Oddbean

Returns is something innate to capitalism. You put your own labour and/or property (intellectual property, money, durable goods, land, etc.) at risk, through use of it, in the hopes of receiving some positive return. Lending money at interest, in order to increase the total purchasing power in line with inflation, is fiat.

i think simply having a surplus is the basis of any such utility of bitcoin, something in common with gold and other long term inflation hedges it means you are a lower risk for a lender as well, but i think you already grasp that point (as in, you can cover losses because you have a surplus)

But private reserves are only useful for private people. Companies need their own reserve, where their reserves are under governance by the members and the directors. This means that they are much more valuable to business partners. Those company reserves are also more valuable to the owners of the company, when combined, than separated into a private wallet for each person, because they can be used to increase the amount of business conducted at an above-linear rate. So, Betty has 2 Bitcoin. John has 3 Bitcoin. Frank has 5 Bitcoin. Sally has ¾ Bitcoin. They each put ½ Bitcoin into their company reserve (or the company earns that amount, in their names, and they don't pull that money out). That company now has 2 Bitcoin, and they each own ¼ of it, but they jointly control it. If they try to close a business deal with a different company (rent equipment, hire an employee, contract a supplier, etc.) the other company will say, but are you solvent? Yes. Our company has 2 Bitcoin in reserve. No problem. We got cash. But this 2 Bitcoin is now at risk for loss, so they are compensated for accepting that risk with any profits the company collects.

this guy is a "purist" and will reject everything until post-hyperbitcoinisation, that's why i muted them lol, so irritating i paid valve and amazon for stuff without a bank "still not bitcoin bla bla bla tldr"

Yes, I'm one of the very few entrepreneurs on Nostr, who isn't just here to talk about how they collect better money from Greater Fools, and their clever plan to sit on it for 100 years, so that their (probably nonexistent) great-grandchildren can purchase Mars. Yes, I know that this upsets you because you thought Bitcoin would finally end private enterprise.

ok, my pea brain just had an epiphany reading this: the only reason to put bitcoin in a company is because i anticipate a return on it! otherwise i would just hold the bitcoin. Is a lightning channel the only example of "decentralized" finance that's truly software/decentralized and not subject to human intervention?

a vault! with one of those big doors i get excited when thinking about Bitcoin cash as in paper money that is like bitcoin. I personally don't like intermediating every purchase by looking at a phone, especially in foreign countries where I'm struggling with SPanish or something. it just needs a private bank to issue it, whose reserves are auditable on the mempool.space. and each printed note would be a claim on the private bank's bitcoin. Over time someone might lose their satoshi notes, so the reserve would slowly grow larger than the supply of actual notes. https://image.nostr.build/e204d17399885e733d38dd0bfc9c8a151c8d04c192ec8210cb22c8e944490615.jpg

And bank locked boxes. Someplace to save your valuables. I think some also offer multisig services for companies and trusts, so that there's always an impartial person approving transactions. And notary services.

ok, i will look into eCash. i think what i'm looking for is just dollar bills/local currency for now. but fast forward 10 years, and it will be interesting to see how it's done because I really don't want to carry around a phone in the future.

yeah, how would they look... would they have some little RFID circuits printed under the surface to match it with database at the bank that issued them. authenticity could be verified with a phone NFC(API to regulated portal that checks serial number against banks issued paper and BTC holdings) . ownership is just whose hand is holding it.

yeah, the idea is to have many of them and for them to have an exchange connecting them so payments from one mint can be redeemed by another with minimal human intervention the ontology of their mechanism of operation does also mean that they can only really scale up to a certain size of userbase before the complexity of the relationships exceeds practicality and lightning is a perfect way to enable the inter-mint exchanging so yeah, i agree, ecash mints will perform an important task, and will be pretty cool for a while until it gets really popular and you get "wildcat mints" and politicians, with no visible prompting *sarcasm* offer to "certify" mints hopefully by that point we have obsoleted banking institutions and their shadowy influence on government

Yeah, Bitcoin doesn't generate returns directly, as it isn't an interest-bearing note. It's a commodity, like gold. You can put Bitcoin or gold or copper or USD bills, or whatever into a company reserve and the company earns money through its business and you earn returns from the business.