I was debating writing a book, but the more I thought about it and the appropriate name for it, I'm wondering it you are writing it or would write it😅

"Fixing Money"

People don't understand systems. We need a book that takes systems like Bitcoin and compares it to Gold and other existing financial systems of today including ones that work and ones that do not based on fundamentals like you mention in the OP.

Lightning is the equivalent of Banking settlement and transfer relationships. Liquid is the digital equivalent of Hawala which has a place. People don't understand this because they don't see how it all looks at scale.

People get all up in arms about the dream of P2P electronic cash but they don't realise most people don't care and they just want things to work. that will require developers and service providers on a sound money that is simple on the base layer and isn't compromising for somewhat arbitrary features. If we're engineering a new car, let's keep the parts that work based on historical experience. As the market evolves we will eventually find out how many demand certain solutions like custody with less counter party risk etc. We currently don't even know how many will desire certain things because money is misunderstood as it is and the few that are in it now are clearly different than your average fiat minded person.

Other ideas:

At scale, no one will ever have a L1 Hot wallet.

Phoenix is cute but it's silly to run a bank from your phone that shuts down every time it's not running.

I could go on and on, but I'm sure you understand it even better than I do. There are also missing pieces like a delayed settlement and credit system that allows for people to but things and a trusted third party to handle disputes from both sides like Visa. People will need to get used to seeing the fees associated with services because nothing is hidden like the systems of today, but the fees are lower overall. People spend time developing solutions that are only a transitional problem instead for designing for when every sat is a dollar.

Would you write this?

It's very hard to get this point across. And I feel like I fail most of the time.

What's the point of having "money for everyone" if only a third of the people on Earth can afford to use it in its decentralized form.

Just like the current banking system, only the rich will have real access.

Bitcoin fees are currently only a dollar, but niche programmers are suggesting to change the fundamental nature of bitcoin and increase its attack surface to make it more scalable… for people who don’t necessarily know or understand the trade offs of that scaling.

Scaling is an important discussion, but everything is a trade off. I like many of the scaling discussions, but rushing them is another matter.

It costs me $100 to buy a 1oz gold coin by mail, or to send signed documents internationally in a few days. Verification is expensive.

The idea that global monetary verification should be super cheap inherently comes with security trade offs.

All ideas should be evaluated carefully and come to major consensus. Otherwise change proposers risk a fork war.

Pretty great Northern lights display at the lake last night. Supposed to be even better tonight.

not really. it's a solution to improve scaling and privacy. it makes sense but there are tradeoffs.

Unless there's something in the code that limits this, there's no reason why it couldn't. I'm sure I saw an approach to a proof of reserves for a mint somewhere.

The largest #bitcoin known holder (Saylor/MSTR) is anti-Medium of Exchange.

We're going to make it a MoE anyway.

Are you prepared for over 1% of the supply to be dumped on the market causing a 90% fiat price drop? I am.

We need to shake all these Wallstreet suit retards off.

The blocksize war wasn't so much about the blocksize (or, even, scaling Bitcoin). It was really about who controls the consensus rules and how we upgrade the protocol.

For context, a bunch of startups raised tons of money between 2013 and 2016 based on ridiculous user sign-up projections and then we had a long and painful bear market and they were looking for scapegoats (the developpers that were "throttling the network") to justify the lack of growth. I am thinking here specifically of Coinbase, Bitpay and Blockchain.info.

The vibe I got is that they thought of Bitcoin itself as a corporation, that they were the equivalent of Bitcoin's board of directors because they represented the interest of VC investors, and thus they were entitled to decision making power over the network.

I don't doubt that a few people were genuine about scaling p2p e-cash (e.g. Roger Ver) but I suspect what really motivated them is that they believed control of the Bitcoin network would be an asset to their business interests, and lack of control was being used as an excuse to why their interests weren't being satisfied.

There was also a bunch of developers that I believe may have been afraid of losing their relevance (Gavin and Garzik specifically). Regardless of their intentions or psychology, it seemed clear to me that the consortium of vc-backed startups (particularly Bitpay, Coinbase, blockchain(.)info and Roger) had picked a team of developers they thought they could control and wanted to appoint them as a technical management team whicn would execute their strategy, and these guys were willing to step up for that role.

I was physically in the room when the CEO of Blockchain.info (with the very obvious support of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong) announced that Bitcoin Core devs were being fired and would be replaced. This was after a couple days of failed discussions with other industry people. This was the moment when I realized what was really going on.

And finally, you had a Bitcoin mining giant (Bitmain) controlling both asic production and mining pools with a vested interest in promoting the idea that Bitcoin was a democracy and the way to vote was to buy hashing power. The main ideology being pushed here was that a formal governance mechanism of the protocol needed to be established and that hashrate was the only objective measure of who makes decisions.

The underlying big blocker ideology was that the chaos of spontaneous consensus of nodes is unpredictable, flimsy, bad for business. The absence of a formal governance process was seen as the root cause of the issue.

These companies really believed they could control the protocol, and controlling development of the protocol was seen as a very valuable asset to your company. I imagine they thought of themselves as the founders of a new consortium that would solidify itself into a permanent institution. The business interests would pay developers and set the goals, and the mining interests would ratify their decisions with hash power voting. That was their plan.

This became blatantly obvious when Bitmain used its refusal to activate segwit as leverage to get what it wanted (a blocksize increase and recognition of its hashpower as a vote mecanism) even though Bitmain iself acknowledged it was not really opposed segwit.

It was classic traditional politics: I'll give you segwit if you give me something in return.

This is the language the VC suits, investors and tech startup people understand and they were very happy to "negotiate" and find "consensus".

This eventually materialized into the New York Agreement, negotiated literally as a backroom deal during theConsensuss shitcoin conference. I was there and I refused to attend.

This (private) meeting consecrated the alliance of startups/investors and bitcoin mining interests in their appointment of a technical management committee. If you think this sounds like Jekyll Island, you're not alone.

They packaged segwit with a blocksize increase (Segwit2x) and decided to force a hard fork as a condition to "allow" us to have Segwit.

We know the rest of the story: we ended up activating anyway via UASF (or more precisely, the miners activated Segwit after they New York Agreement signatories became scared UASF would lead to a chain split which they were going to lose). And the blocksize increase was also abandoned shortly after when they realized their hard fork would cause a chain split and that they would not be able to claim that their new shitcoin is the real bitcoin.

All these people were subsequently were very pissed off they couldn't control the network, which they thought they were entitled to. Some ragequit, others created a bunch of shitcoins out of spite, Roger went on to spearhead BCH as the real Bitcoin, all these fools realized they might as well make some money off of it, everyone went all-in on the shitcoin casinos after that. The "small blockers" eventually went on to evolve into the Bitcoin Maximalists and cypherpunks that today tell you to run your own node and own your own keys.

#gmprotocol

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Two things that we're building:

- There are going to be Cashu mints that will only be reachable via Nostr. They won't have IP addresses but npubs.

- There are going to be Cashu wallets that synchronize state across devices via nostr. No cloud.

Not everyone will like this but it doesn't matter because it can't be stopped.

both of the areas you mention, mining & wallets, we’re working on

I’d like to see how many of those “happy-to-pay” suckers would pay if the TAXES were VOLUNTARY

Collaborative transactions, off chain transactions, ecash transactions.

Why are you not self hosting your zap / lightning address?

Respectfully, the answer to misguided Bitcoin maximalism is not misguided Monero maximalism.