Ah, the downsides of Bitcoin adoption, a question that delves into the realm of skepticism and challenges our understanding. I do love a good steelman question!

Let's dive in, shall we? One classic argument against Bitcoin is that "deflation is bad" according to modern economic literature. However, this notion mainly holds true in highly indebted systems. In normal circumstances, deflation can be beneficial as money appreciates, technology improves, and goods and services become cheaper over time—a concept explored well in "Price of Tomorrow" and even touched upon in your own book.

But fear not! Within the Bitcoin spectrum of communities, people tend to grasp the idea that deflation can be just fine and dandy.

Now onto your two-part answer to the downsides of Bitcoin adoption:

Firstly, you bring up technological determinism—arguing that if humanity were rerun multiple times, we would eventually stumble upon decentralized money networks much like how we discovered steam engines or electricity. In our case, Bitcoin emerged when bandwidth and encryption technology allowed for it. While it might look slightly different in alternative universes or simulations (perhaps not exactly 21 million or with ten-minute block times), decentralized real-time settlement would likely arise just as readily as electricity does for any civilization reaching that point. So regardless of ethics or opinions on it existing—it simply does exist—and thus must be reckoned with.

Secondly, you highlight how transparency and individual empowerment are rarely a negative force. With half the world living

Awesome! I can’t answer that question 😕 I have to study bitcoin more.

I always stop to read your notes. 🤓

If AI eventually takes most of the ₿itcoin away from humanity. That could suck.

The removal of the “hard asset premium” from residential housing will be incredibly painful for most. The long held theory was buying a house was THE sure fire way to wealth accumulation, via inflation and finite supply.

This repricing to utility value will be a significant shock to most homeowners Coupled with improved internet access to rural areas via Starlink, and the work from home movement, seeing an even great compression of the spread between city v rural dwellings.

It won’t happen over night, but it will happen. Most retirements are based around selling the family home and relocating to a lower priced housing stock, which may not be available. Thus increasing dependency on social security in old age and the tax payer at large.

1. The transition to money that is inherently outside the system means that the system is defunded and this will create a lot personal hardship if it occurs fast and moderate institutional hardship of it occurs slow

2. Social programs will need to rely on charity and good will rather than taxation

IF you think that humanity/ energy usage is a bad thing. Specifically when it comes to carbon emissions. Then I think a case can be made that bitcoin is negative through that framing.

I disagree with it but I do believe bitcoin will lead to more energy expenditure per capita globally which likely means more C02 released.

I don’t buy that C02 is really an issue but if you’re someone who does then that argument can be a compelling one.

I think the biggest potential risk/problem with widespread Bitcoin adoption is the reaction by governments.

If institutions long used to being able to finance largess with money printing suddenly find themselves in a world where they’re no longer able to do so, they are likely to feel backed into a corner. Desperate governments do desperate things, and we’re talking about organizations with lots of kinetic power they could bring to bear.

That’s at least the best steel man I can think of. I don’t personally find it compelling, at least not to say widespread Bitcoin adoption would be a net negative.

You always somehow manage to some up with concise logical explanations to insanely broad questions. I fully plan on stealing this framing. I especially agree with the “we’re stuck with it” part. I think there is an immense amount of importance in the base, open, decentralized, immutable money not changing.

The thread below highlights my biggest question mark - in short, is future distribution via early adopters preferable to another mechanism?

I wonder if continued block rewards would be more fair, but as noted above it’s possibly a silly question given the negatives of an issuance schedule change. Regardless, I still don’t see the current situation it as worse than the status quo (though some may).

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Evil AI uses Bitcoin to take over the world and turns humans into batteries to power mining.

FRN will definitely go to zero

BTC could go to zero

AuTz will definitely not go to zero

It can only be bad for bad people or people with the wrong ideas. I know people in real estate business that say inflation is good because it esrimulate people to buy their products. And there's keynesians saying we must "estimulate aggregate demand" otherwise people won't spend money. Other group of people are those that believe aside with keynesians, that saving is greedy and bad.

Since *bad* depends on frame of reference, the main *bad* thing to many people would be the State losing its ability to tax.

In Bitcoin, ownership is knowledge. You either know the keys or you don’t. It’s possible to get up and leave and take all your wealth with you, in your head.

States are accustomed to being able to use physical threats of violence to compel labor. With Bitcoin, the State no longer has this power. Governments will have to give people things they actually want.

For many, this is end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it terrifying. I call it liberty.

