Before any real Bitcoin circular economy can exist, you need a community capable of holding a meaningful share of its wealth in bitcoin. That should be the foundation.
If people can’t sit tight through volatility and uncertainty, there’s nothing to circulate in the first place. Storing value demands far more patience and discipline than spending it, and I'd say that that cultural shift has to come before everything else.
Replies (16)
Correct. Understanding Bitcoin requires a whole lot of work though. How do we bring the foundational insights that we have to normal people busy with their lives?
But that's the thing, normal people won't do this, at least not at first. Need to work with the crazy and unhinged, the weird. Normies will not and can not drive this. We really need to accept this reality.
Seems like a realist conclusion, yet how does money converge to one when most people aren't able to drive its adoption?
Do we expect that the dollar will one day implode and then everyone will sort of wake up and start accepting their wages in Bitcoin?
I guess what I'm trying to say that I fail to see the path to mass adoption, maybe projects like Square enabling it for merchants is how to make some meaningful progress, or other similar initiatives
what would you quantify as a meaningful share of ones wealth?
There'll never be mass adoption of Bitcoin. Why are you expecting that? We just need a small chunk of humanity that's willing to create its own market. And then we'll all be happy. And the rest will never come on board.
Intransigent minority > mass adoption
It always depends. But people that have most of their savings in btc tend to be more motivated to participate in bitcoin transactions. But it's always always a slow process. People start out with just a few hundred $ or so and then work their way up to eventually getting almost all of their savings on btc. But I think getting even a few thousand $ is more than enough to be good to sustainably partake in Bitcoin economies.
i personally think some people have been doing all kinds of dirty tricks to pivot from eurodollars to bitcoin. the mass adoption they have in mind won't be the one you want, and i'm pretty sure they already know they can't just turn it into americacoin without controlling the miners.
> As of the close of 2024, the United States accounted for over 40% of the Bitcoin network’s global hashrate, with two major U.S.-based mining pools, Foundry USA and MARA Pool, collectively responsible for over 38.5% of all blocks mined.
> Foundry USA alone controlled approximately 36.5% of the total hashrate, making it the largest mining pool globally.
> The U.S. has become a dominant hub for Bitcoin mining, particularly due to the migration of operations from China following its 2021 mining ban, with Texas alone hosting over 28% of the nation’s hash rate.
> This concentration is further amplified by the rise of publicly traded mining companies, which collectively controlled nearly one-fifth of the global hash rate by 2022, a figure expected to grow as more miners go public.
if you don't know about how corporations and government interact, well, you will see it soon.
i'm pretty sure they also control the bitcoin core project, and they have been testing the waters for how fast they can get the last 11% they need to make it AmericaCoin (but they will maintain the current branding and promote the ethos to distract from what's really going on, which you can see once you start to notice the trend. segwit. taproot. brigading for bitcoin core.
I'm a little more optimistic than this. I think mass adoption will eventually happen, only because the fiat legacy system will collapse under its own debt. There has to be some kind of alternative, because money is needed for civilization to continue.
But, it's extremely unlikely that mass adoption will mean everyone is self custodying their bitcoin. The biomass will still most likely opt for third party solutions for their bitcoin, they'll willingly do this, won't even have to be forced on them.
Just gotta make sure the early adopters interact and use the network and 2nd layer protocols permissionlessly and in a sovereign way. We gotta cultivate that toxic culture and pass it on to our kids and followers. We are the Sabiqoon!
I don't even think dirty tricks are needed. Biomass will want to use American coin or whatever without any influence.
I'm more thinking percentages here. Like say if someone's annual gross is $60k and they are able to save 18%. If they put 80% of that into bitcoin (like $8.5k annually via dca), is that a meaningful amount? If not, what is the threashold?
Good question and I don't have the answer. But to me if someone is DCAing 8.5k annually and they're able to self custody it securely and hodl it for years, that's really damn good. Actually harder to pull off than spending bitcoin, in some ways.
Well, the arguement that I put forth in my paper last year was for 3% of zakat to be put toward a "sovereignty" fund. But really that "fund" is the individual Muslim bitcoiners hodling away. And we have a good number of these folks. I think what is needed is establishing that next step of bringing folks together in communities and figuring out the logistical best practices for small governance.
May be distributing zakat and sadaqah in satoshis may be a way to contribute to a Bitcoin circular economy.
"Here are some satoshis. And here's the location of a nearby shop which accepts satoshis."
absolutely! takes a good bit of effort to pull this off still but this needs to be a focus and i thinknthe general orange pilling should include spend about as much as wr've focused on secure hodl
I do think a realistic method of trying to get some sort of economy more focused on bitcoin is to focus on particular markets that are more inclined towards using bitcoin.
