Subnostr

The main reason why, as a non-techie person but as someone who has a fairly good grasp on economics and philosophy, I am all-in on BTC (in terms of storing my long-term wealth), is that I GET IT.

Unlike cryptoassets that want to "improve" on BTC, which I just don't GET if I look at them from the same perspective: is this a sound store of wealth? And it doesn't look like it.

The question then becomes: if they're not a sound store of value like BTC is, what are they supposed to DO?

I know the cynical BTC-only answer already ("They're all scams"), but I think it is partially true only. Some, well, most "crypto" are outright scams, there's no doubt. But I'm ready to give the benefit of the doubt to some projects, even if I KNOW that the result is going to be the same: centralization and, thus, not a sound, safe, permanent store of my financial freedom.

Having stated my good will then, to reiterate: what is ETH supposed to DO?

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Discussion

allen 2y ago

I find the most charitable interpretation that assumes good faith is they are test nets for potential future bitcoin features and apps, whose technical contributors are unwittingly being milked by fraudsters.

a surprisingly large proportion of the technical bitcoin founders I speak to have only very slight variations of essentially the same story: “I got into eth first, played around, had a great idea, tried to implement it, couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working, in the meantime learned more about economics, finance, energy, and distributed systems” (i.e. the problems bitcoin actually solves), eventually saw the light, and here I am.”

hh 2y ago

BTC founders that were into ETH first? 🤔

But I understand -- developers who went onto building stuff on Ethereum because they found it easier or more flexible (?), but then they realized the incentive/economic structure was wrong, and decided to take the technical trade off and move over to BTC.

But still I was asking a very literal low level question: what is it they want to build? Payment rails? A more complex financial layer, enabled by smart contracts?

I think the issue is that too many people are trying to make BTC do stuff it just won't do (or won't do well).

Namely, a form of electronic petty cash, which I find incompatible with what BTC really is. I understand that even Satoshi seemed to at least partly present BTC as electronic cash, but I think in the end all the other things he design it for supercede tbis function.