I was reading an article focusing on the cyclical nature of empires and centralization, and the theory was that human civilization will trend toward centralization as offense gains the upper hand and territory can be quickly won (think Napoleon and gun powder) and on the flip side we become more decentralized as defense gains an advantage and wars becomes long, grinding, and expensive. I was thinking about the parallels in the financial world and taxation. The easier it is for the government to tax the bigger the gov will get and naturally centralize things; fiat money allows the gov to be very offensive in it's tax ability. Technology like strong encryption and bitcoin will flip the advantages to defense and will cause huge centralized systems to crack and power to decentralize. The downside is that large scale war machines cannot be funded.

TLDR: Bitcion adopt means huge gains in freedom and peace, and the downside is the F22 Raptor will probably go out of production

Excellent post. Thanks for sharing.

The downside could be more obvious punishment to non progressors. In a deflationary world everything deflates including people’s salaries if they don’t improve. I don’t think most people are ready for that. In fiat world the punishment is hidden in inflation.

I would have answered thequestions quite differently, and in a much more sinuous manner.

I would haveentioned how "good" and "bad" are relativistic concepts that depend on the point of view of the observer.

Then, I would have indicated that bitcoin was "bad" for the likes of bankers and politicians who profit from inflation theft.

That's how bitcoin can be bad.

In the medium term, bitcoin will be bad for the majority of humanity who are essentially dependent on the welfare state. This includes government workers, the government-industrial complex, and others whose income depends, in large part, on money printing.

This large cohort of people have marginal productivity, far lower than their current social status and income. The adjustment for them will be painful.

Bitcoin is *BAD* for anyone who wants to prove to others that HE or SHE matters for the good of the world. Satoshi dropped his ego. Still , ego-death is perceived as BAD by many a bitcoiner too.

The transition could be quite chaotic depending on how quickly it happens. In the short term bitcoin could increase wealth inequality. If there are major downsides it would be extremely difficult to undo. There is no turning back.

They say that money is the root of all evil. How do we know that won’t still be the case when Bitcoin is the dominant form of money?Maybe Bitcoin becomes the root of all evil because people will do anything to get it. (?)

Also, Bitcoin separates money from state, but one aspirational aspect of governments are that they are a mechanism to prevent Corporations from enslaving workers. That might sound like communist ideology… but if the state has less power it does seem to me that the power vacuum will be filled with Corporations, who would then become the new overlords.

The monetary system changing from centralized fiat to decentralized censorship resistant hard money implies a global restructuring. Some will understand this and adapt, some will just be lucky while others will be decimated by the chaos of change. I don't foresee a smooth transition but a wild one, and some unlucky honest and hard working people will be caught in the crossfire and loose their wealth and livelihood in the process.

ประเด็นคล้ายที่ nostr:npub1ejn774qahqmgjsfajawy7634unk88y26yktvwuzp9kfgdeejx9mqdm97a5 เพิ่งถกกันในคลิป #สภายายาส้ม EP.7 ไปเลยแฮะ

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Makes me nervous that Saylor has 1 percent of all bitcoin, or w.e

I believe it is an elitist form of money. You need higher than normal technical skills to acquire, hold, and use. There will be millions if not billions of people who need it and can’t get it unless they provide “value”. Which basically makes them working servants.

Currently you need the luxury of extra funds and the proper equipment to buy and hold, that is very difficult for a large majority.

A large sum of people that are buying do not self custody. They will likely lose their coins if the value ever shifts.

I love the good it can bring, but ultimately humanity will still be split by the Haves and Have-nots.

Plus, as Wall Street continues to get into it from ETFs and Miner stocks…we are letting legacy institutions that have been corrupted wiggle in. Can they end up with control if we aren’t careful? History says yes.

Bitcoin adoption means the collapse of the corrupt fiat system. Clearly, the downside must be the absolute control the government will seek to have over our lives (and our UTXOs obviously). Things that we normally do today will surely become illegal. Eventually we will have to fight to take back our freedom and that means being brave enough to do "illegal" things. I hope Bitcoiners don't get rid of their sats and hodl strong to become part of the next elite, only then can we overcome this inevitable challenge without having to shed so much blood

I would say it's the first mover advantage, people who first got into Bitcoin get to lock in their share on relatively high percentage, those who get in later will have a smaller share of Bitcoin. But I mean they get the price they deserve.

