Rich renters. Less house, more bitcoin? I believe that selling bitcoin to buy a house is only advisable when you found the perfect forever place for your family.

People starting to realize the foundation issues with nostr. I love it too but know it’s unfortunately not (yet) a serious platform for free speech. Not when you can be easily identified. This will always create a risk and chilling effect. We need to be careful because it can lure people into a false sense of security. They may think they’re anonymous when they’re not. View quoted note →

I’ve been thinking recently about how the AI boom could be helping to decentralize bitcoin mining. Companies are buying up all the power in western countries for AI data centers. I haven’t seen any recent stats, but I’m expecting that this is encouraging bitcoin mining to move and find lower cost power elsewhere. Bitcoin’s incentives could be playing out in front of our eyes.

Another insightful podcast on the scaling debate. Highly recommended. Link below. Interesting to hear Vijay’s explanation on how frequent changes to bitcoin’s protocol undermines trust in its “unchangeable” monetary properties. I hadn’t considered this before, but it makes sense. He argued for conservatism very well. I thought Brandon represented the “Big Scripters” 😜 well too. He focused the debate on how these proposed technologies promote bitcoin’s decentralization — which, of course, is the North Star for many of us (me included). He argued that without these new scripting capabilities, fewer people will hold their own UTXO and therefore bitcoin will be more centralized. In the future, large custodians will be the key economic nodes and may control bitcoin and their interests may not align with ours. Brandon recognized that his concerns are in the distant dystopian future, perhaps even after a wonderful “gilded age” for bitcoin. Brandon argued that we need to do something now. He doesn’t know whether the proposed scripting capabilities will actually fix the potential problem but he hopes they will be helpful. Brandon recognized that the proposal could have unknown risks but he was largely dismissive, believing that it’s probably safe. Why now? Why the rush? Brandon left it unsaid, but I had the impression there may be a sense of urgency amongst the Big Scripters. Perhaps because they believe bitcoin will be harder to change in the future - ie, it’s now or never. Perhaps some believe that they will lose control to folks like Saylor, who represent the whales and large financial custodians of the future. If these large financial nodes control bitcoin, then the devs may believe that they will lose the power to make changes later. I remain unconvinced. Here’s why: Firstly, I believe we have to reject any proposals that solve potential problems that don’t yet exist, even if plausible. We don’t know what will happen in the future, nor whether the issue will be solved later without making protocol changes. Even the best of us are just humans and not magical infallible wizards. We can never completely predict that a change will not create even bigger problems. We can’t take risks for potential problems that may never happen or which might be fixed in some other way. Changes to the protocol should be a last resort. Bitcoin is our hope for the future. We’ve been given an incredible gift. We can’t mess it up. Future generations are counting on us. Secondly, I believe our ability to accurately predict risk is related to our inability to accurately predict the future. For example, I don’t recall ANY community discussions pre-Segwit / Taproot anticipating that we would be soon syncing our nodes slowly over Tor with 4 MB blocks filled with spam. It was all a big surprise to the community, wasn’t it? Why was the block size increased? Why was there a discount given disproportionately to spammers? Why was the risk overlooked? Why hasn’t there been a post-mortem? So many questions. I’ve realized we can’t blame the devs. We, the plebs, need to take responsibility. We allowed the devs to make complex changes to the protocol relatively quickly and we blessed it by upgrading our nodes. We trusted but didn’t verify. Lesson relearned. We can’t do this again. Lastly, the power to change bitcoin should be held by the nodes and not the devs. Maybe it will be harder to change bitcoin in the future. That’s a feature of bitcoin, not a bug. Devs, if you’re in a hurry, please check your time preference. I keep thinking that bitcoin could be like one of those cathedrals which took hundreds of years to build and which stand for millennia. We should take our time to get this right. Even if it takes 10 more years of research and debate, that’s nothing in the grand timeline. In the meantime we should fix bugs, make it easier to run nodes, improve network privacy, and improve community communication. @Stephan Livera Thank you for the great recent content. Love the debate format! 🙏

Stephan Livera

Bitcoin Ossification Debate with Vijay Boyapati and Reardencode SLP583

The bitcoin ‘ossification’ debate continues with a discussion on the key considerations. What makes Bitcoin special? What improvements are nece...