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It depresses me how little does digital personal sovereignity actually matter in reality... I suspect I feel this way because both markets and political powers are rapidly moving away from individuals to collectives and states again.

I suspect digital sovereignity will increasingly only mean the national sense.

I also suspect that most productivity will shift away from the Internet and into physical production,granted most of that is heavy on software, but software isn't the same as the web.

Which means, Bitcoin wallets will matter less while Bitcoin vaults would matter more.

Yes there will still be entertainment and gaming and tons of money to be spent on that, but if the productivity comes from the state and heavy industries, then money will be increasingly handouts of stable coins for social welfare ... And you don't get digital sovereignity or digital rights at all when your cooperation with the state doesn't matter.

I am afraid that the world will become increasingly hierarchical, and investment in physical networks will matter way more than creating one more digital tool.

I hope I am wrong and individuals or at least networks of internet natives manage to survive and thrive going forwards.

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Discussion

Nuh 4mo ago

Bitcoin will remain valuable if only because elites everywhere want the fresh printed money but don't want to hold it for long, and Bitcoin is a good asset to save at.

But that is orthogonal to freedom. If the internet is not productive, its freedom will be hard to defend.

Niel Liesmons 4mo ago

That last line :scoresoccer:

4166899d... 4mo ago

> Bitcoin is a good asset to save at.

Not entirely disagreeing but I want to see your reasoning. Is it the digital scarcity, or the cross border transfer nature of BTC? Why only BTC and not something else? Be it a digital asset or a physical like gold?

Nuh 4mo ago

Bitcoin is better than Gold in every way, the real competition are stocks, real estate and bonds ... And if you trust the power structure, they are good enough.

Bitcoin is basically a global index fund minus the political and legal concerns. So it will always have a place in portfolios, I guess where physical gold previously dominated.

But I don't take that for granted either, it is possible for Bitcoin to do such a horrible job at censorship resistance that you can no longer sell significant amounts without legal permission, in which case it becomes useless compared to gold.

As for other digital assets (shitcoins) they may always exist, but can they survive a brutal crackdown? You don't get censorship resistance by accident, in fact despite all Bitcoin efforts an optimisation for censorship resistance it is still not guaranteed, so what chance do you have if it wasn't your No1 priority.

In fact USDT is already sucking the air away from all other assets, because... If you don't care about censorship resistance... Might as well get USD IOUs and in fact USDT is moving to custom L1s because if you don't care about censorship resistance why bother with somewhat distributed blockchains at all.

See what I am saying? There are two stable ends; censorship resistance and scale, anything in the middle will die.

4166899d... 4mo ago

Very well put Nuh, USDC is indeed taking a major share of the pie. It had somewhat the same volume as Visa last year IIRC and is stable / useful for the most general public.

Nuh 4mo ago

They quite literally will become the CBDC without the political baggage, and if you read the plans for that, it didn't plan for absolute friction with KYC ... They plan to make it as convenient as digital Blockchain tokens, but the choke the off-ramps with KYC.

This way, everyone is inside the system, and can't easily leave, and when that is complete they may or may not make it as shitty as banks again requiring full KYC for every transaction.

Either way, until the adoption is complete it will feel just as good and free as Ethereum so why not.

Again, the problem isn't that these options exist, but it is that most people will be paid that way, so you won't be able to make money otherwise, because ain't no one has any money elsewhere because no one is productive, everyone is getting handouts from the state that runs the productive sectors.

So my problem can't be solved with Bitcoin, it can't be solved unless the internet magically managed to stay productive in the age of big AI and big Robots.

FLASH 4mo ago

I intended to zap you for this text

Nuh 4mo ago

Thanks, the sentiment is enough.

Dee 007 4mo ago

I think people would prefer it. They just dont know how. And there is also misinformation.

Nuh 4mo ago 💬 1

I am not sure about that, mainly because there isn't much to do on the internet anymore anyways that is worth the fight.

Fwiw, direct communications will remain free, stuff like Signal, which I value tremendously.

But already most of Bitcoiners don't have no-kyc jobs, so whether or not they are making money online doesn't matter, they are making money within the hierarchical permissioned system.

So what remains? Entertainment. Ok does it fucking matter if Twitter is centralized? You would rather be on the beach anyways, so who cares if your digital identity is permissioned, when there is very few digital stuff you would like to access anyways.

People want to touch grass, and sovereign digital identity doesn't matter in that regard.

Maybe if we had the Metaverse by now, but we don't.

Dee 007 4mo ago

Entertainment matters alot. There should be a viable alternative to twitter, but, more importantly to the other entertainment and media giants. Then people need to understand how to use it. No one has built that yet, but hopefully it will come soon.

Nuh 4mo ago

Why do the people need an alternative to Twitter or Netflix?

Digital sovereignity and freedom of expression truly doesn't matter when you are not productive nor politically organised and wholly dependent on the state to provide you with welfare or fake employment.

My point is if you are powerless in real life you are powerless on the internet too.

Azz 4mo ago

News, the more hierarchical the faker mainstream news needs to be.