We are talking about two very different concepts here.
In the arguments I am making, I am referring to the success of Bitcoin as the success of a censorship resistant monetary technology, while you seem to be referring to the success of Bitcoin as an arbitrary Dollar number.
I would argue that the majority of Bitcoin holders don't really care about censorship resistance at this point, they care about the Dollar value – meaning that changes undermining Bitcoin's censorship resistance would likely be little opposed by economic actors (many have in fact already spoken out in favor of things like sanctions), therefore *not* reducing the price of BTC.
Your argument therefore should actually go the other way around:
Why should someone decide _against_ keeping their money on the dominant value chain to protect censorship resistance, when a fixed market cap – not censorship resistance – is considered BTC's value proposition by the majority of economic nodes?
You are conflating the money with the system that governs it. Bitcoin is definitely not "more fungible than fiat" – cash is the king of fungibility.
I don't mean to put you on the spot, but these are exactly the misconceptions I'm talking about.
This is a community note proposed to Anita's post, and I think we need to talk about it.
The past years have brought a swarm of new people into Bitcoin, and these posts and comments show how hard we failed them.
First off, to address the majority of commenters in Anita's post that also like to spam my posts with the same nonsense (and then tell me that I'm stupid because I have a vagina (?)), in the Bitcoin network, you do not get to vote for anything. Your node allows you to control the rules that your node runs by. That's it. That's all it does.
There is no voting in Bitcoin.
Second, miners run profit oriented businesses. This means that miners follow the rules adapted by the nodes with the majority of economic activity.
In the event of a hard fork, it does not matter how many nodes you run – if the majority of nodes generating profit for miners apply new rules, those are the rules the miners will follow.
Bitcoin positions do matter to the extent that they generate economic activity.
I understand that the voting analogy can be helpful, so here's one that you can make: in Bitcoin, you vote with your feet.
If a large exchange was to signal for, say, a Bitcoin compliance fork, you can threaten to pull your money out – to the extent that the exchange still allows you to.
Lastly, what Anita is referring to in her post is Bitcoin's social layer.
Bitcoin is run by humans, and humans can be influenced.
Humans can be influenced by setting positive incentives, such as gov subsidies or developer grants, or by applying violence, such as threatening to throw the people running and building Bitcoin in jail.
This is a reality of human nature and should not be controversial - How to prevent such actors from influencing open source development is often discussed in the open source community.
If this topic interests you, look up Operation Orchestra at FOSDEM.
Let's remember that the memes are not always your friends.
Influencers spent the past few years so focused on "hyperbitcoinization" that half-truths about how Bitcoin works are now taken at face value.
Because so many "Bitcoiners" now genuinely believe things like "Bitcoin can't be censored," "one node equals one vote", "Bitcoin is for enemies," or "everything is good for Bitcoin," we have created a culture that believes paying attention to the creation of an adversarial environment is unnecessary.
These memes are mental shortcuts. They are true to some extent, but do not reflect reality.
In the case of my posts, next to the obviously snarky comments here and there, the majority of commenters are not posting these things with bad intentions - they genuinely think that this is how Bitcoin works.
If you are an educator, influencer, or in any other way have the capacity to better explain these things to people, _please_ take the time to do so.
The memes are fine to get people interested, but we all need to do a better job at combating these misconceptions. The future of BTC could depend on it.
a16z just named "proof of personhood" – a form of digital identites – one of its 2025 big ideas in crypto to "build a web we can trust."
Boy am I glad that we didn't elect these psychos and their gang to run the government
🚨 A vulnerability in the WabiSabi coinjoin protocol allows malicious coordinators to deanonymize coinjoins. Users are urged to update their wallets immediately. 🚨
Do you know what a user activated softfork is
Bitcoin can‘t be captured/censored/insert wishful thinking here because ✨magic✨ arguably the most successful psyop yet
Just stopping by to let you guys know that over in the shithole they're cheering on Bitcoin gov capture
Oof really well written
You clearly know nothing about my work – good luck exhausting yourself in my replies though.
It's impressive how many people are unable to simultaneously hold two thoughts in their head.
Yes, it's great that we're talking about debanking.
No, it's not great that this conversation is driven by investment interests attempting to mandate even more nonsense surveillance that effectively does nothing to solve the problem (to the contrary, it likely makes it worse).
Nuance, my guys. It really ain't so complicated.
The US' new "AI and Crypto Czar" David Sacks:
"It's so important that Chokepoint 2.0 got the crypto debanking conversation going"
How the crypto debanking conversation is going:
As pushes to reform the BSA increase, we're going to see an epic showdown between factions of the US Gov that want to protect citizen's constitutional rights, and the alleged "pro-freedom" faction which has bet much of their networth on the NatSec surveillance complex (Musk, Sacks, Lutnick, possibly Andreessen if rumours on DOGE advisory position are true) – therefore unable to conceed that the US' massive surveillance of its own citizens is inefficient in fighting crime while infringing on the rights of the American people without tanking their own gainz.
This may actually be the administration to finally transcend the nonsense partisanship of left vs. right. What a time to be alive 🍿
h/t nostr:npub15dnln6cukw3yrflnv3hnrntdt9amh0uw466u6tns05ymqp3nal4qzz3lfc
Talk to me when you are done sucking government balls
They call it client side scanning – their idea is to scan messages for "illegal content" before they are being sent (i.e. right on your phone, before they are encrypted).
It's proposed in the EU with Chat Control, in the UK with the Online Safety Bill, and proposed in the US with the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the EARN IT Act, both of which are cosponsored by Ernst.
It takes zero political capital for him to free ross, so i doubt that he'd be stupid enough to betray the trust of one of his most loyal voter bases for something that's of zero consequence to him.
On the other hand he can't run for reelection, so he might actually just not give a shit. Would still be insanely stupid though.
The great thing about Trump appointing "pro crypto" positions in the USG is that the supposed freedom camp is too busy celebrating their bags being pumped to care about what an administration of natsec goons means for their privacy.
Here's Joni Ernst's take on encryption and the fourth amendment, who will lead the Senate Caucus for Congress' collaboration with Elon Musk's DOGE.
Libertad Carajo alright, you dumb fucking morons.
The House Financial Services Committee just announced that it is investigating the debanking of the crypto industry.
But here's their solution: to ensure that crypto businesses are compliant, businesses should leverage ***AI-enabled AML/CFT programs*** and ***blockchain based identity***.
Absolute fucking nightmare.
https://www.therage.co/house-financial-services-committee-crypto-debanking/
