Roger Ver posts a link to his tweet on r/btc, titles it "Zing!", then gets ratioed.

You love to see it.

I spoke at a big bitcoin-adjacent company this week and one of the best questions was from someone who asked what the downsides of bitcoin adoption might be.

I always do appreciate these steelman questions, the skeptical questions, the ones where we challenge ourselves. Only when we can answer those types of questions do we understand the concept that we are promoting.

So the classic example is that in modern economic literature, "deflation is bad". This, however, is only the case in a highly indebted system. Normally, deflation is good. Money appreciates, technology improves, and goods and services get cheaper over time as they should. Price of Tomorrow covers this well. My book touches on this too, etc. The "deflation is bad" meme is still alive in modern economic discourse and thus is worth countering, but I think in the bitcoin spectrum of communities, people get that deflation is fine and good.

My answer to the question was in two parts.

The first part was technological determinism. In other words, if we were to re-run humanity multiple times, there are certain rare accidents that might not replicate, and other commonalities that probably would. Much like steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity, and nuclear power, I think a decentralized network of money is something we would eventually come across. In our case, Bitcoin came into existence as soon as the bandwidth and encryption tech allowed it to. In other universes or simulations it might look a bit different (e.g. might not be 21 million or ten minute block times exactly), but I think decentralized real-time settlement would become apparent as readily as electricity does, for any civilization that reaches this point. So ethics aside, it just is what it is. It exists, and thus we must deal with it.

The second part was that in my view, transparency and individual empowerment is rarely a bad thing. Half of the world is autocratic. And half of the world (not quite the same half) deals with massive structural inflation. A decentralized spreadsheet that allows individuals to store and send value can't possibly be a bad thing, unless humanity itself is totally corrupted. I then went into more detail with examples about historical war financing, and all sorts of tangible stuff. In other words, a whole chapter full of stuff. I've addressed this in some articles to.

In your view, if you had to steelman the argument as best as you could, what are the scenarios where bitcoin is *BAD* for humanity rather than good for it, on net?

Consider,

Twitter could've implemented lightning tips, or honestly payments of literally any kind YEARS ago. But they didn't. Why?

#Nostr on the other hand has accomplished this in no time, and everyone who has experienced it immediately feels what a big deal this is... but why exactly?

Numerous features implemented in Nostr could've been on Twitter all this time.

• Do you think it's because they didn't want to?

• Was it too technically difficult, even though Nostriches pulled it off in a matter of days or weeks?

Of course not, it was POLITICALLY infeasible. Remember how Facebook spent *years* and bookoos of capital trying to create a *whole new currency* just to enable it because there was no chance of doing it with dollars? They were even dragged before Congress to explain why they would do such a thing as enable payments on social media! How dare they! It was easily squashed despite the fact that the list of those backing it was essentially a Who's Who of Silicon Valley fintech.

And what did the Twitter Files teach us? That not only would the suffocating regulatory environment make tips and payments on social media virtually impossible, but the political leviathan refused to even allow them to freely TWEET to their followers! Intelligence agencies were both *funding* social censorship & had direct communication channels to shut down people's accounts, shadow ban, & ensure that "unapproved" opinions simply can't travel through the network.

Like @#[0] said, "this has the power to monetize dissent." Consider the insane power of sharing an "unapproved" opinion to millions of people and being directly rewarded with 1000s, maybe 10s of thousands of private, instant payments while the post has unfiltered, free flow to every last user in the network.

No more "donation services" or "patreons" that take 10% and will preemptively shut down anything remotely against the establishment. No more Go fund Me's fuck stealing millions going to protestors to donate to a "charity of their choice." They are all immediately redundant & pointless.

Instead we are walking into a world with unfiltered, free flowing information and unfiltered free flowing money.

The simple fact is that no large, centralized social platform of any kind CAN do what Nostr does so easily. Because they have a gun to their head & they know it.

This is the 10x value add that is going to wake people up, and it's going to start with ALL the dissenters. We need to find all of them and bring them here.

The simple ability to have direct access to millions of followers, and be able receive payments and tips from them directly, unfiltered, untaxed, with no middle man & no authority whatever involved...

They are afraid as FUCK of that power. And they absolutely should be. Think of what a staggering problem the mere existence of someone like Joe Rogan has presented in the past couple of years. Now consider they attacked him through his network, his advertisers, his payment processors, and a huge targeted propaganda campaign (and fucking LOST despite, 🤣). Now think about the 1000s of others we watched get attacked, banned, deplatformed, canceled, etc...

–––––––––––––

Now imagine the past 3 years done over again, except without any of that being possible anymore...

Guys, we are right in the fucking middle of the revolution. It's right now.

⚡⚡🔥🔥

Just unsubscribed from Twitter Blue.

Everything nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx keeps telling us about that service is true.

It's deeply disturbing.

Nostr and Bitcoin are our hope people!

Imagine your government built upon open protocols that they can’t own, control, or manipulate…every interaction visible to all. What changes? What fails?