Yeah naw. It sucks that people don't custody their corn and rehypothicatoon is, and will continue to be, a big problem. But in Bitcoin rehypothicatoin eventualy blows up and there will be no bailouts. This is why we self custody. This is a decentralized self regulatory system. When ETFs get rugged their will be pain, but to act like creating bigger blocks (with no coherent fee market btw) would solve all this is asinine. Meanwhile ignoring all the real issues with increasing block space in a hostile fashion. Mistakes were made, for sure, but the big blocks ain't the answer and never have been. Plus homeboy isn't even active on nostr, just tweeting out this foolishness from twitter.
From nostr:nprofile1qqs976gg9npqm0wjtveqavxru70nha4peyhxqc35f88nyf9slgg7m2gppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tc8y9mqg on Xitter
SUNDAY BITCOIN OUTLOOK
1. Bitcoin price will continue to go up. As the world's most liquid* fixed supply** digital asset (for now), bitcoin is still underpriced and will continue to be bought up by people fluent with money.
2. Third party custodians remain the only and preferred option for most people to actually interact with bitcoin, due to
(i) a poorly chosen high-level technical path (i.e. the Blockstream-style smallblock scaling meme), and
(ii) a lack of any real interest from most participants in the more abstract goals of bitcoin, like circumventing the fiat monetary system.
3. Soft forks with bold scaling improvements likely can't be deployed anymore. This is not a certainty but it is my best guess. This condition has been all but cemented by ecosystem fragmentation, high degrees-of-freedom in design choice, and the entrance of large institutions who have fork leverage.
4. As a result of bitcoin's failure to preserve mass self-custody, there is now a "shot clock" on the properties I asterisked above: liquidity* (the censorship resistant kind) and the fixed supply**. As large institutions capture larger shares of stored and immobile bitcoin, fork choice clauses translate into the power to dump one side of a given fork, destroying the price of the fork and forcing profit-seeking hashrate to the other side. While this isn't a definite game-over, it creates a very uncomfortable option for governments and institutions to exert a high leverage veto over tech that will bitcoin meaningfully challenging to fiat.
The idea that everyone who holds bitcoin would be voting on protocol changes indeed seems foolish, but certainly there is a point closer to that side of the spectrum than where we are heading.
5. Even if the fork choice judo isn't leveraged, traveling the path that gold did seems inevitable given the low rate of self-custody. Bitcoin could be crippled by fiat in the same way: centralized warehouses give way to rehypothecation. Some will argue that bitcoin's easy-to-validate nature will mitigate this, and that may be true. But ask yourself how much fake gold governments have to produce vs. simple rehypothecation and accounting games.
6. BCH might have actually been right about the big picture, but in the critical moment they didn't have the developer network effect or market recognition to capture bitcoin's momentum. Even if they were right, and are still right, about some major conceptual issues for bitcoin's scaling, the ship has sailed. I hope I'm wrong on this, but BCH's market share will remain fringe despite being probably the most faithful continuation of what bitcoin was actually supposed to be - in the same way that early internet pioneers thought we'd all be running easy-to-use SMTP servers, but instead we converged on the more dystopic outcome of all mostly submitting to gmail's walled garden.
7. The upside is that for now, bitcoin's rules are indeed resistant to inflation. True P2P exchanges may not have developed, LocalBitcoins might have been beaten into submission, and KYC/chainalysis may be basically winning, but at least for now the asset is still scarce. So the silver lining is that maybe we've bought some time, and those who are fiat-hostile may have been awarded some capital.
8. An under-mentioned fork necessary to scale bitcoin ownership is probably unit subdivision (as pointed out by
). At the current base unit, if we hit $1 = 1 sat, the minimum transaction fee is around $200 unless some kind of out-of-band miner payment is happening.
9. As I get older, I realize that many of the problems that created the emergence of fiat money are due to upstream human systems problems, and that is where the fix really lies. Developing our relationship with (and place beneath) God, and revisiting what made the west successful in the first place, are more crucial to human flourishing than bitcoin is. Bitcoin still remains an interesting experiment and encouraging bed of possibility
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