I work in the reverse order. Is that OK?

Are you the perpetrator in disguise? Because barring that, these notes are unintelligible.

I'm pretending I'm the banking industry in 2007 telling people to buy their third house, and promoting the Michael Saylor archetype. Here is my first statement: You got to pump it up. You know pump it up!

Ooooh interesting. Are you suggesting that there is some kind of manipulation to get people into more debt to then try to crash bitcoin prices temporarily and leave everyone in debt needing to liquidate some of their assets for the government to buy up for cheap?

That's an extremely good attack vector if they could pull it off, because no one believes it's in the cards right now. Seems extremely unlikely to me, but avoiding debt denominated in the bankers' fiat tokens would prevent you from being subject to much of the fallout from that kind of a reversal on monetary policy.

The majority of the utxo set is captured in bitcoin banks. A bailout would imply forking bitcoin towards that utxo set with my rules. Now I work out all my logic with that outcome in mind. The first step given the current chess board has already occurred with my prior statement.

The best strategy!

I thought the majority of the UTXO set was in individual hands, but even if it was mostly in bitcoin banks, what causes the fork? What kind of bailout are you talking about, a native bailout on a Bitcoin fork? That's just not the real bitcoin and would be rejected by true bitcoiners. You might be able to convince the majority of statists that it's legitimate Bitcoin, but those remaining true to what Bitcoin really means will stay on the real chain and will simply outhodl those who diverge. They may be inconvenienced by suffering a reduction in purchasing power, but as long as a community of real bitcoiners remains intact, it will continue on indefinitely. Sound money is powerful, as is honesty and rationality. That patchy, scrappy community will attract the vast majority of the capital. Short term fluctuations are child's play to them.

The only thing it occurs to me that we'd have to worry about beyond the usual comcerns is the security budget and double spending attacks. 51% attacks cannot do THAT much harm though, thankfully. It just makes final settlement a but more of a wait or require a tiny bit of extra verification, really.

re: bitcoin backed loans discussion imagine you want a house and you take a loan/morgage against your bitcoin. then suits decide to fork. now your collateral is useless and only sane action is to not repay.

Are we assuming the collateral is held entirely by the bank? And you're saying that the bank can fork and decide not to repay the original bitcoin, but instead pay the "new bitcoin?"

A bailout would imply forking bitcoin towards that utxo set with my rules.

Degeneration of the consensus rules, yes?

yeah, that would be my assumption that they will release the collateral on a new branch. so rugpull.

now I have more questions then answers. I've never actually thought about smart contracts if the parties are on different branches.

My targetted attack is those with self custody. Standard divide and conquer strategy, and my division is at it's weakest and most vulnerable point.

A fork requires utxo owners to sell to one side or to the other of the fork. Of course you have a choice to not sell, but if everyone moves to the side you don't like by selling your side then I win. The attack vector is over self custody.

This has always happened with money. It's the same as it is now. Those who understand money and value their life over a long time horizon will keep the true Bitcoin. The other forks will die off eventually, even if they get a higher purchasing power for a while. It's brutal, but it keeps the network free from usurpers and gullible people who would be poor stewards.

Two different versions of events regarding the contract could happen between the branches. On the new, fiatconsensus branch, the contract conditions could be considered to be satisfied, while in the standard bitcoin consensus, the conditions are not met. A sovereign victim of this attack could simply sell the returned collateral (if the fiatconsensus allows it: they'd probably come with strings and monopoly privilege to certain corporations attached), and let the collateral from the real bitcoin fall back to them as a result of violation of the contract. Their valuing of the real bitcoin they hold and discarding or refusing to operate within the other chain, voices their say against the fiatization of money. This is assuming you have a rock solid smart contract set up. In the case of rugpull via just convincing other people to join your fiatconsensus chain and driving up demand for it artificially, you need only outhodl the attacking corporation and all of its useful idiots, even if they overpower you in control of the security budget. You need only outhodle them because they will destroy themselves in time. High time preference, reality-disrespecting crap like that always does.

Within the community of principled bitcoiners, you will have ad hoc solutions as well as tried and true ones pop up. Networks of rational, scrappy freedom fighters exactly as we have on nostr would bootstrap the foundation for a freeer world. It will be very much like what we are doing now. All encapsulated in our culture of don't trust, verify.

I'll be sure to keep learning about this stuff though, refreshing my understanding, and looking out for my ass haha!

Given your strategy we default to a standard banking model because self custody is now illegal (as the fork was not in your favor). You now own a number on the screen. Fiat 2.0 Have fun kids!

Illegal huh? What the fuck are laws gonna do if I manage to escape though?

More land for me.

Whoopdie fuckin' do. You don't get my labor or my regurgitation of your lies.

Well, I was a fiat maxi anyways so I call that a win.

You keep acting like I am some kind of master at game theory but the joke is on you, I'm retarded. And yeah I didn't say anything about changing my strategy because it's implicit based on what I said earlier today about unity as well as in several realistic assumptions I am making about the social network of hardcore freedom loving bitcoiners.

I also thought that it was implicit that bitcoiners adapt and to a large extent refuse to trust banks in the first place.

Growth can be a funny thing. Try living the life of a criminal for a few days. People need to break the law like calisthenics in the morning for when the time comes.

I think that's really good advice along two different vectors: thinking like a natural outlaw (evil person) and actually breaking the government law (nonaggressively). I am strongly in favor of both of those things.

I appreciate your adversarial challenge queries.

Yes I think the conversion could go many ways from here, but a touch point is in the aggregate. The scope of the problem is quite large. We changed the infrastructure, but not the people so nothing changed.

We changed the infrastructure so that people like me have a good tool. It's at the very least a momentary advantage. But yes the people matter more. Bitcoin is only as good as the people using it. The republic called the United States failed miserably because they simply created a new government just like the old one. Bitcoin is a voluntary republic, and those who follow a fork of it that becomes involuntary and government money, well, they follow the same route as the people who put their faith into the United States instead of into freedom and logic themselves.

On that note, I would like you to flight me. It's every Sunday, and if this is your first time, you have to fly.

Fascinating. I might like to join out of curiosity, or study it on my own. Sounds weird haha

It's not weird. I am, and I actually have very little to do with it, so you should be relieved at that 😂.

Weird is so often a good thing so don't worry! But thanks lmao!

Here's the post for tomorrow's study group: View quoted note →