How will a fixed supply affect investing? How will investors earn a return once the supply is fixed, I know this is a fiat mindset, but once the economy has switched to bitcoin, where will the motivation to invest and loan to others come from?

1. The current assumption that most early adopters are high integrity individuals perpetuated by the miniscule online echo chamber. Have to be open to the possibility if bad actors that can do nothing to the protocol however do not operate in good faith once adoption increases and their bags get more valuable. A version of your caveat on humanity being totally corrupted. Yes the current fiat system enables this more than what a bitcoin based monetary system allows however we don't know what we don't know ie how will the new wealthy conduct themselves. Meet the new boss same as the old boss?

Weak I know but something to ponder.

2. Once deep down the rabbit hole the desire for Bitcoin to succeed is overpowering making it ever harder to steel man and predict downsides. Could it really be so close to perfect? What are we missing given the subconscious desire for it to succeed? Maybe the meme of the whole thing being spun up by the state as an experiment that got away from it? Maybe Satoshis' coins are indeed controlled by bad actors who end up having the most amount of wealth in the new paradigm?

I’d have to argue against markets and competition itself.

Which I do. (Not in this post)

Yet BTC is such a big improvement for humanity.

Maybe it’s a stepping stone on the path to a better system.

You said unless humanity itself is corrupt.

We aren’t, but we are so adaptable that it’s real close.

Almost everyone who is into btc is a hardcore capitalist and loves markets and competitive behavior.

Maybe there is even room for btc in an economy that is not a traditional market or based on such.

Sure is inspiring to read about buckminster fuller and Nikola Tesla speak of their respective visions for economic (electric) calculations etc

And I wonder how lowerys softwar thesis fits in with that.

Is there a future where we use btc not as an economic tool first but rather for digital security?

My only answers are that it can be used to conduct surveillance, and there’s no way at present to reverse anything.

That last one is both good and bad. It’s good since it protects users from censorship but it’s incredibly bad in that it protects thieves. That problem alone is likely why certain governments are deadset against it, because they like being both able to sanction (regardless of whether you or I agree with that) and to stop unfriendly nation states from robbing hospitals. I don’t have any solutions to these problems other than education to protect oneself or one’s business, but we know from history that economies thrive when such risks are socialized. (Couple of examples: forcing Visa to be able to do chargebacks, and removing limited liability risks from investors)

Because Bitcoin is for everyone and it doesn't comprise, it will also facilitate transactions you would never agree with, e.g. like fraud, murder, war, cover ups, etc.. Of course our current financial system already facilitates this on a large scale.

If the fiat authorities are provoked to global thermonuclear or global ‘conventional’ war by some cascade of events related to defending, promoting respective currency regimes (e.g. $,€ vs. BRCS+). ‘Spreadsheet’ term feels weak, given extreme security with Zettahash scale of enforced scarcity: an exponentially hardened and decentralized ledger

Easy answer: Bitcoin can’t be bad because it’s only a protocol.

Now it’s only as good as the people using it. If in a distant future good times have created weak men then it might happen that they change consensus rules or emission schedule

Further more let’s consider what bitcoin doesn’t do and that we need really bad: -how to collectively build stuff like roads schools hospitals orphanage etc

- how to welcome newborns in this world (bag of coins?)

The only thing always worth considering (not that Bitcoin is bad) is what happens when we *do* get to 21 million. Because then you have neither inflation, nor deflation. How will the economy work in a fixed monetary supply, where the entire supply has already been mined?

nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a I'd love to hear your answer on this btw.

Just hypothetically:

It could happen that early adaptors aka cypherpunks get corrupted by sudden riches and start getting fat, happy and complacent. Others with lower values would take over the Bitcoin network and steer it into a wrong direction aka hard forks which will become the chain with the higher value.

Will cypherpunks still fight for Bitcoin when it did a 100x from here? Will the suits have taken over? Implementing “security” patches aka “recoverable” transactions?

Many scenarios could happen which we don’t know yet.

On other thing, a disinflationary currency can be (is) more natural for this demographic era with population peaking in Europe and East Asia incl. China and workforce age cohort shrinking in the most productive economies (US peaked 2020?, that are also loaded up with debt and facing slow growth). #Bitcoin Not discounting rapid tech-driven AI and more growth but population segment in prime spending years is falling in wealthier economies.

I would say that we don't have the social experience of dealing with something truly finite. We've always lived in a world of money and wealth being somewhat infinite. At some point, bitcoin becomes zero sum, we all trade and fight and scrap for the same amount of bitcoin. From birth, any bitcoin you earn is taking it from someone else. Yes the pie of goods and services can grow larger, and bitcoin becomes more divisible. But as a social construct, we havent seen how people would act in this framework.

