointing out that bitcoin itself is not straying away from sovereign money but what so many people are and are choosing to interact with is far from sovereign. In my mind the straying is more cultural that technological. As bitcoin becomes increasingly mainstream the average bitcoiner strays from being an adversarial thinking libertarian. It could be compared to the internet and how there is no physical limitation preventing each business from operating their own website yet increasing numbers of them choose to only advertise and operate through Facebook and insragram relinquishing control in the process and opening themselves up to censorship, surveillance and deplatforming. These same people will probably choose to only interact with bitcoin in the same way. These are my fears and I hope to be wrong. I am glad there are so many smart and capable people working on open and interoperable bitcoin layers and hope to see them win.
Yeah a lot of people have mentioned the lock up period (which, as I understand it, is just a low cost defense against bank reversals) as a frustration, but it was never really a point I cared about because I had been doing auto stack and withdrawal from the outset. I was always using them for long term savings so that never really made any difference, it was just going to my cold storage basically once a month. Also Swan has 1 “n” in the company, my name has the double. No relation.