I agree with you in the sense that all macro patterns in complex systems are meta stable. And no system will survive forever. My disagreement comes from that abandoning incrementalism and suing for compete revolution is profoundly dangerous given the complexity of modern states, modern economies and the modern world.

We agree that these breakdowns are often associated with war. But I disagree that money can be a limiting factor -- especially for say a great power conflict. Governments can just nationalize supply chains and defense production directly. They don't HAVE to go into debt to sustain a war. And if the war is considered to be existential, it's likely this is what they'll do. In fact, the US already had laws on the books that give the president expansive authority to seize control of production in the presence of a real or apprehended war -- the Defense Production Act, for example.

So I get my back up against the wall when people suggest something like Bitcoin can bend us away from these kinds of risks because of any discipline they think it can impose on governments, in this sense.

I'm willing to concede that wars like Iraq in 2003, conducted at the height of America's unipolar moment, within a largely peacetime framework of government debt and spending, could potentially have been attenuated if the public had felt the effects of that more directly, as you pointed out on WBD.

But I think existential wars are different. The rules change. The government can just force industry into a wartime economy and use production nationalization as a tool, if necessary. Which happened under FDR in WWII.

Truth is some people don’t want sovereignty. Glad we have the option and tools to be sovereign tho even if only a minority will care about using them

Same for national regulators.

No mention of Layer 2 in their publications, no mention of non custodial mixers.

They think Bitcoin is slow, traceable and inefficient (pre 2015 era bitcoin).

When regulators realise how fast the target they are trying to hit is actually moving - they are going to panic.

The fact that Bitcoin isn't yet accepted everywheree and for everything really underlines for me how few people have actually used Lightning. Whenever I show somebody how it works, there's always that "wow" moment. But why was it a surprise?

The problem is that normal people still understand BTC from the one half-remembered opinion piece they read in 2017, and are operating under the belief that transactions still take an hour to settle, rather than being instantaneous and irreversible — money transmission without the Paypal Problem. The public mind needs a cache refresh.