The hardest part of orange pilling people is that when you tell them “no one controls bitcoin” they don’t believe you.
Discussion
Man is this true. Been trying to orange pill a guy at work for years, and still, every time it’s brought up, he asks who created it, who is Satoshi? I explain that it’s irrelevant as it is free and open source software. He cannot get over this hump, and may not even understand what FOSS is.
Yeah FOSS is a strange concept to most – try talking about the different groups involved and their incentives. Talking about it in terms of balance of the different groups seems to work well in conversations I've been having.
This is really really really really hard for most people to understand. We've all been so conditioned to believe that someone is always in control that it's really difficult to conceive that something created by humans could be fundamentally outside of any single person's or group's control.
To me, it's actually the starting point for trying to help people understand nostr or bitcoin. Once they see that it is in fact possible that no one is in control AND it works, there rest becomes easier.
Exactly, and they’re right not to believe you, because it hasn’t happened before
Literally everyone
Technically, you control Bitcoin, weather that be by running a node, or choosing an app that uses the fork you want. Thankfully, most apps are on the same page.
So true. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to convince a single person of this. It is hard to conceptualize. I first learned of bitcoin in 2012 and it took until probably 2020 for me to fully understand this. Reading “The Blocksize War” was the single most influential thing that turned me into a fully fledged bitcoiner.
Rules without rulers is hard to understand. There are not a lot of real world examples to compare it to.
This also scares people.
It raises a good point. People associate centralisation with control and don’t immediately understand how decentralisation can work and be reliable.
Who controls the internet?
And even when they accept it to be the case, the knee-jerk reaction is to assume it's a bad thing that cannot work...