would monopolies on violence be difficult to maintain in a hyper-bitcoinized world?

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No, the total fees are higher than the total supply of bitcoin 🐶🐾🫡🤣

Interesting block, note the max fee 🐶🐾🤣🤯

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?

Im not trading my zappy Damus for adjustable font Damus.

I will never update Damus until the TestFlight timer runs out.

Wow. What an update! An integrated Nostr relay running on your phone? 👀

Hey Vitor...

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I guess that’s what most ppl do

nostr:npub… should work in most cases

To orange pill my friends I have a good idea:

I would like to tell my friends to start saving Bitcoin as a savings plan now. I offer to buy their Bitcoin at the purchase price after a year of stacking if they still don't want them. Unfortunately, I can't afford this idea, as I'm already saving all my money in Bitcoin. 🤣

You all have a glorious Zapathon. I gotta go run 🏃🏻‍♂️ I'll Zap all replies in an hour. ⚡

There is nothing wrong with HODLING but if you are able to send zaps, spend sats at merchants (and ideally replace what you’ve spent) I think you should as much as you can. We need every bitcoiner using the lightning network consistently. A lot of bitcoiners I’ve met don’t have lightning wallets and I think using the lightning network is the key to the circular economy. nostr:note1hexc3zkxt4ksslvgkzslr224qq25xxc4j65d69p5pp8sz0wvfrfq53fws2

IT'S OVER GUYS.