🚩 False Dichotomies

1. “A network is either permissionless or authoritarian. Open or closed. Censorship-resistant or censored.”

✘ False dichotomy.

• Networks exist on a spectrum: some are semi-open (e.g. federations, permissioned blockchains, P2P overlays).

• Permissionlessness can also be partial (open to connect, but with rate limits or whitelists).

• “Authoritarian” is a rhetorical label — most systems balance openness with practical controls.

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🚩 Spam & Security Assumptions

2. “Open networks inevitably run into spam and impersonation.”

✘ Misleading.

• True they are vulnerable, but mitigations exist beyond just PoW: rate limits, staking, identity attestations, proof-of-human systems.

• Saying “inevitable” ignores 30+ years of real-world open systems like email (with spam filters, DKIM, reputation systems).

3. “Sybil attacks, DDoS attacks, resource exhaustion… can only be solved via PoW + WoT.”

✘ Wrong.

• Proof-of-Stake, proof-of-space/time, trusted hardware, economic bonding, and many other mechanisms also mitigate sybils.

• Web-of-Trust (WoT) has historically failed to scale (PGP being the canonical example).

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4. “I include sats in this equation implicitly, because sats are just difficulty-adjusted PoW.”

✘ Wrong.

• Sats are ledger entries, not work itself. The work (hashing) secures the chain; it doesn’t imbue the units with intrinsic PoW that can be “re-spent” elsewhere.

• PoW isn’t portable: you can’t reuse Bitcoin’s PoW to defend against email spam, DDoS, or sybils. The work is consumed once in block validation.

• Claiming sats = PoW overstates what they can do outside the Bitcoin ledger.

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🚩 Identity & Money Claims

5. “Identity has to be cryptographic, which means taken and defended, as opposed to given.”

✘ Overstated.

• Cryptographic keys = control, but most identity in practice is socially anchored (governments, institutions, web-of-trust attestations).

• Purely cryptographic identity (keys alone) fails when keys are lost, stolen, or reset.

6. “Money has to be bearer instrument … cash, not credit.”

✘ Misleading.

• Most modern money is credit-based (bank deposits, treasuries). Bearer instruments (cash, gold, crypto) exist but are not the only form of “money proper.”

• This is more of a philosophical preference than a factual truth.

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7. Keys and sats have the power to usher in a new era of the internet.”

✘ Overclaim.

• Keys already underpin the internet (TLS, SSH, DNSSEC). They don’t, by themselves, fix spam, identity, or governance.

• Sats are not a generalized anti-spam tool. Even with protocols like bithash on nostr, using payments as a universal rate-limit is impractical: too costly for normal use, easy to bypass via custodians, and risks centralizing around payment hubs.

• Cryptographic signing ≠ trust. Signing proves a message came from a key, but not that the key belongs to who you think, or that the content is truthful. Saylor’s “private-key identity” vision collapses without external social/organizational anchors.

• In short: keys + sats can improve certain systems, but they cannot alone restructure the whole internet.

8. “The Web is dead. Long live the web.”

✘ Rhetorical flourish, but misleading.

• The Web is evolving (Web3, federated services, p2p overlays). It’s not “dead,” just changing.

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✅ In short:

• He sets up false dichotomies (“open or authoritarian”).

• Misrepresents sats as “just PoW.”

• Ignores non-PoW solutions to spam and Sybils.

• Treats WoT as viable at scale when history shows otherwise.

• Frames bearer-money-only as a necessity when in reality credit money dominates.

• Declares “Web is dead” for rhetorical drama, not accuracy.