I found this a thoughtful and informative read, and I especially like the term “proof of force” to describe fiat currency, which I hadn’t heard before.
I don’t think this is going to significantly change the way most people on hacker news think about bitcoin, but I will say that it changed my perspective on the problem of network scalability.
If you think of Bitcoin not as competing against Visa, but as competing against the bank settlement network, then it makes a lot more sense.
As someone who's into economics and finance (as well as cryptocurrencies), I'm less concerned with what everyone thinks about Bitcoin and a lot more with what they know about money in general. It's scary when you first realize most people have no clue how our civilization works and what holds it all together. This is a very fragile system, it benefits those with money/power, but it's also ripe for disruption because it's not consciously supported by the majority of the world's population.
How can someone go through life and never ask themself what money is, where it comes from, why their paper bills keep getting worth less year over year... Most of us consume things on a daily basis, but never stop to think what actually happens there, where the value of the money comes from, what determines the price of the product, etc.
> If you think of Bitcoin not as competing against Visa, but as competing against the bank settlement network, then it makes a lot more sense.
Yes, this is Bitcoin precisely. If you then lock your bitcoins in different schemes with different security models or transaction amortization tradeoffs, you carry the risk of the scheme, not the settlement layer and unit of account. You can experiment with different forms of commodity money, fiat money, and all the monetary policy therein and the proof will be in the pudding of who ends up with more of the underlying, finitely scarce coin, but you can never risk anyone's coin that doesn't join the scheme.
I don’t think this is going to significantly change the way most people on hacker news think about bitcoin, but I will say that it changed my perspective on the problem of network scalability.
If you think of Bitcoin not as competing against Visa, but as competing against the bank settlement network, then it makes a lot more sense.