If you're interested, but want to skip the noise on Twitter, uou can read most of his work in regards to Bitcoin and its humanitarian impact here: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein
> I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it
This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database, rather than really understanding the problems Bitcoin solves and why Satoshi made the choices they did. There are important trade-offs between efficiency, redundancy, decentralisation, and robustness in an adversarial environment.
The other aspect is that they just look at Bitcoin through a technological lens and judge it inferior to other networking & data storage technologies. They don't have a deep grasp of the concept of money and what properties makes for a sound form of money. Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job explaining it from that perspective [1].
It's a shame that so many, otherwise smart, people are sleeping on such a revolutionary change in the world. The idea of Bitcoin has been thought about and predicted for many years by people held in high-regard among HN readers, such as Buckminster Fuller [2], Henry Ford [3], and Friedrich Hayek [4], and they'll still dismiss it out of hand.
Such a massive lost opportunity for great skills, knowledge, and talent to be applied to what I think is one of the most important innovations of our civilisation.
Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish. Sorry I don't know how to phrase it so it doesn't come as a personal attack. Most of the crypto posts sound like it.
> This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database
I think it's crazy that you feel this way, I can only speak for myself and a few others, but we do in fact fully understand it and why it works this way.
Satoshi is not some god that has come to save us. He saw something that fraction of people in society consider to be a problem and attempted to solve it. He did not consider complex ways that his solution would interact with the society. A lot of us think that crypto causes more problems than it solves.
That's because I strongly believe in its ability to have positive change on our civilisation... environmentally, economically, politically, and sociologically.
Any belief held strongly enough appears cultish. Ultimately, I don't really care how it appears.
But hey, I could be wrong about Bitcoin, I just hope I'm not.
If I'm wrong I look foolish and have lost thousands of dollars saved in Bitcoin. If I'm right... well, I guess we'll see.
But this is why Bitcoin works though. It's why it's important. Because it solves a problem most people have no idea even exists. That's why they get angry when people talk about it, because it seems like people are lying to them or trying to wind them up.
The metaverse (not Facebook's/Meta's version) can be whatever you want it to be. That's the point.
You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off.
Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car.
And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead.
There will be markets for all different types of realities.
You think they're going to shutdown the Internet to kill Bitcoin?
Even if they did, once the Internet was back up and running what would stop the Bitcoin network from continuing where it left off?
There's thousands of people around the world running their own Bitcoin nodes, many also protected behind Tor [1]. In what realistic way could governments shut it down globally?
They could go for centralised custodial businesses like the exchanges, but that doesn't stop the Bitcoin network itself. Also there are decentralised exchanges like Bisq that can't be shutdown.
"Yes (you will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.), but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.
Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own."
— Satoshi Nakamoto
"A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system."
— Satoshi Nakamoto
No, I’m not talking about shutting down the internet. I’m talking about filtering its traffic. I also did not say they would do this. I said that they could do it and have the power to do it. My point is that if the US Govt really wants crypto to go away, it will.
You've revealed plainly that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
Miners can't change the protocol of the entire network.
The only malevolent thing they could do is perform a 51% attack if they all colluded together. And even that wouldn't achieve much, so there's not much incentive to do it. All they can do is a double spend. They would've been better off spending that energy on mining blocks to be rewarded with the Bitcoin subsidy.
So, let's play that out. Suppose 90% of miners (hash power) collude (as GP posited), for example validating blocks with a larger coinbase (mining reward). The "good" nodes don't accept these (but the "bad" miners can trivially have many nodes that do accept them). But now the "good" hash power drops to 10%, so only every 100 minutes a "good" block is mined (suppose this happened just after a difficulty adjustment), and that goes on for 20 weeks. In the meantime, the bad nodes and miners carry on as before, pretty much, but with their malicious change incorporated. If they're bored, they can devote some of their hash power to double spend attack the "good" chain. Which chain will come out on top?
Sure, it's unlikely. But not impossible. Just as runaway inflation in a reasonably managed fiat currency is not impossible. Just unlikely. (And, yes, hyper inflation has happened historically. Similarly, rewriting of the immutable Ethereum chain and BTC forks have happened historically.)
A malicious set of miners that decides to give itself a higher block reward will never have their blocks accepted by the "good" nodes. It's quite simply not possible. The blocks will be invalid and therefore rejected outright. It doesn't matter how much hashing power is behind them.
> If they're bored, they can devote some of their hash power to double spend attack the "good" chain. Which chain will come out on top?
Also wrong. For an Ethereum (or bitcoin) upgrade that requires a hard fork to be accepted as “being Ethereum”, all the users running Ethereum nodes need to be OK with it and update their full node software to that version.
People still talking about high Bitcoin transaction fees pretending like the Lightning Network doesn't exist... it's almost as though they aren't keeping up with latest developments in the space, instead relying on old information they formed their initial opinion on.
Also El Salvadorians can use any app/wallet they want to transact over Bitcoin/LN. However, the government provides incentives to use Chivo. If the government is too exploitative people will move away from Chivo.
