🚩 False Dichotomies
1. “A network is either permissionless or authoritarian. Open or closed. Censorship-resistant or censored.”
✘ False dichotomy.
• Networks exist on a spectrum: some are semi-open (e.g. federations, permissioned blockchains, P2P overlays).
• Permissionlessness can also be partial (open to connect, but with rate limits or whitelists).
• “Authoritarian” is a rhetorical label — most systems balance openness with practical controls.
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🚩 Spam & Security Assumptions
2. “Open networks inevitably run into spam and impersonation.”
✘ Misleading.
• True they are vulnerable, but mitigations exist beyond just PoW: rate limits, staking, identity attestations, proof-of-human systems.
• Saying “inevitable” ignores 30+ years of real-world open systems like email (with spam filters, DKIM, reputation systems).
3. “Sybil attacks, DDoS attacks, resource exhaustion… can only be solved via PoW + WoT.”
✘ Wrong.
• Proof-of-Stake, proof-of-space/time, trusted hardware, economic bonding, and many other mechanisms also mitigate sybils.
• Web-of-Trust (WoT) has historically failed to scale (PGP being the canonical example).
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4. “I include sats in this equation implicitly, because sats are just difficulty-adjusted PoW.”
✘ Wrong.
• Sats are ledger entries, not work itself. The work (hashing) secures the chain; it doesn’t imbue the units with intrinsic PoW that can be “re-spent” elsewhere.
• PoW isn’t portable: you can’t reuse Bitcoin’s PoW to defend against email spam, DDoS, or sybils. The work is consumed once in block validation.
• Claiming sats = PoW overstates what they can do outside the Bitcoin ledger.
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🚩 Identity & Money Claims
5. “Identity has to be cryptographic, which means taken and defended, as opposed to given.”
✘ Overstated.
• Cryptographic keys = control, but most identity in practice is socially anchored (governments, institutions, web-of-trust attestations).
• Purely cryptographic identity (keys alone) fails when keys are lost, stolen, or reset.
6. “Money has to be bearer instrument … cash, not credit.”
✘ Misleading.
• Most modern money is credit-based (bank deposits, treasuries). Bearer instruments (cash, gold, crypto) exist but are not the only form of “money proper.”
• This is more of a philosophical preference than a factual truth.
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7. Keys and sats have the power to usher in a new era of the internet.”
✘ Overclaim.
• Keys already underpin the internet (TLS, SSH, DNSSEC). They don’t, by themselves, fix spam, identity, or governance.
• Sats are not a generalized anti-spam tool. Even with protocols like bithash on nostr, using payments as a universal rate-limit is impractical: too costly for normal use, easy to bypass via custodians, and risks centralizing around payment hubs.
• Cryptographic signing ≠ trust. Signing proves a message came from a key, but not that the key belongs to who you think, or that the content is truthful. Saylor’s “private-key identity” vision collapses without external social/organizational anchors.
• In short: keys + sats can improve certain systems, but they cannot alone restructure the whole internet.
8. “The Web is dead. Long live the web.”
✘ Rhetorical flourish, but misleading.
• The Web is evolving (Web3, federated services, p2p overlays). It’s not “dead,” just changing.
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✅ In short:
• He sets up false dichotomies (“open or authoritarian”).
• Misrepresents sats as “just PoW.”
• Ignores non-PoW solutions to spam and Sybils.
• Treats WoT as viable at scale when history shows otherwise.
• Frames bearer-money-only as a necessity when in reality credit money dominates.
• Declares “Web is dead” for rhetorical drama, not accuracy.
