A thing must be desired AND scarce to command a high price or value.
Of course there are many items that are important to our survival that are free. Fresh air & water for most of us in the rich countries is an example. Another example is the childcare worker who is paid low, yet their role to look after children is extremely important - arguably more so than being a plumber. Yet the plumber is often paid 3 times more than the childcare worker. Prices hence value are set by supply and demand.
The honest billionaires (that don't steal) have figured this out and specialize in offering value.
Therefore, billionaires are not taking a large share of the cake and making other people have to go with less. Billionaires are making the cake much larger for everyone.
Capitalism (small business & billionaires) have driven down prices drastically over the last 200 years. And this is why poverty is less than a tenth of what it was then.
***Making profit by offering value (not stealing) is one of the most ethical things one can do***
Also, since you were talking about ideas and reading books, let me start with some recommendations that say it much better than I can.
"The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith
"Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt.
"An Introduction to Value Theory" https://mises.org/library/introduction-value-theory (Mises Institute).
Not only does being a billionaire make sense but it is highly ethical to be one.
If someone has earned a billion dollars in assets by providing value to others (not by stealing), then by definition he or she has contributed a billion dollars more value to the world than what they have consumed.
If someone has more liabilities than assets then this person is not just broke or insolvent, but they have consumed more than they have produced.
Who is more moral? Who is more ethical?
Shitcoin
Shitcoin
Remember that the state is incompetent. Eg. The most oppressive powerful country on the planet, China, banned mining a few years ago. Yet China still has very significant hash rate.
The state, even the mighty US, cannot afford to control enough hash rate to censor transactions at scale for any significant length of time.
Bitcoin mining is the most competitive business Vs the State which is the most wasteful organisation on the planet. Difficult for them to win that one.
Tough question and my answer is pure speculation. I think the next war won't have anything to do with the bitcoin protocol itself.
Some soft fork proposals and methods of activation will continue to be contentious but not a biggie in the overall scheme of things. Also not widely known but there is at least one hard fork in bitcoin's distant future (block number 5101541 in 86 years) which I won't get to see unfortuantely... but that is another story.
The next attack IMO will be from the state or through their proxies. Such as:
- closing or restricting on-ramps to #Bitcoin using FTX & other scams as an excuse to introduce legislation to "protect" us.
- increasing electricity prices for miners
- attempting to censor transactions
- legislation targeting Bitcoin hodlers to disclose their stack addresses
- legislation targeting Bitcoin hodlers with unrealized capital gains tax consequences
- psychological attacks such as writing more articles describing ppl who hodl #Bitcoin as "Impulsive psychopaths are drawn to Bitcoin and other crypto"
- low probability 6102 attack but perhaps some countries will try
- CBDCs are more of a #Bitcoin promotion and getting normies used to the idea of digital wallets
Many of the above are highly highly speculative. But ultimately any or all of these attacks will make #Bitcoin stronger and if anything accelerate #Bitcoin use and adoption. The mining ban in China was a perfect example.
What are your thoughts? Where do you speculate that the next attack will come from?
Yeah that is really neat I agree.
The fact that #Bitcoin can be used by your enemies and truly evil people as well as freedom loving hard working people is truly liberating. Here's why.
First of all #Bitcoin gives you the irrevocable right to your money. It is a neutral tech, & doesn't care how moral or heinous you are.
Would you critize the gold asset class because it was effectively used by the Nazis? Of course not. Gold was the best tech to store value across time in the 1940s.
Today, #Bitcoin is used by truly monstrous evil people as well as honest hard working mums and dads because it is the most effective tool to store and transmit wealth that has ever existed.
But here's the silver lining--in a society where strong private property rights are enforced for all, freedom is far more powerful and productive than tyranny. And #Bitcoin is the trojan horse that allows normal plebs like me to enforce our private property rights.
States that remain on a centrally controlled fiat money standard will flounder and fail like North Korea.
But groups of people who use a truly sound money to store and trade will flourish and thrive and outcompete their fiat money Neanderthal cousins.
Instead of left vs right it should be
Freedom vs tyranny
Both the left and the right are bumping up against the tyrannical end of the scale.
Ultimately
More government=tyranny
Less government=freedom
A more accurate meme would represent crypto as a parasitic worm hanging onto the log instead of a smaller version of dog.
Agree. Yes how did Satoshi get Bitcoin so right? Even after he combined so many existing discoveries like proof of work & linked chain of database blocks, he added in the difficulty adjustment. On top of that the numbers he chose were near perfect, including blocks targeting 600 sec, 1mb block limit, 2016 block difficulty adjustment period, 210,000 block halving leading to 21 M bitcoin total.
Changing any of these numbers would be similar to changing the charge of an electron, or the strength of gravity. Our universe would drastically change forever.
Thankfully these numbers cannot changed.
Although there is one hard fork in the distant future for bitcoin, but that is for another time.
Fantastic article. It's spot on!
The only shocking thing are the many replies to #[1] s post saying meh or no big deal.
I'd take a bet that most of these ppl have never read Orwell, Mises or Rothbard.
A society with Strong Private Property rights at it's foundation is where I want to live. This is why I keep all of my wealth in Cold Storage Bitcoin because it is truly mine.
Try putting your question to the GrapheneOS off topic telegram group. Someone might be able to give you the name of a good hardware repair person.
And yes the inbuilt GrapheneOS backup works very well. I use it along with the brilliant opensource "syncthing" to sync in realtime my photos and Keepass over my private tailscale network.
Thank you Paul really appreciate my first zap you are too kind. I have zapped you back 500 sats.
Unfortunately I have stuffed up somewhere with my setup because your zap hasn't turned up in my wallet. I will do some homework on the weekend and figure out where I went wrong.
It's people like you who really help newbies like me that will make nostr and bitcoin successful. Thank you v much.
This Saturday at the Sydney Bitcoin Alive conference will be my first time meeting a group of Bitcoin-only people & I honestly can't wait.
Any conference do and don't tips you can give?
I'm keen to make connections and start a Bitcoin-only group in Cairns.
Thank Paul, I'll set up an lnurl this weekend cheers
This is such an interesting question.
If the alien civilization published a single block (at the leading tip of the chain) with 100 leading zero bits, it demonstrates they channeled more than 2^20 times or roughly 1 million times the amount of energy in the entire bitcoin hashing network into that block or roughly 1000 times the total electricity output of humanity (assuming bitcoin consumes 0.1% of total world electricity).
It also shows that the aliens want us to know how powerful they are and that they exist since they could have simply mined a winning block with not as many leading zeros. More interestingly it demonstrates that they mined that block within close proximity to us; at most, 5 - 10 light minutes away.
I would start by waiting to see if they published more similar blocks and hence try to adjust the difficulty upwards by a lot.
If not, I would put a message in one of the subsequent blocks asking to establish trade and communication with the aliens. Any race that can channel this much energy into this calculation must have invented their own version of sound money that can't be fucked with. This answer hasn't begun to scratch the surface of the consequence of an event like this happening though.