Watching some of this bitcoin conference makes me .... less interested in bitcoin than ever before. Bitcoin feels like a SuperPAC, a lobbying group, or some other huge scummy political football.
What is the new edgy underground hacker thing that we should all be jumping ship into?
Privacy tech
This is where shitcoinery comes from, partially
That’s the problem with the bitcoin magazine conference… it’s noise galavanting as signal for the most part. If you hadn’t watched it, you wouldn’t feel this way
Bitcoin certainly dgaf 🦡
Yeah, bitcoin isn't the cringe circus around it. I get that.
I just wanted to express how cringe the conference comes off.
More seriously now, while I love a lot of bitcoin's fundamentals (self sovereignty, fixed supply, decentralized, rules can't be changed by administrators at a whim), there are other things I dont like (infinitely increasing ledger, too much transparency, transaction rate is very slow, requirement of huge energy input to maintain, and now it is a political lever). As the first mover, it has first mover advantage. But after bitcoin came a thousand other blockchains, most of them tokens or currencies. Are really none of them better? Am I to believe nobody was able to improve on bitcoin? I admit ignorance, but I remain a skeptic and open minded about what you all call "shitcoins". Please don't hate me, I came here to fix censorship not money and fixing money is not my area of expertise. I'm just still not interested in joining this cult at this time, I'll keep watching from just ouside... and that conference made me even less interested.
Appreciate your thoughts.
Well, youre probably going to get at least one "Monero" but I figure I'll say it again. That's the only coin I'll shill because it's the only one worth shilling.
I will add, Mimblewimble as an architecture/scheme is the only thing in existence today that comes close to truly solving scalability issues with bitcoin. You should look into it. I've said this a lot around here, to solve the issues with bitcoin you need to have the same security guarantees as bitcoin without the requirement of keeping any and/or all historical data. Mimblewimble *almost* achieves this. Actually, it does achieve it as originally specified, with the downside that you get absolutely no programmability, no multisig, no time locks, nothing. To get those a trade off was made, and tiny little proofs from each transaction must be kept, called kernels, that are present in all MW implementations to my knowledge and in the reference implementation, Grin. If this issue can be solved while keeping those programmability features, you've got bona fide space money.
MW is def underrated. Scalable and far more private. Bitcoin should've added it long ago. Litecoin already did all the work.
Beam uses MW and has programmability/multigsig/timelocks etc I think (although I don't know much about it)
afaik multisig is possible on mimblewimble
no programmability = no spam
Yeah I know. So I've been following MW development since before Grin launched, and there's some interesting things about that. The original MW paper specified an interactive protocol with no programmability. It also required absolutely no historical data preservation whatsoever. Andrew Poelstra massaged the cryptography a bit and brought us the MW we know today, which does have programmability, at the cost of needing to preserve a range proof for every transaction forever, which in MW is called a transaction kernel. So you get multisig and all that good stuff (but no scripting, but there are ways to script with it nonetheless) but you lose that very powerful feature of needing only the UTXO set for full security.
I think that feature is the killer feature of MW, it is the trait that allows it to scale to the limit of the trilemma, you don't even need a block size if the chain doesn't grow forever, the block size is limited by a function of block time and network latency and not by transaction size. But we have to have multisig and that kind of stuff to do anything more interesting than plain cash, so here we are. I hope we can figure out how to build something that has both and I can see no fundamental reason why it is not possible.
If you fear a community will attack you for asking reasonable questions or having a different opinion...
🚩🚩🚩
Bitcoin is not static. It represents power to the hodlr. Governments were destined to want it. RFL's proposal to use it as a backing for the dollar is only stating the inevitable. This changes nothing. Bitcoin is not defined by governmemts, its defined by who accepts it in commerce. Governments produce nothing, corporations produce nothing. Ultimately individuals determine what is a store of value, not banks and not a small group of billionaires.
The present limitations of bitcoin are designed to make it the optimally valuable limited resource in today's world. Transparency and simplicity is paramount to this purpose. Shitcoins are the collective toiletbowl where baselayer features can be proved or discounted. Layer twos enable some of these features in the meantime, though with some compromises. A government deciding to try implementing a layer two or three is not necessarily a bad thing. The first to do it in a credible way will dominate the future. Yes, politicians are slimy and we don't like them because they're all about trying to fix a system that cannot be fixed. Your instinct to move on from bitcoin in reaction is not misplaced. Just remember; not today, and not in 10,000 years: nobody changes bitcoin, bitcoin changes everything.
"Your instinct to move on from bitcoin in reaction" ... I didn't mean this literally. I was expressing how cringe the conference was. Clearly a lot of people took it literally an explained to me how bitcoin isn't the cringe circus around bitcoin. But I have a few brain cells still. I knew that.
I always find it interesting when bitcoiners get angry when Bitcoin is used by people they don't like or in ways they don't like.
That's the point.
It's as though they don't understand this technology at all.
Your enemies will use it in ways that you dislike.
