I would hope that the goal would be for Nostr to be for much more than bitcoiners. If there aren't gullible grannies on here eventually Nostr will have failed.
Also saying bitcoiners would never fall for a scam is.... A bit of a stretch.. given that Bitcoin may just be the greatest con of all time. Aside from all the others of course.
Anything is possible, and I do think about it from time to time. I think that’s only normal though, we’re human.
What if bitcoin was the greatest scam of all time? How much money does one person (we’ll assume 1) really need though? And for what?
The more I research and learn about bitcoin though, the more it makes sense.
I haven’t really found anything bad about it.
Bitcoin is BIG, and I think it’s going to change the world as we know it.
These scammers will soon realize it doesn’t pay to scam and they’re better off to just join us. It may take a bit of time, but we’ll get there.
I actually agree. I think Bitcoin has massive problems, but I think they will get solved to a point that it fills a very useful niche. My comment was more about Bitcoiners not falling for scams. It seems anti-true, how many people became bitcoiners only after they really understood how it worked? My guess, not many as evidenced by how few host full-nodes or even self-custody.
People who buy in without a clear understanding or a clear utility (let's be honest it is still hard to spend) are operating in a way that is identical to falling for a scam.
Are you able to shed a bit of light on the problems you see with bitcoin, aside from not being able to use it everywhere yet?
Sure. Some are well hashed criticisms that have good arguments for and against already.
The most obvious is proof of work or as some snarky folks call it "proof of waste." Of course PoW is why Bitcoin works at all so it is hardly a problem, but the fact remains that we are caught in an endless arms race between miners. This is fine as long as Bitcoin faces reasonable competition for energy from other productive labors and so remains a small fraction of total needs, but as we have seen with email, social media, and online retail, efficiency likes centralization. There is always the threat that one actor could gain a runaway advantage in mining. Or more likely a few competitors that occasionally agree to act in concert in their own interests or in the service of some precived greater good.
The Block Chain, again this is key, but it is a one-dimensional map of a 2 or more dimensional space. The consequence is that there is some threshold beyond which it simply cannot scale. Lightning etc help but no technology built on it can scale indefinitely without forever adding layers.
It is not latency friendly. Yes I could in theory mail in a transaction via carrier pidgin from a remote island and it would go through just fine if I estimated my fees correctly, but utility decreases the greater the latency. At greater than 10+ minutes I can no longer participate as a fullnode at all. I can verify yes, but I won't be part of selecting the longest chain and mining is out of the question. Why does this matter? Surely there is nowhere on earth with greater than 10 min round-trip... Exactly! I am a space enthusiast. There is a very real threat that over the next few hundred years there will be more economic activity outside that light cone than within it. Side chains can help but at some point (alpha centauri?) It becomes unworkable. How do you even set up an exchange? You are back to carrying gold.
It isn't really trustless. As long as your opinions on how Bitcoin should function are majority opinions, I guess you are ok, but you still have to trust that everyone else won't get suckered into a version of the software that is detrimental to you. All it takes is being on the wrong side of some manufactured moral outrage that decides your freedom is reprehensible to society. See speed cameras and the TSA, things that exist because noone pushed back at the right time. It is still pretty good, you don't have to trust any one individual but you do have to trust. I don't actually see this as a problem since every human interaction requires some level of trust anyway. But perhaps some of the other problems could be solved be designing for trust to begin with. I actually think this can be done but it is a hard problem.
It is deflationary. I am not an economist but this does seems troublesome. There is too much incentive to hodl rather than invest in real goods and services. New entrants and people who try to build actual goods are penalized for spending.
All that being said, it is the best solution we have going and I don't see it going away anytime soon. In the long run it will probably become a way manage transfers between large entities in and around earth and backing for some layer 2 currencies as a way to control inflation. It will probably compete with really annoying state sponsored e-currencies that people use out of convenience but are bad for your health.
Really long term I expect a web-of-trust based currency to win out. It can't win now because that web of trust doesn't exist. It can't be artificially forced, it has to grow organically along lines of real world relationships on some open protocol something like .... Nostr.