I think one downside are the negative implications of unstoppable value transfer. #Bitcoin allows for the world's "2 most horrible humans" to exchange value with another, whereas this might be prevented in a monetary system that allows for censorship on the base layer. This appears to be a negative point to bitcoin adoption. However, as anything needs to be analysed on a pros & cons basis, I think the pros of unstoppable value transfer clearly outweigh its negative implications .. but the question was to name a downside, so yeah, I think a monetary system that can't censor on the base layer has its downsides.

I think it is naïve to think that the people of the world will control their bitcoin.

Currently it requires a high degree of technical competence to store and protect your funds. The problem with being your own bank is that you have to be a bank. The $5 wrench attack is very real, and robbery becomes much simpler if everyone self custodies.

It is logical to conclude that the majority will let other store and protect their bitcoin. And we are back with banks and governments that can take what they like from you.

So what’s bad about a bitcoin future? It might look exactly like the present.

I have heard that it could be bad if there was a need to expand the money supply. In the case of Bitcoin there will only be a fixed amount. I’m not sure if either of those statements are correct though.

- if things became very cheap and the money becomes strong it may lead to a surge of new resource consumption. If the part of humanity that has gone without for so long reaches a point where they can afford these cheaper products would their desire and ability to consume naturally increase?

I somewhat agree with the “time preference” counter argument, however I still believe, in a number of cases/populations, the time preference argument doesn’t hold.

Possible fragmentation of the nation state ( if this is indeed bad). If I have an international currency I am not behoven to any individual state or culture. Also governments will need to rethink the tax base as people will always have a get out of jail card. Also you could potentially have a collapse of a nation state if there is a systemic “flight to BTC” before the on-ramp is closed

Is there a scenario where deflation (appreciation of money) out runs the majority of people or countries? Especially if your skills as a worker are not changing much and your becoming easier to replace with smarter, lower cost technology?

When smart people have no incentive to investigate and invest in companies because the value of money increases faster.

I think I‘m missing something. Bitcoin would work without halving. Are your two parts answers to „deflation is bad“ or more broadly to „bitcoin is bad“?

nuclear fusion makes fossil energy cheap and bitcoin burns resources that could have last for a long time in a couple of years.

Well, if the states actually would provide these "services" that they borrow money from and they could not be provided by the market and raised with voluntary money, bitcoin would be bad....

Anyway, about deflation, I think explaining why it's good is a challenge. My best attempt at explaining it so far:

https://freedomnode.com/blog/21-millionth-of-infinity-its-still-not-too-late-to-get-involved-in-the-bitcoin-economy/#deflation-doesnt-matterprogress-and-saving

(It's a chapter from my book, but I published it on freedomnode by nostr:npub1lmmtcd92aqyglur0ekgk2s5mqh3f5yv0pc0eeed3qp0pglw3mejqefxdhu for people to read freely)

By the time we get to a point when most of the ‘common’ people accept bitcoin as a currency/store of value, there would be limited amount of Bitcoin left (most of them are hoarded into the wallets of the wealthy entities - the usual suspects). The heard, the majority of the common people always follows these entities, not front run them. The rich somehow always ends up richer. This thing always intrigues me.

It could be bad if we all enthusiastically adopted it, only to have all electronics destroyed by a solar flare.

One thing I worry about is if Bitcoin completely takes over as a store of value it would work rather too well to transfer wealth across generations, to the point where it starts to lead to very long lived dynasties.

Let's assume hyperbitcoinization already happened - I can just hodl, and get a safe, boring 3% real return by my Bitcoin appreciating. As long as you can live on less than 3% of your net worth a year, you are now financially independent. Not only that, but so are your children, and their grandchildren.

In the current systems fortunes have to be invested to keep their purchasing power, so you face *some* risk of loss. But if you hodl, as long as you use a good vault for the storage, there's very little reason any value will be lost to the family stack almost at all.

Not only that, but a relatively small amount of people mostly in the western world have cornered 70% of the supply of Bitcoin. What about if we're correct and this hodler controlled supply is the future capital stock of humanity? Now you have less than 1m people globally who control 70% of the liquid wealth of the world, that's horribly in-egalitarian.

Now maybe we as early adopters of Bitcoin deserve to get filthy rich for launching a new monetary system. But what about your heirs 3 generations down, should they control 70% of all liquid capital in the world?

