So many nocoiners always say they missed the boat with bitcoin. Should have got in at 2011.

All utter nonsense. Such a dreadful fiat mindset. We are still so early, sats are ridiculously cheap right now.

In reality hardly anyone was here in 2011. The actual reality would be more 2015 and those who were here and got it deserved it. And only if they still hold it.

The real test is stacking with a bitcoin mindset. That is the true visionary. It is the future of your time and energy in purchasing power stored with sats.

All of the great changes in History you missed out on, well here you are in the early stages of the greatest paradigm shift of all time. Step back and take a look. You’re right in it. 🔥

Your opinion is misinformed.

Monero is already today the money used underground, by those same people who used bitcoin in the early days.

You will have privacy, and you will be happy.

Monero is not only separated from the state. It’s separated from the entire economy at large. It is not separating The Money from the state tho. Monero is not The Money and never will. Bitcoin can be.

Thank you for this response. I will lean into learning 0xChat

Monero has its utilities, mostly as a stop gap for privacy transactions. But it has little chance to become the world’s store of value, medium of exchange, adefacto of account. To do so it requires a market cap and liquidity large enough such that there’s small enough volatility to be half of all of the world’s transactions. Its simply not happening.

Monero is the short time preference version of Bitcoin where it cannot wait for price stability and privacies properties to emerge. These properties are slow to emerge on Bitcoin because of the need to be a ‘sly and roundtable way to introduce something they can’t stop’. In fact, Monero is effectively slowed, if not already stopped, because its simply not sly enough. Monero is the idealistic but impossible perfect that is in the way of the practical and already working good that is Bitcoin.

Medium of exchange and privacy properties will continue to improve on Bitcoin, at a rate that will not overly alarm, and effectively penetrate the authoritarians. Only Bitcoin has a chance to truly separate money from the state and become the one defacto money for humanity.

Their were and are cypherpunks that work(ed) inside the system

Bitcoin is the capstone on 4 *decades* of innovation and experimentation .. and it is the foundation for decades more that we’re already seeing start to emerge:

- Liquid

- Lightning

- eCash

- Nostr

Ignorance of the history leads also to the fallacy of “version 2 will be better” which the altcoin promoters feed on

Fundamentally, and i speak as someone coming from a technical background, the most important aspect to learn is that Bitcoin’s innovation is economic (verifiable absolute digital scarcity), not technical.

Then technical innovation is impressive but only in so far as it enables the actual economic innovation

🤝

Most people who I know that think the CIA invented bitcoin, are not very familiar with the pre-history of Bitcoin including work by Back, Szabo, Finney, etc.

I'm not saying that certainly no intelligence agency created Bitcoin, but rather, I'm very skeptical of the certainty that many people have around that topic.

Because, when you are somewhat familiar with that pre-history and look at it from an engineering perspective, you can clearly see the pieces gradually falling into place. In the1980s there was work by Chaum about how to build a database run by mutually suspicious entities. In the 1990s there was work by Back for proof-of-work. As things moved into the 2000s, there was Szabo's Bit Gold, which is very similar to what Bitcoin ended up being, and Finney's Reusable Proof of Work "RPOW" tokens. Finney hadn't solved the centralization issue, and Szabo hadn't solved the issue of better computation causing supply inflation over time, but they were collectively within shooting range of the solution. Others as well. Meanwhile global bandwidth was getting better, encryption in general was getting better (and there we've got an actual intelligence agency contribution), etc.

And then Satoshi added to that work, including the difficulty adjustment in particular and many other details, with a full implementation.

Basically, if someone thinks that Bitcoin just kind of magically came out of nowhere, then it's pretty easy to see how they'd be inclined toward a conspiratorial assumption.

However, if one sees that, just like any other industry, there was a series of engineers building on each others' work until someone finally got it over the line, then it looks a lot more organic.

Yeah, SimpleX definitely has it's UX issues

I didn’t know this was a thing. Interesting points to consider.

Thoughts on SimpleX chat? I found Matrix a lot of work.

best UI/UX available imo

years ago, i was on fosstodon all the time. it was filled with all kinds of hacker-ish stuff. not the hollywood version of hacker, but the original meaning of the word. all kinds of fun, obscure little linux projects.

now its full of corporate programmers talking about their Azure projects and "how to up your Rust game". barf. where do all the linux tinkerers, and alternative tech kids hang out these days?

I’m displeased with the Russell Brand/Rumble CEO conversation at the Bitcoin conference.

It’s troubling to hear Brand speak about Rumble as if it’s decentralized and for him to compare it to Bitcoin. I’m open to changing my mind if anyone has thoughts.

Bitcoin is *hope* 😃

I'm really not currently concerned about custodial vs non-custodial for lightning wallets and other layer 2 tech. The benefit is in the fact that we can choose the services we use based on their reputation on the open market.

Eventually I believe most people won't keep more than 5% of their stacks in custodial services. 95%+ will be in cold storage that rarely moves. If we don't like a custodian then move the coins to a different one, and people in general will learn not to do business with custodians with a poor track record.

Custodianship isn't inherently evil, it's just that until Bitcoin we had no way to keep custodians in check by maintaining self custody of the majority of our wealth as it was just too costly (such as with gold, needing expensive security) and inconvenient.

The beauty is that these technologies are still being developed and all these issues will be solved with different techniques, such as was recently proven possible on the main chain with silent payments.

Until that time Monero does fill a need for truly private transactions on the main chain, but BTC is still the superior store of value and as more BIP are developed Monero will likely become obsolete.

found the statist