ok so if the thesis is everyone has a personal responsibility to defend their stack with force...

how is it then that #Bitcoin succeeds and successfully disintermediates the most powerful institutions on the planet

but they know who holds and uses it

and somehow just let thenselves be eliminated as the power brokers for the world?

lotta "something something Trojan horse" handwaving here.

or "we'll implement strong privacy later"

which is ridiculous.

Yes theres a good case to be made for LN privacy.

But the liquidity isn't there, try sending just a couple thousand USD...

and there is no guarantee LN will remain private either.

its likely making large payments in the early days of LN will result in payment passing through a few centralized routing nodes with good liquidity.

iow not decentralized or immune to timing analysis by a nation-state.

Bitcoin is great and I hope it succeeds.

but the censorship resistant Bitcoin *I would call success* really just feels like hopium.

or conversely, like trusting that its operating in a permissive and sane regulatory environment.

Which means we can trust the courts to enforce property rights.

That isnt an assumption i am personally willing to make. I am preparing for a future in which government will NOT protect my property.

which is exactly the environment #monero is developing for.

the property you truly own is the property nobody knows you have.

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Discussion

With bitcoin is the main concern the distribution or lack thereof of miners? Is it nation state adoption and at some point the state calling for censorship of transactions?

I think that's a legit attack vector.

I wouldn't consider Bitcoin censorship resistant if I have to pay a N Korean miner to get my tx eventually mined.

here I was more referring to taxation and other coercive tactics being employed to create an environment that prevents sovereign use.

mining censorship could certainly play into it.

Yeah, that's so definitely an attack vector. There's a lot of talk about leaving a geographic area for friendlier environments, but I wonder how many would actually do it?

in my experience

up and changing jurisdictions is mostly something people in their 20s can do

but the time were 40 and have assets and are established

its often more expensive to change jurisdictions

which is by design of course

its intentionally cheaper to comply.

Privacy hopefully gets improved later, through technology or more p2p econ activity. An open ledger has advantages, eg spotting inflation bugs (sure there are a couple others too).

Bitcoin may not have made it out of infancy too, had it had stronger privacy built in at the start 🤔

As for confiscation/kyc-threats, I think widespread self custody goes a long way. Even with gold 6102, they couldn’t reasonably pry a lot of the privately held gold iirc

i dunno man

people have been saying "privacy will get improved later" since I've been in Bitcoin,

over 8 yrs now.

still waiting and i dont see a lot of reason to be hopeful.

with gold they had to do house to house enforcement.

owners weren't recorded on a ledger auditable to anyone with an internet connection.

transparency tradeoffs.

Have you seen what dr orlovsky has built for rgb? I think this is the future.

https://x.com/lnp_bp/status/1868607464800924094?t=sxneeScoLSuNAxCoFjGFvw&s=19

Will check out the video. Always thought client-side validation was an interesting offchain privacy alternative.

I really like the tradeoffs too bridge bitcoin to prime with radiant. Similar to the cryptoeconomic security that bitcoin already depends on for security.

1. There’s no property but the defended one.

2. No rights are granted but conquered.

3. Not fungible can (and will) be traced and stoped somehow

LN is fine but just a toy compared with #monero

checks out