Yeh I was surprised too.

Mining pools are slaves to intelligence agencies? Not heard that one before.

It's actually quite difficult to sell any significant amount of bitcoin right now without stringent KYC requirements. Try selling as a US citizen in Europe right now, where you are banned by default by every exchange.

Makes sense. He was American

I’d be interested to hear his take on all this, if you are able to share 😊

He’s on Telegram. Not Nostr. The gist of his thesis is that mining pools can captured by the state to enforce kyc on 90% transactions.

I think people can become a little too radicalised in many aspects of Bitcoin, and anything is possible. We all want it to succeed, but the idea that it cannot fail is dangerous to those who don't believe it's possible.

I don’t disagree. But if btc gets captured by the state, then what? Lol 😂

But what is captured by the state? Is it a node, an acsic minor or a wallet?

Custodial wallet? Gun to head to hand over non-custody wallet? Spoofed to send to a State owned wallet? I'm afraid I not smarter than that to know. Everything I've seen it's very difficult for one identity to control the majority.

That’s why I said “if”.

Not saying btc will. I think it’s unlikely but guy I spoke to seemed to think so.

Then we tried our best, right? It would be game over for that dream. I suspect a lot of people when give up hope entirely. It's the double-edged sword of who actually created Bitcoin, and I haven't yet ruled the possibility out, that's why I stack AND trade it.

Although bitcoin is a major constant (if not the most constant) in some respects, it is also constantly ecolving because the way changes how bitcoin is viewed and used, and by whom. I find it quite natural that people - even OGs - distance themselves from bitcoin. Everything is a process.

Yeh I will just have to tell my family I wasted 4 years of my life lol 😂

I wouldn't call an honest pursuit a waste, especially if that thing doesn't work out due to factors we don't control. It would be a hell of a way to demoralise us though. 😅

I met an OG Bitcoiner in Miami in 2021 who was still talking about the block size wars, saying we needed a variable block size 🤷‍♂️

Maybe we speaking the same guy haha.

I’ll bracket this by saying I’m not very technical so I could be wrong… But I assume that any days I’ve bought through kyc entities, which is most of them, can be easily tracked to me. Unless I mix them I don’t think there’s a way to solve that problem. The average person who bought bitcoin on an exchange probably doesn’t self custody and almost certainly doesn’t know what mixing is. Beyond that, the state could make it very difficult on bitcoiners. If they drastically limited to banned Bitcoin purchases on exchanges it would really set back average adoption. Or if they made it difficult to off ramp bitcoin into cash by raising taxes or making you report all transactions on your taxes (this may already be required I guess - I don’t know because I never sell 😂). I can barely get my friends and family to think about bitcoin as it is right now. Some policy like that would make that worse. I think things like Drivechain, where we could build a privacy sidechain for example, fedimint, which is more private as I understand it, and a circular bitcoin economy, which would allow people to avoid off ramping into cash, will all help with this. So I guess I’m my humble opinion it’s not a completely unreasonable concern.

Nah kyc I don't think it's possible. They can try and block some blacklisted and related addresses, good luck with that, other pools in other locations would mine those txs. Reminds me when MARA tried that and ppl sent tainted coins to MARAs coinbase address. Lmao.

Thank you for reminding me about that 😂

I have heard this too somewhere..... I'm just trying to remember who I was listening to at the time. I've heard this from more than one person actually, but I took it that my BTC circle is small and perhaps they All have some kind of slant on things/want to sell you their product etc and looked at it in that light...