> There are profound problems with the Lightning Network, not least of which is that you have to access the blockchain just to to to use the Lightning Network, which means that transaction fees are $50 on the main network. You have to pay $50 just to open up a lightning channel on the main chain, which doesn't make any sense. Now there's all all kinds of deep technical problems with lightning, which now people are starting to acknowledge, okay, all these promises didn't pan out. Oopsie. We don't really have a plausible mechanism for making Bitcoin turning Bitcoin into cash.
https://fountain.fm/episode/Nyt3vIj8NJ2y8MWDHWdt
"Steve Patterson is an iconoclast who always seeks to puncture the orthodox narrative. In this episode, he defends the book he helped Roger Ver write, in which they lament the alleged "hijacking" of #Bitcoin away from Satoshi's original vision."
Discussion
> Bitcoin being used as a speculative asset is quite beneficial to the existing political and financial system. So Bitcoin in in its current structure is not a threat to the financial establishment because, for many reasons, the on roads and off roads of Bitcoin are totally captured by KYC.
> There's just a small group of people, the Bitcoin core developers, many of which form their own, for profit company called Blockstream that said, "Look, we're the people that decide what goes into the final code of Bitcoin."
> ...whoever is, you know, infiltrated Bitcoin, you know, if it would in our opinion, it appears that there are companies, that may have ties to government that had infiltrated Bitcoin. And if they decide, if the if the Michael Saylors of the world and the Blackrocks of the world who are now the people who are really calling the shots of Bitcoin, if they decide that, well, you know, in their expert judgment, having a small, indefinite inflation in Bitcoin would be good, and it would be necessary to to protect the network from yada yada yada, that's probably what's gonna happen.
>
> As as we discovered living through what the the civil war in Bitcoin, there are powers out there that are way, way, way greater than, like, the community of Bitcoiners online. Okay. This is this the I I think, libertarians who like myself, who were Bitcoiners early on, were incredibly naive in understanding the power of politics, the power of infiltration, the power of propaganda, the power of censorship. We didn't understand these things.
> how utterly insane it is that BTC, Bitcoin, was capped at 7 transactions per second. You know, the the this was crazy, like, in 2012, but the idea in 2024 that, like, you know, you have this a couple megabytes, every 10 minutes are produced on the Bitcoin network. It's it's multiple orders of magnitude off of from what what, is technologically possible right now without really, causing any decentralization problems. It just doesn't make any sense.
> And, also, the the idea of, like, you know, trading IOUs Bitcoin and and trading second layers where you're just, like, you have to go through a company, this is just reinventing the banking system. This is not an this isn't an improvement. This is this doesn't make the world a freer place.
Cashu?
> I think there's an amazing version of Bitcoin, and there's, like, a dystopian version of Bitcoin. And it's very much on the table whether or not we keep stepping towards the dystopian version of Bitcoin.
> When we we have 10,000 cryptocurrencies to choose from, Why what is it about Bitcoin that that is special or unique? Like, cryptocurrency itself was an awesome, technological breakthrough and, like, maybe something some other project, maybe Monero or some of these privacy coins will make the world a freer place and and, you know, people can use them as money and commerce, that would be cool. But I don't see evidence that that's actually Bitcoin. I see evidence---. You know, there's a great quote. I forget who who who said it, who coined it.
>
> It's a phrase that, the purpose of a system is what it does. I don't know if you've heard this. It's an excellent, excellent way, like systems analytical thinking, about how the world works. "The purpose of a system is what it does." And by being honest, and about about Bitcoin over the last decade or 14 years, what is the purpose of Bitcoin? Chatter aside, theory aside, I think the purpose of Bitcoin is to appreciate in price. And maybe that's good, especially good for early adopters. But if that's all that's going on, I think that's, that's maybe not this amazing invention that it could have been.
> But, yeah, I think I think, Peter [Schiff] would probably like, I think he, I'm sure he would love the contents of the book because it just destroys a bunch of the myths that are so commonly repeated in Bitcoin, and there's, like, very few people who are, you know, challenging the narrative anymore.
>
> People are so invested. They have so much to gain from repeating this narrative of buy it and hodl it. And the price goes up, the price goes up. You're gonna make money. That it there's not a strong incentive to be like, maybe this narrative is not grounded in reality anymore.