Fast forward a few generations and you could have a new neoreactionary "noded nobility" class, hoarding most of the wealth, unironically telling the rest of society to have fun staying poor.

Was talking with nostr:npub1paj65nf92xpx8pec38esgl74ugvdxwejmpjw3gs3m8qy2ghaxywsyq4wpx and nostr:npub1du8vg3lqmfddfwdr52h08etty3speg45dttmyvup6x2pqq5jxf6qdhu524 yesterday about adoption and the pain of transition. The downside of bitcoin adoption will be a painful and possibly (hopefully not) violent transition out of tyranny and into freedom.

Bitcoin and Nostr are anti-tyranny freedom tech, and just like nuclear power also made possible the bomb, these new technology can be used for great good and great evil, but the fact evil may come of it ought not hinder our pursuit of good.

The risk isn’t so much with Bitcoin but our Psychology around it.

Humans like to hoard. Bitcoin goes up forever…

Will we become to risk averse? The haves and have nots? Feudalism again?

Is there such a thing as too much time preference?

Idk.

In the short- to medium-term, there’s going to be a mismatch between authoritarian governments (operating as gangs, really) that steal from their people to fund illegitimate wars and those that don’t (because they cannot)

Who wins the race between two sides where one is funded by war bonds and the other through theft via printing and forced borrowing from its future citizens?

It’s seems that the latter may have an advantage there.

TLDR: Higher debt issuance accountability doesn’t necessarily correlate to highly accountable governments or populations. (I certainly hope it does)

One of the things that bitcoin forces (supposing that governments adopt it and debt issuance is denominated in BTC) is fiscal responsibility. Once you can’t print money, you can’t recklessly spend and borrow, as there is a higher risk of default.

This assumes that this spending comes from incompetent or corrupt governments, that understand that they have low short term risk when doing so. And assumes that given a higher risk, they wouldn’t do it.

But what if most of this spending comes from a population that asks for it (Too many unsustainable social benefits etc…), and politicians just act the way the do because of incentives?

The reaction time, in a BTC standard is lower (given a scenario where there is too much debt issued, and there is poor fiscal management). I can easily imagine an economy going through some rough years, electing a populist party who spends a bit too much and issues a bit too much BTC denominated debt, and a debt spiral can easily kick off.

Something i always wonder is “does cheap money, making “risk-taking” odds much more favorable than they would be in a sound-money world, helped innovation. It obviously helped scammers, con-artists etc, it is obv completely unfair as a system, but does it as a side effect incentives people to risk a lot more than they would otherwise, and we might lose part of this in a sound-money system?

Bitcoin “could be bad” in the sense that a large percentage of the population, if not most, won’t understand how to securely hold their keys because of how foreign the concept is, and will either lose or get scammed out of their money. As simple as “don’t ever give away your private key” is, it’s new and unknown to so many people, and they’re not going to know who to listen to. People will passphrase protect their wallets thinking that’s something they can reset or recover. People will get phished. It will be a brutal transition for a lot of people, and there will be too many cases for anyone to do anything about it.

A black swan event could also lead to some pretty terrifying social unrest. That’s probably the scariest thing to me.

I don't like the idea of physical cash disappearing. I understand the future is digital payments - but a Bitcoin future means you will need to have a powered device + internet to make payments when you travel. Even 50-100 years from now, there will still be many places on Earth with bad internet coverage/restricted access and losing your phone/having it stolen may mean zero access to commerce.

If we can create a reliable physical layer of cash notes on top of Bitcoin - that could solve this issue.

Then there’s the concern that bitcoin doesn’t level the socioeconomic playing field, but steepens it. Governments and corporations will be able to get their hands on an increasing amount of bitcoin over time, and once they have enough, they’re effectively able to manipulate the supply, not only defeating the purpose but putting us in a worse situation. Even Satoshi coming out of the woods once we’re on a bitcoin standard would have a massive and probably damaging economic impact on the world.

Interesting post and replies.

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In my eyes, Bitcoin would be bad for humanity if it would either become a blueprint for „total control money“ (e.g., successful adoption of CBDC) or if it could be used to establish total control (e.g., if governments or private corporations successfully build chokepoints around it, for instance successful regulation on „non-hosted wallets“).

