One day, it would be nice to see a well-capitalized challenge to the Bank Secrecy Act on 4th amendment grounds.

The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they saw that people need a license to transmit money, or that the government thinks it has the right to surveil and censor everyone’s money and transactions.

The default is privacy. To infringe on someone’s privacy should require probable cause and come with checks and balances. Ubiquitous surveillance shouldn’t be the default, since it enables tyranny.

Yeah I love this explanation. I've started to think of ethereum etc as companies with shareholders rather than anything related to money.

The bitcoin white paper explaining POW is relatively easy to read and reason about, even if working out how things will actually play out in reality might not be. I've yet to see anything similar for a POS consensus mechanism. It just inherently seems more complex and for that reason I'm out.

How to reply to a PoS shitcoiner:

PoS has been around for thousands of years, it's nothing new. Government money is proof of stake, as are company shares.

Egyptians, Romans, and Chinese were using this 2000+ years ago. Italian city states perfected it 800 years ago. Stake based systems are not new.

Using stake to solve the Byzantine General's Problem is also not new. Cypherpunks have been working on this shit since the late 80s.

The cypherpunks on the mailing list (that Satoshi sent the white paper to for peer review) are literally the people who created the *entire body cryptographic of work* used by proof of stake coins today (stake based byzantine fault tolerance). They are well aware of the fundamental limitations of stake based BFT because they are ones who came up with it in the first place...

If Bitcoin was proof of stake *you would never have heared of it* because it wouldn't have survived 5 minutes of peer review by any real cryptographers.

Time-based difficulty-adjusted PoW *is* the breakthrough and is the *only* reason you and anyone has ever heard of a "blockchain".

The failure modes of stake based BFT are well known, and it fails *every time* for a number of reasons, but if you are betting on a shitcoin to increase in value then the failure mode will probably involve the fact that stakeholders have an incentive to increase the supply to benefit from the cantillion effect.

Mathematical fact: you cannot deploy external capital to defend a system that is secured by internal history (stake). This is why stake based BFT does *not* secure against attack by a state or central bank, which means *anything* secured by PoS MUST comply with governments.

Bitcoin's value proposition is that Bitcoin let's you do things that bankers and governments *don't want you to do*. If bankers and governmensts can nuke your shitcoin, then you do what they say or they nuke it.

What's the value proposition beyond CBDCs if your shitcoin ultimately has to comply with governments and bankers?

You cannot out-stake a bad actor who has aquired sufficient stake to fuck with the system, your only option is to fork them out. Then it becomes a competition between charismatic personalities convincing the market to follow their authority (their fork) instead of the other guy.

So how do you solve the problem of removing a bad actor without requiring some form of authority? Read the Bitcoin white paper. Satoshi knew exactly how stake based systems fail, that's *exactly* why he used proof of work instead.

A common expression I’ve heard from boomers is “I want the last check I write to bounce”.

Meaning I am not planning on leaving anything for anyone, I’m going to spend it all on me and my temporary desires.

Many individual boomers are good people, but as a whole they were a bad generation, perhaps one the worst to yet exist in American life.

Meanwhile, on Bluesky………

I really love this. Who's building it?

I just almost drop a loaded barbell on my face 😅