ELI5 how incentivizing institutional adoption results in "infecting the system and making it eat itself from the inside out"
(whatever that means)
and NOT regulatory capture of the network and de facto criminalization of sovereign usage.
Discussion
A new (to me) concern is that institutional/state control of a large percentage of utxo’s provides them an opportunity to use a subset of miners and effectively isolate those coins to their approved and kyc’d network. They just don’t broadcast txns outside their domain. A network fork I guess.
Andreas was talking about this sort of thing years ago
it seems unlikely to be valuable to create a walled garden within the network
but regulatory capture is a real thing
Interesting, I’ll watch this tonight. But right now, I think it’s uncomfortably likely. They don’t need to overpower the existing network. Once they have say 10 million to 14 million btc under control, they just start using a subset of nodes running their own validation filters. And only sending txns within their network. If they never spend to an unauthorized address then those coins are effectively lost to the existing/organic network. They use their own chain fork going forward. I guess the original network could keep going, but it would be stunted.
nostr:npub1lxzaxzge0jq9u9cecucctdt5lslwgp7hcxmp2l0wn8r2ecjenwasu6svxa bullseye. Yeah, that’s what I’m concerned about. I was also against etf’s for some of these reasons plus some or all of them are going to try the paper bitcoin game. Didn’t realize he was saying this 6 years ago though.
super smart dude
Institutional investors (particularly non-us ones) see bitcoin as a greater safe haven than treasury bills. Fiat goes to hyperinflation.
Because the system can’t print more bitcoin.
so early adopters become new 1%
yay
they don't have to print more bitcoin if 99% of users go through a financial institution and just own IOUs
Well those people can get rugged, idgaf. I’ll keep mine in cold storage
okay. how many people do that? how many people on earth can squirrel away a UTXO twice a year? under unrealistic laboratory conditions it's still less than the population of germany
Idk what you’re talking about. If everyone is using BTC, even if they are just reserve notes, then I will still be able to use real bitcoin
you are suffering from a delusion. none of your behaviors will protect you from the effects of debasement, fractional reserve banking, or UTXO discrimination until almost everyone else also adopts those exact same behaviors, and the technical limitations won't let them even if they decide to stop being stupid.
How does bitcoin not protect against debasement? How will they debase bitcoin?
I don’t think fraction reserve bitcoin banks will succeed in competition with full reserve banks. There is no benefit
you trust custodians not to issue too many IOUs for absolutely no reason, even though they have done it and been caught an uncountable times already, and custodians also did the same thing to precious metals.
WHY does bitcoin protect anyone from anything? because it's supposed to let you bypass a financial institution. if almost all of the users don't want to do that or cannot do it, it is the same as speedrunning what happened to the gold standard. this can only be avoided IF a network upgrade enables scalable self-custody and enough of the userbase takes advantage of it.
What happened with gold is that gold holders complied with government orders to relinquish their holdings. Do you think bitcoiner will do the same?
What do you mean “scalable self custody”? I could hold 1 million bitcoin on a single wallet if I had that much, and transaction fees are well below 1%
now you are just playing dumb. we both know what would happen if lots of people try to take possession of UTXOs at the same time. please don't try that stupid crap on me. and I'm not talking about the gold confiscations either but you can pretend I am if it helps you cope with bitcoin's excessive dependence on custodians.
Why would I take possession of a utxo if my BTC is in cold storage?
These arguments are too speculative. I'm not convinced that batched transactions can't scale the thing, and I'm not convinced that transaction fees will be too high, and I'm not convinced that there will be such a huge need for block space. Fees can go lower than 1 sat/vbyte. The blocks are probably already too big, IMO. It seems darn near perfect... Longer block intervals would be nice, but I don't see anyone raising that issue yet. Focus on the privacy issue - maximize the good that comes from the criticism. Imagine if we get this perfect scenario, where the institutions get so married to Bitcoin that they can't back out when we suddenly all start running a version that has getter privacy. Push for that...