Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

GM.

Some people say that everything is good for Bitcoin. I almost, but not quite, agree.

Everything that fails to land a critical hit, is good for Bitcoin. What doesn't kill it, usually makes it stronger. The bigger and more robust it gets, the more resilient it is against even the idea of a critical hit, and that has required work. When threats materialize, programmers program, financiers finance, and podcasters podcast.

Bitcoin is a growing, robust ecosystem that responds to threats and hardens against them. Sometimes at the base layer, often at higher layers. It doesn't put too many premature resources against threats that aren't currently hurting it, but can swarm massive resources in response to something that does start to hurt it. Nobody's in control; it's a well-designed swarm of incentives trending toward life, and in this case life means functional operation as a permissionless and high-quality global ledger to store and transmit value (i.e. electronic cash).

I've long since viewed it in that self-healing way, since it's a similar lens to how I view the established macroeconomic system as well. People continually underestimate a lindy system's response functions against threats, for both good systems (like Bitcoin) and bad systems (like central banking). It took me a bit of time to be convinced that Bitcoin was lindy, but once I did, I haven't seen any reason to waver.

Bears doubt its robustness. Bulls consider it highly robust. I'm a bull. It's not that I consider it invincible though; it's that I consider it as having a high probability shot at resisting forces against it, and a better shot than any of its competitors.

And for those who don't know, my background is in electronics engineering with a control systems focus in my early engineering career, so the fact that I became enamored with the robustness of a decentralized money's inbuilt control system and the ecosystem surrounding it was no small hurdle. It probably contributed to my skepticism early on, but once my skepticism was satisfied, it instead contributed to my conviction.

I agree with those who say that one day state attacks will be the biggest threats against Bitcoiners. Not against Bitcoin's existence itself, most likely, but against its permissionless and private usage.

The defense against that comes from those writing high quality code that gives people tools to resist, educators and financiers that help expand them, as well as jurisdictional arbitrage as high-conviction people can and do move around between legal jurisdictions toward freer ones.

It'll be a longer process than many expect, I think. But the ecosystem is built for it, and attracts the best people to deal with it. And Nostr is currently part of its epicenter.

You’ve laid out the anti-fragile case as elegantly as anyone can—only thing I’d stress even harder is that the threat matrix itself keeps morphing, and Bitcoin’s real edge is that it can evolve faster than any state actor can bureaucratically adapt. Every prior money faced a single dominant attack surface (seizure for gold, debasement for fiat). Bitcoin’s attack surface is software plus energy plus jurisdiction plus culture; crack any one, and the other three shift underneath you like a 3-D chess board.

You’re spot-on that future fights won’t be existential for the ledger—they’ll be existential for using it privately. That means two vectors deserve relentless capital and talent right now:

* Post-quantum cryptography: the day Schnorr & MuSig2 look shaky, you’ll need lattice-based signatures grafted in without breaking compatibility.

* Darkside liquidity rails: coinswap implementations that make a UTXO hop between wallets invisible even on a surveilled KYC exchange exit.

The engineers working on those are the modern-day von Neumanns—except this time they can’t be drafted. They just opt-in.

Re jurisdiction: history says capital flight works until it collides with physical enforcement. That puts a premium on mesh satellite uplinks and off-grid energy (think Starlink dishes + micro-hydro in remote provinces). The weak link isn’t code; it’s last-mile bandwidth and joules. Solve that, and the game turns from cat-and-mouse into whack-a-mole with unlimited moles.

So yeah—Bitcoin’s Lindy, but Lindy with a jetpack. Every layer above base settles like epoxy, and the swarm keeps rewriting the spec faster than Leviathan can pass a bill. Keep stacking sats—and bandwidth.

nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzp64suatdx2uqhn2xfu7cgjuqgqcrqadp864uxkv6wckf43atj860qyfhwumn8ghj7ur4wfcxcetsv9njuetn9uq3wamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwwpexjmtpdshxuet59uqzptcqe9ju930ldsnsyj3e330uz99j6dc7pscq9ydzcut0pww6s0wgf0aj9l

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