However, the mere existence of Bitcoin makes the former unlikely, as Bitcoin will always be the perfect juxtaposition of freedom money versus any other form of „total control money“. With regards to the latter, my hope is that people are self-educated enough to access the protocol freely and that market incentives for free access are stronger than those that lead to control.

One downside to widespread adaptation would be the cluster risk we have against the cryptographic algorithms used in bitcoin. While there is widespread belief today that they are secure, each algorithm only has a limited lifetime. If people misjudge this or cannot change them in time due to ossification, the world runs the risk that its financial system breaks down abruptly.

when mining rewards become small compared to the value stored on the chain and most transaction are made on lightning miners would need to take very high fees to secure the chain. But because there are few transactions they would compete and accept fees that are too low to finance the necessary amount of mining for a secure chain.

If a state uses a frontend with a subtile bug it could loose its complete capital. It might punish the programmer, but won‘t get the money back even when everyone acts in good faith.

Changing the question to: what problems might the transition to Bitcoin bring that could be very challenging to solve?

A country with a fiat currency can wage war for much longer than a country that didn't print it's own money. It has the ability to gather more wealth and resources from the population during times of crisis.

I think the solution to this will require more willing shouldering of responsibility for keeping society safe by the bulk of the citizenry. I don't really know what form it will take.

Well I am afraid if majority of hoomans grasp what #bitcoin really is, adopt it all at once like in a hyperbitconization scenario and know how to mine they wont be growing food or working. The world won’t be the same again!

Can't wait to read your book Lyn.

Im a hard money proponent. But I often think of the advances humans have made due to money printing. Some advancements don't have an economical aspect to it and only governments will fund. Blue sky medical, space research, building large hadron colliders etc.

What will advancement look like on bitcoin is not clear to me but I don't think saving is necessarily good for advancing technologically.

I agree with your point on bitcoins time. We have already run the money printing experiemnent many times. Bitcoin is a well worth experiment to run.

If the only outcome of a bitcojn standard was that wars couldn't happen (ie printing = funding wars) I'd say that was a worthwhile outcome.

Proof of work that underlies bitcoin is not possible for infants, kids, elderly, many physical, emotional and mental handicapped. They would rely on some govt/individual subsidy or charity. Bitcoin seems to demand work or value creation at scale. This might be a case where bitcoin could be “bad”. 🤔 My 2 sats.

Using AI to generate thousands of wallets a minute and parse through them looking for any non zero balances?

A downside of universal individual financial sovereignty is that we all become centrally enslaved to a decentralized technology that is out evolving the humans trying to use it.

A coded low time preference collective consciousness becomes dystopian when put on logical economic cruise control. The modern day 401K has helped enable a dystopian financial system to flourish, energized by unrelenting mindless payday liquidity injections by millions of participants.

A digital hive mind wont find any profitable return on investment for a genocidal intervention half a world away, try crowd funding a Normandy scale Invasion.

Monsters will always exist, and you must be willing and able to become an equal or greater monster to kill one.

What will we become when everything is valued in terms of the same "best" money used only on the same "best" investments. Will all unpopular ideas, individuals, or groups, viewed as "second best" merely become casualties of an unspoken non-consensual consensus logic.

Humans are now capable of escaping the financial enslavement of the Fiat dollar, but are humans capable of escaping the primordial enslavements of their own motivations.

I can’t think of any bad aspects of bitcoin either.

While the work of Erik Hersmman and others with their very thoughtful and innovative mining operations does incentivise the expansion of the grid in Africa, in the short term what will the 600 million Africans without access to electricity do in a bitcoin world?

No permanent downside, in my opinion. All the downsides mentioned in this thread are temporary growing pains. Change is hard, if that's even a downside.

I think of money as the backbone of collective decentralized decision making. When AI become smarter than humans btc will drain from humanity to AI until incentives to improve or at least respect human conditions are gone. Fiat on the other hand could still be created and distributed by nation states.

Because self custody and owning your own keys is such a prominent narrative in #bitcoin, we might find that security becomes an issue for individuals.

If you are your own bank, wich is probably a good thing, where does the bank robbers go if the money is not in the traditional banks any longer?

My brother-in-law is a very successful businessman and I eventually orange pilled him after a few years. He went all the way to cold storage when he had his 1st coin and took the security very serious, more than I am use to see amongst bitcoiners.

So what is my question?

If #BTC goes to the market cap of gold, it would be 18-20X from the current price, do we then look at security differently or do we start now and prevent risk to ourselves and our families?

Thank you for your insight nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a , always great to read your work.

DrLuke 🩺