Oddbean

i became interested in bitcoin because of its potential to build a parallel economy that offers an alternative to the censorship-friendly & orwellian mainstream financial system so of course i want it to become private/fungible + scale to onboard millions of people at a cost much lower than western union/banks so i get angry when i see a bunch of suits hijacking the narrative by providing “education” that makes sure hundreds of thousands of new community members only want to use it as a pet rock and actively oppose any improvement whatsoever it’s a sybil attack on consensus which effectively freezes the ability to do any network upgrades if guys like saylor can decide which dev gets funding and from where, then they discourage the medium of exchange function and manipulate the narrative on something as significant as self-custody, millions of people miss out on the once in a generation opportunity to fix the broken money system if guys like saylor amass this much influence, bitcoin is effectively a delegated proof of stake system i’m fine with finance bros using bitcoin for whatever. bitcoin is for enemies, right? but when you weaponize your army of trolly ngu simps to effectively stall the progress of the project, i will do my best to remind people why i came here and what the mission used to be until just a few years ago use bitcoin as a pet rock if you want, but don’t try to tell others what they should do with something that’s supposed to be freedom money don’t ruin the lives of millions of people living under tyranny only because you want to see your number go up and you’re afraid of regulators i may not have the same platform as saylor and i may not pass arbitrary purity tests from high priests, but at least i am honest and willing to use my significantly smaller platform to remind people why bitcoin was created and what it should ultimately become

Great Script Restoration would be a good start to bring the cypherpunk builders back to Bitcoin. Then MWEB for extra scaling and privacy. BIP300 too, though this one is likely to happen if Paul convinces a majority of miners to deploy it. Won’t pursue the BIP process anymore. Let the devs do the deving, stop all this purity test nonsense which doesn’t even pay the miners to compensate for the diminishing subsidy.

I want things like BIP300 to happen too but I'm too pessimistic to let myself believe it will ever happen. they are too dysfunctional to do anything like that ever again and there are too many bad actors poised to do social engineering attacks against any more serious innovation. bitcoin can only scale via custodians now. I hope it changes but I am done holding my breath.

Monero needs more people to get behind it to put pressure on Bitcoin developers and the Bitcoin community. Eventually even the most conservative status Bitcoin holder will adopt improvements to prevent their involvement going to zero

In Bitcoin, you need to be ready to kill your heros. nostr:nevent1qqspfpysr69n80lk73k4l9gj0vtykpgacx8wslt9n8wcuvljsz97wjqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygzsq4xs0ckd7v43qdth00vu7uue9f9wytu3c998vtha4fdlv86825psgqqqqqqsrlupul

I will celebrate my 10th Bitcoin anniversary in 5 days and was looking to write and reflect about things past. This hits home so hard its just depressing. Looking at all large communities (reddit) or big conferences (BTCanythign), you see they turned into hold moon moon bonanza full of instagram investment gurus with no substance. Even DOGE is not fun ever since normies started associating it with Mush for whatever reason. Saylor gets praised just because the company he manages bought a lot of BTC, but what he has actually done for the ecosystem? At least now, after he has come clean on his view of regulation and state compliance, we don't have to "debunk" him anymore. But the reality is, this moon moon crowd does not care. Their 1st question is "how do I report my Bitcoin" or "How do I get gains" , not what can I do with it.