My main concern has always been at the human layer. That future generations will just forget why any of this decentralisation stuff and immutability matters in the first place.

I am most concerned that Satoshi’s coins are owned by the CIA, they’ll eventually move, and it will shatter the immaculate conception narrative

Backdoors in the cryptography might be second

The security game theory as the block reward drops to zero would probably be third

Inheritance is still a nightmare. I'm an IT pro with security training. Designing a system that keeps my sats safe from theft but makes them available to my wife and kid if I get hit by a bus is still a challenge. I'm not happy with what I've built. I don't see great options around.

As an aside, I love this idea. Can't wait to see what everyone else says.

Always verify

I like the idea can’t always wear the rose coloured glasses.

This applies equally to both, but

1. I don’t see how PoW is more resilient in a war time scenario than PoS. Arguably PoS promotes diplomacy while PoW just promotes violence.

2. I’m not convinced that anyone in the bitcoin or crypto world will ever be capable of truly understanding and sympathizing with non-technical users. (Regarding things like key management mostly)

I am scared that bitcoin as money is too sound, and it's value will go up too high.

This is absolutely great!! 💯🔥

Scaling self custody globally will be near impossible. Second layers can scale transactions but not necessarily custody. If everything can always go back to settle on chain, then the only real self custody solution is scaling the utxo set.

But also I'm just stupid.

Perfect! 💯

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Coinless here; Sounds healthy to me, I have carptonnes of feedback but I lack the skill to discuss. Like I'm equally skeptic to Bitcoin and Fiat, but I think nostr is interesting. Where are my peers? :'|

This is great. It’s always in the dev list, bitcoin optech, and a few other avenues where you I have to hunt to get this sort of discussion. But it would be good to see it brought to the forefront more.

That’s a yes from me on this idea.

💯. If you can survive steelman arguments against your position, you're proving you're on the right path!

Love this idea.

I still don't think Bitcoin can survive a coordinated banking shutdown. But tbh I don't know much about the global banking system. There may be leaks around the world that allow flows into the corn.

The worst case scenario I can imagine is if bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency, and we don't improve the ease of very good privacy on the base layer, then thirsty bitches in my local area will find out the size of my stack and my penis would end up getting sucked right off my torso

P.S. realized I sent this right before I have to be AFK 😅

Will respond to as much as I can later, but have some good, engaging, nuanced, and calm discussion amongst yourselves 🤝

Wealth concentration with bitcoin hodlers. Will the average person actually benefit from bitcoin?

…I think yea, but still I’m a bit worried about what this could look like should bitcoin really take off

I don’t know how we’re going to thread the needle of keeping block space scarce yet enabling sovereignty for all. Trustless base chain access is a must.

Love this. Nostr is a great place for this.

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Great idea, thanks for doing this

Sometimes I worry because:

1. To use Bitcoin as a day to day currency, Lightning is absolutely fundamental. Whoever proposes on-chain transactions as the day to day transaction engine clearly does not pay a lot of things with Bitcoin and has never set up a retail store with it.

2. Using Lightning in a sovereign way is anything but easy. We can't expect the common folk to graduate in Systems Administration just to have a reliable payment medium.

So, combine 1 and 2 and we are either unable to scale Bitcoin as a currency or we can only do so through custodial options. I think this is a serious problem.

I'm hopeful that technology will appear to enable great experiences that are sovereign at the same time, but for now we can only throw people into Wallet of Satoshi and the likes.

Curious to see more points of view on this.

Bring it on. Can’t have a anti fragile system without attacking it from all angles.

Plus if there are weaknesses let’s get them out in the open and get to work.

Build, Deploy, Observe, Debate, Improve, Repeat.

Paper bitcoin is a major problem that can keep price and thus bitcoin’s perceived value down indefinitely imho

Your post is getting noticed.

Added to the https://member.cash/hot feed

Hyperbitcoinization is not a sure thing. Good ideas don't always succeed. If most people are not willing to take personal responsibility and self custody, they will always opt for "State" security over sovereignty. Even if the fiat State collapses, they will just comply with whoever else takes power by force after that.

I'll save my other skepticisms for the next threads.

I worry about paper markets, particularly once etfs are commonplace and once institutional money (that does not want to self custody) comes in hard.

We saw how ftx’s paper bitcoin games suppressed bitcoins price, I think we could have that on a much larger scale if self custody becomes less prevalent.

Good for bitcoin

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I worry bitcoiners aren’t doing enough to boot strap a circular economy. unless people can buy goods and services in bitcoin the movement will fail. I welcome the likes of silvergate and coinbase going down as I think long term it will be good for bitcoin. I am happy to see the dollar price flat to down during the transition. the point of bitcoin should be self sovereignty and a seizure and censor resistant SoV /P2P spending tool which can travel at the speed of light and anyone can participate in without permission by running a full node and mining. The vs USD NGU narrative is not useful and is heading potentially for a giant rug pull as US administration blocks liquidity. I also think “the institutions” came too early and would rather they lost interest in bitcoin. This needs to be a grass roots movement by the plebs for the plebs as we build an alternative system—brick by brick—which likely won’t really improve life for us materially (other than the joy of being engaged in meaningful work) but will potentially make life much better for our children and grandchildren.

Privacy in Bitcoin sometimes seems cumbersome at best, impractical at worst. This is one of the most serious risks to long term adoption in my opinion. In the future, coinjoined UTXOs may be red flagged at exchanges. Unless there's a realistic circular Bitcoin economy, this makes things much more difficult when needing to spend Bitcoin.

That and I think the best chance at adoption is education and making politicians become invested in Bitcoin's success. They won't ban what they are invested in.

