retarded take

True. The gold isn’t manufactured. But its rate of discovery is a function of technology and demand. Bitcoin’s is pre-set. That constantly trips people up when they think of mining. Dhruv’s way of thinking about it is better. The network already has the bitcoin: they just haven’t sold them to the miners yet in exchange for hash.

Been thinking about Dhruv Bansal’s idea that bitcoin are not produced or generated — wrong way of thinking about it induced by “mining” metaphor — but rather all bitcoin existed from the moment the network was launched, but are auctioned off to miners as a whole, in exchange for hashes (compute), on an auction schedule of 140 years or whatever it is.

Each miner decides to take the network’s offer or not, by running their machines or not. Collectively, they determine how much that latest round of auctioned bitcoin is worth, in hashes and/or in energy.

Then there’s another market on top of this one which is coincidental but distinct, and that’s the market for block space, where the sellers are individual miners and the buyers are would-be transactors and of course that’s sat/vbyte.

I really do think it’s more accurate than thinking of bitcoin miners as “producing” bitcoin the way a manufacturer produces a product like cars or even discovered like gold miners discover gold. The bitcoin, all 21 million exist, just not on the ledger, from the get go. They only need to be auctioned, like treasuries. We don’t think the bidders on treasuries produce the 10-year! It’s just a weird auction mechanism where you have to prove work and your odds of winning the auction are proportional to your work / the total work by bidders.

I do get it and I think it’s right and I think it helps with a lot of misconceptions once you grok it fully. And as Dhruv says it shows you the formula for how bitcoin disrupts everything which is by making markets where there weren’t any, and building layers of distinct markets, including lighting and eventually the internet.

So, good job Dhruv.

But… it is not so easy to communicate is it? This thing is bloody hard to explain, as someone said once.

Woke up and it’s raining.

That’s fine, decided to check the weather forecast to see when it’ll be sunny next.

Answer: literally never.

MSTR and SBR are not moving Bitcoin in a direction of decentralization or improvement in any way I see meaningful.

I find them antithetical to the goals that I and I expect cypherpunks originally thought to be important.

I find it off-putting how much mindshare and effort seems to be put into promoting them vs educating people on why they should avoid them.

It is however probably a good tool for NGU, which I will admit is/was an important driver of "adoption"

How's that?

thrifting vintage has made me appreciate just how much better they cared about fabrics in the past

and the whole “vegan” leather trend is so fiat. plastic leather is disgraceful

I have never seen a worse USB-C socket than on my current Pixel 6a. Even looking at it from a distance makes the plug come out.

50% of the time I find it didn't charge overnight.

No, it's not the cable.

The rest of the device is pretty cool.

:q

:q!

^C^C^C

^D

sudo kill -9 1

MSTR & SBR are shitcoins. If you are for these things you are against Bitcoin

Bitcoin is not just NGU

To where? Also, for how much?

Anecdata: I had an invoice which failed on my Phoenix wallet which worked with xpay from my local node.

It's always been the other way around!