That's a feature not a bug.
It's the equivalent of only supporting free speech for people you agree with. If that were the case we wouldn't need free speech.
People who think like this about bitcoin need to go do more work.
Bitcoin improves every day. How? The layers that are built on top of it. You can pick your poison; do you want more privacy? faster transactions?
there are other chains out there that are going different directions. some see themselves as a better alternative, some focus on other things.
Bitcoin is bitcoin 🤷♂️
If you want a more learning and discussing new ideas vibe, you should checkout Baltic Honeybadger (next month). It's been around for ages, and the content is focusesd on technical and learning for newcomers, none of this cringy politics shit.
NGU Conference.. GFY.
Sad to see these fiat clowns parading their degeneracy in a cloak of freedom, drunk off their time preference. 
I see Bitcoin merely as one bridge, one of the tools at our disposal to free ourselves from our masters.
There will be many bridges, all serving a different goal and pointing towards another destination.
NOSTR will tie it all together I guess.
nostr or the thing that replaces nostr, or the thing that replaces the thing that replaces nostr. Stay frosty
What you see there is a circus of fiat grifters and bitcoin has nothing to do with this clowns!
understood.
You know there are hundreds of other BTC conferences right? This is not a centralized event that controls all the other events lol.
Meshtastic
It was basically a shitcoin conference when I went in 2022, seems like its only gotten worse
That said bitcoin is agnostic to the conf. I think Bitcoin is still our best chance at having a globally adopted freedom money
Privacy coins
unironically:
there is no second best, ok?
there is no second best crypto asset
there's a crypto asset, it's called bitcoin. ok?
there is no second best
but also, read about bip300
Well, you already know that Bitcoin OGs and cypherpunks work on making digital cash a thing.
#Bitcoin as store of value is a mostly solved problem
#Monero as medium of exchange is just getting started and is fought by governments around the world
You can switch to monero no one cares
I've preferred dogecoin for like 10 years
american dream style.
just early majority things
There is still a sizable contingent of bitcoin cryptoanarchists and freedompunks. Most prefer the shadows and do not have large platforms. But we are here.
I see this.
Traditional Catholicism
You were probably never interested in Bitcoin, but were always a “Cultural Bitcoiner”. And that’s OK.
My post was mostly just about how cringe watching the conference feels to me. I don't personally think this reflects on bitcoin itself, but I express this because others might.
I use bitcoin all the time. I'm paid in bitcoin. II'm interested in bitcoin, but I can't spread my time so thin as to have developer-level technical knowledge of bitcoin, since I'm full up working on nostr.
As for the principles behind fixed money supply, fully distributed, no intermediaries, taking back control of our lives... I'm 100% interested and on board. But none of that necessitates this particular coin. And I haven't heard Bitcoin maxis make a solid argument for their coin versus other coins that are also proof-of-work and fixed supply. I've just heard it stated forcefully, devotedly, cult-like, that it is bitcoin and only bitcoin.
If a bitcoin maxi said something like "being the largest and the first mover means it has the best chance of changing society for the better, so we have to all get behind the same candidate token" I'd respect that argument. Or they could say "it needs to be bitcoin because I have a metric shitton of it and I want to be richer" I'd respect the honesty of that. But generally I just hear intense professions of cultish faith, which is also cringe to me.
‘Bitcoin Maxis” === Instant block! Whoops not on Twitter, INSTANT MUTE!
How I feel about society in general.. if I went id probably feel the same
It’s a mistake to judge Bitcoin culture by the behaviour of all the simps, scammers and generally stupid people who descend on to mega-conference cringe fests during the bull market. Look closely and you will see that the underground cyberpunks are still there, building, and they will be there when all the idiots wash out as the bear inevitably comes back.
understood.
Monero is the best alternative currently.
It does seem to be the 2nd most mentioned.
Private by default. CPU proof of work is more decentralized than ASICs. Monero has changed and will change the PoW algorithm again if needed to keep it that way. Tail emission of a fixed amount incentivizes miners to keep mining when fees are low, but the amount emitted will always decrease relative to the total amount existing.
agreed. but the people at a conference aren't bitcoin
Bitcoin is bigger
more important
purer
À. Zcash (Don't hate)
Okay, Bitcoin 2025. Ticket prices. WTF!! Savage twatz with such high prices. WHY??
The ₿ 'elites' excluding the man/woman on the street. Fukerz!! ₿ is for ALL. YOU fukerz r taking the PISS big time.
"HAWAII! JACK, WOULD YOU LIKE TO MEET IN LATVIA OR A SAFER COUNTRY; WOULD YOU PLEASE (SCREAMING!) WORK THIS OUT WITH WHOMEVER YOU HAVE TO, IMMEDIATELY?"
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“Stick it to the man”
Yeah but the man has discovered bitcoin ;(
Hi
Any valuable money network is inevitably going to become political and adopted by people you don’t like.
This was always going to happen with bitcoin. Sorry that you were naive to reality.
Monero
