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?

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?

WTF Happened in 2009? 🥹

#Bitcoin

Doing finishing touches for my book, which is now past all external editing. I'm doing the author's final edit/checkup, cover, getting it into the right format for publication, etc.

Some questions for the community:

-Do you prefer hardcover, paperback, or ebook?

-For hardcover or paperback, do you care about the physical dimensions of a book? eg do you prefer a 5.5"x8.5" thicc book or a 7"x10" thinner book?

-For those that like audio books, would you prefer to read the book physically or electronically rather than listen to it, if it had a lot of images?

60M millionaires and 2.9M liquid #bitcoin:

2.9M / 60M = 0.048 BTC per millionaire

Team Super Rich:

- SEC

- Politicians

- BlackRock

- Government

- Central Banks

Team Freedom:

- Plebs

- #bitcoin

Top 10 largest shareholders of The Federal Reserve:

1. JPMorgan Chase & Co.

2. Bank of America

3. Wells Fargo & Co.

4. Citigroup Inc.

5. Morgan Stanley

6. Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

7. US Bancorp

8. TD Bank NA

9. State Street Corporation

10. Bank of New York Mellon Corp.

Printing money is like setting fire to your crops to cook your dinner.

Imo, some people are overreacting to the BRC-20 spam. That’s what fees are for, and meme coin speculators only have so much capital to burn, and only so many followers to use as exit liquidity.

It’s good for users and devs to constantly evaluate the incentive model to make sure it works, and to see what minor long-term consensus changes might be useful over time. But there is no need for knee jerk reactions for things- the desire to constantly tweak a monetary system in response to stimuli is why fiat currency and other crypto currencies exist.

One of the key things that made me turn from interested in bitcoin to bullish on bitcoin was the resolution of the Blocksize War in favor of the small blockers.

I initiated coverage of bitcoin/crypto in 2017, and watched the forks play out. The fact that the big blockers weren’t able to overcome the node network helped me see over the next couple years how bitcoin stands apart in terms immutability and decentralization. And that is still the case.

Understanding #bitcoin is harder than getting into Harvard or McKinsey.