Avatar
gsovereignty 5mo ago

Paper bitcoin is a thing because our territory of freedom has no exports.

Even worse, our territory of freedom is completely dependent on imports from the fiat dominion.

Whoever produces the stuff you need decides what form of money you will pay with.

To pay for goods and services produced in the fiat dominion, you must use fiat. That's where fiat gets its power - if you want access to the global economy you must go through fiat as a gatekeeper.

So even if you pay with bitcoin for imports from the fiat dominion, you don't get what you're paying for until someone settles the trade in fiat. By paying in bitcoin you're actually just creating demand for fiat.

That's why most people are actually better off with custodial bitcoin. It's not about the difficulty of self custody, it's about a guaranteed offramp into the fiat they need to access the economy that produces the stuff they want.

A bitcoin standard just means the net producers in the economy are bitcoiners, and so you need bitcoin to access the economy.

Right now it's the exact opposite.

We fix this by becoming better than the fiat dominion at improving the human condition.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Avatar
Cardinal 5mo ago

Right now, demanding bitcoin as the only medium of payment for our products makes us less competitive in the marketplace where consumers want convenience. Perhaps if more businesses offer large discounts for payment in btc, we can slowly incentivize more people to hold and pay with btc .

Avatar
Judge Hardcase 5mo ago

True. Though, a 'huge' discount shouldn't be necessary. Any incentive is what will slowly move us in the right direction. It ultimately comes down to a fundamental question: Is bitcoin an inherently less expensive payment system to collectively participate in than fiat? If so, then the incentives - no matter how small - already exist for both merchants and customers to be able to benefit by using it. If not, then this is a lost cause from the get-go.

Avatar
gsovereignty 5mo ago

If you were somehow able to sell things that were in demand but simply not available in the fiat economy you could charge high prices and only accept bitcoin.

Avatar
stacktoshi 🚀 ∞/21m 5mo ago

Nice note. A couple quibbles though.

Fiat took over because it was superior in some ways to paper and physical gold, and government forced it down their citizens throats. Bitcoin will take over because it's superior to both of those, and government can't easily stop it. But it will definitely take time.

"a guaranteed offramp" one would hope. Being able to exchange custodial bitcoin for fiat (which requires fiat issuer cooperation) is as much of a guarantee that the exchange will give you an account with an on-chain address where you can transfer custody to them to do the same thing, which they're incentivized to offer in order to collect fees, so I'm not sure how people are exactly better off.

Avatar
gsovereignty 5mo ago

Banks and ETFs etc have guaranteed offramps if you buy "bitcoin" through them.

Avatar
Short Fiat 5mo ago

If we pay for bitcion audiobooks with bitcoin, then we have an entirely digital economy

Avatar
Richard 5mo ago

IMHO we’re beyond the point of worrying about exchanging bitcoin for fiat; or for anything else, for that matter. Self-custody should be the default, and as a community, it’s our responsibility to make that a reality through awareness, education, and better tooling.

Bitcoin circular economies already exist, and the number of ‘bitcoin accepting nodes’ is growing exponentially. Hyperbitcoinisation is underway. To accelerate it, producers and traders can simply offer a discount for payments made in bitcoin, and encourage their suppliers to do the same.

Avatar
gsovereignty 5mo ago

We've been trying that for 15 years and yet the rate of paper bitcoin is rapidly accelerating, especially with the rise of ETFs etc.

Education doesn't work, it isn't a forcing function.

Avatar
Achilles 5mo ago

Bitcoiner citadels in the making 🧡🗽🏰. Where we going?