I wonder if this ethic of "holding" and effectively removing money from circulation would in fact be very damaging economically if done on a large enough scale. As much as bitcoiners lambast fractional reserve banking, the access to liquidity it provides does serve a useful purpose.

Well this blew up! Will definitely keep doing this every Sunday, *great* conversations going on here and a lot of tricky topics being discussed.

Love it, and yet another sign of Nostr being an amazing community that isn't bathed in religious fervor but is able to think critically and engage with meaning and respect.

👥

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Great idea. Continued bitcoin adoption isn’t a sure thing. We need to be critical of things that can improve (eg privacy, self custody, etc.) Fortunately, there are a lot of bright and humble people in the space that want to do good for humanity rather than just pump their own bags (although there are some of them too).

One of my main concerns is a lack of privacy features, scaling on-chain issues and potential centralization factor of the Lightning Network.

On the privacy issue, you brought up some great points with #[2]'s podcast about UTXOs can leak info... Maybe this is something that can be solved at the wallet level?

The scaling issues when the network gets congested as it is now is also a concern... I'm not technical enough to even begin to understand that from an engineering POV... but I have had a lot of individuals reach out because they're worried they might not be able to afford to use on-chain and opening channels still requires a UTXO commit which comes with fees... I think they're really nervous about Ordinals and NFTs on-chain...

And this then bleeds into the concerns of LN, where a good portion of users are using Custodial solutions. #[3] brought up that users will tend to go to products that are much easier to use... I guess the issue is that not many people know about how LN works, the liquidity needs, and the privacy leaks on the receiving end... As you so famously shows people in your 5 min hack.

Just some things that I think about and have no clue where to even begin...

1. Quantum computers will crack private keys from public addresses. Obviously this means the rest of banking, the military and government, communications, and everything else are up for grabs too. However, people are working on making quantum-resistant solutions in those spaces. I'm worried that the Bitcoin developers are too few and too slow to develop a solution in time. Even if and when they do, if it requires all people holding Bitcoin to move their funds to a new wallet, that will have countless problems; just to start, lost wallets will become "known", conspiracies will abound and people won't know if they should trust the new protocol, and all lost or un-transferred funds will go to a single entity who could then control half of all Bitcoin (and what if it's China, and Bitcoin is worth 100mil USD and is the global reserve currency?). But then again, maybe it's just a normal fork.

2. Overhype. The "Internet of money" and "adoption will be just like the Internet" and "it's inevitable!"

DVD was "the future" and "the best image quality possible"... Until it wasn't.

You know what was poised to take over transportation? Segway.

The past is littered with short runs, unfulfilled fantasies, and cults of people sure about a specific thing happening in the future.

There are infinitely more things that *can* happen than you can imagine. As you get older, you see how few things happen as you expected, and usually, that's fine. The world doesn't end. And, usually, better technologies win out. Bitcoin is a great (and fun!) hobby for the young, but for the wise, diversification and hedges are necessary to minimize risk and maintain peace of mind.

The narrative NgU/ hyperbitcoinization at all cost are in my book the most dangerous aspects.

Bitcoin helps in becoming a sovereign individual.

But If the monopolist of force will adopt it too early, there will be a huge spectrum of social engineering to bitcoin usage, if the people have not gained more self-confidence

As seen with the plandemic

Possible vectors revolve around the permissionless use.

Yes, it will stay permissionless by design. But if state says I.e. you can use bitcoin, but within our „rails“ (quasi l2). using bitcoin outside of this layer is a crime, probably 98% of people will comply.

The only solution to this in my opinion is building tools and adopting circular economies.

It’s a race of time.

I’m skeptical that BTC will have meaningful fungibility because of the difficulty with obfuscating transaction sources and destinations. This visibility could be used as justification for reducing the value or seizing coins by regulating and law enforcement agencies because of their legacy in criminal activities. I have many of the same concerns about government issued digital currency.

Too late to party? The bitcoin community is growing memetically stagnant. It took an actual bitcoin adversary to give us one of the most prolific pieces of bitcoin art ever created. We need more punk rock, heavy metal, drugs, and skanks. If I had kids they wouldn't find us very cool.

Anti-bitcoin podcast in 3, 2, 1… fr this is good to discuss though. Someone should actually set up a podcast for this

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Great idea. Much needed. Be careful, you may be accused of FUD if you discuss any concerns or air any criticisms.

Love this idea, Seth. Will help the community become more resilient and self-aware. 🙏

I have some concerns I will acknowledge here, which I hope will not be dismissed as vile shitcoiner FUD.

1. There appears to be a fundamental and intractable tension between self-custody and scalability. Fedimint, for instance, has been proposed as a technique to scale Bitcoin to billions of users. But in so scaling, users must trust the custodians of their funds.

2. In my view, it remains to be seen whether the U.S. government will be able to interfere with mining. One potential attack is MIT's ChainAnchor, which Shinobi links to on the pinned post of his Twitter profile. In that attack, regulators offer payments to miners in exchange for complying with certain rules, such as enforcing anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing laws. This would be achieved by creating a separate blockchain called the "ChainAnchor" that would be used to make payments to compliant miners. The government would then "eliminate the remaining non-registered miners, making it impossible to use or mine Bitcoin without first registering your identity." See #[2] at https://petertodd.org/2016/mit-chainanchor-bribing-miners-to-regulate-bitcoin.

3. The time-warp attack, another scary if unlikely scenario that Shinobi brought to my attention. A 51% attacker can not only censor transactions: he can literally break the network by the difficulty and DDoSing all nodes. See https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/79892/what-are-forward-blocks. Shinobi argues, however, that this attack could be solved or at least mitigated via a soft fork.