There is value in having core functions of society like social medla and money decentralized and running on open source software even though it will not fix wealth inequality.
Like the rest of society, some people get ridiculous wealth by luck of being at the right place at the right time. That is no reason to not have open source money.
There are many issues with bitcoin but that one I do not buy.
It is similar to open source social media. No single entity is in control. No single company or government that can use that power to control the users. For the end user the result is that bitcoin is more like paper cash than other digital money. You and only you are in control. It is extremely hard to stop you from sending or receiving money.
Just like with the fediverse, there is no Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to kick you out. With bitcoin there will be no Putin or Trump to freeze your bank account.
thats federation, not open source. reddit was open source for a while, but not federated – and now we are here. whatsapp uses an open source protocol, but isnt federated – some asshole hawaiian (resident of hawaii, not the other option) controls it. Signal is open source, but won’t federate, its controlled by people who are way more into crypto than helping their users (moxie was actively against federation, using such examples as email to prove how federation is a failure)
The big difference between bitcoin and cash is: When my employer pays me in bitcoin, they can see which wallets I give it to. If all stores and online shops use bitcoin, they’ll publish their bitcoin adresses on their website etc. like they already do with bank account numbers. That means my employer could see where I’m shopping at.
Bitcoins indeed have much worse privacy than cash.
As you outline, if people use the worst possible privacy choices the privacy is ridiculously bad. It does not have to be that bad.
The current best practice for on-chain transactions (as in not all the layer 2 stuff needed to scale) is to use a new address for every incoming transaction. That way a shop would not have one address but thousands, none of which your employer can easily know about.
This type of privacy is still not anywhere near cash. To get that type of privacy you would need to mix your coins with others. Essentially putting all the coins into a sack, shaking it, then handing out coins to everyone. It is not perfekt but we are getting to cash like levels of privacy. Cash is not perfekt either, bills have serial numbers, etc.
The elefant in the room is that for most people what will really matter is the layer 2/3 solutions and what properties they have. On chain transactions does not scale to planet level. The thinking these days is that the bitcoin blockchain should be used more like a court and less like the ledger it was initially intended to be.
Like the rest of society, some people get ridiculous wealth by luck of being at the right place at the right time. That is no reason to not have open source money.
thats not the point, there have been studies that show bitcoin is fairly vulnerable to 50% control due to early adopters and other wHaLeS controlling the currency. and the studies can show this because bitcoin isnt private.
don’t recall, it covered both bitcoin and etherium and investigated who owned what. ill see if i can’t find it.
edit: this seems to be the academic version of it, but theres a prettier journalism version with more stories and pictures: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02871
in this case i seem to have misremembered owners vs miners, but I’ll keep poking around. this one is also older than i remember.
That is super interesting! But yeah, that was really early days. Hash rate centralisation could of course still be a problem today but it was most likely 100 times worse in 2011.
Bitcoin Core is MIT licensed.
There is value in having core functions of society like social medla and money decentralized and running on open source software even though it will not fix wealth inequality.
Like the rest of society, some people get ridiculous wealth by luck of being at the right place at the right time. That is no reason to not have open source money.
There are many issues with bitcoin but that one I do not buy.
the software is, but what relevance does that have to people using it as currency?
It is similar to open source social media. No single entity is in control. No single company or government that can use that power to control the users. For the end user the result is that bitcoin is more like paper cash than other digital money. You and only you are in control. It is extremely hard to stop you from sending or receiving money.
Just like with the fediverse, there is no Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to kick you out. With bitcoin there will be no Putin or Trump to freeze your bank account.
thats federation, not open source. reddit was open source for a while, but not federated – and now we are here. whatsapp uses an open source protocol, but isnt federated – some asshole hawaiian (resident of hawaii, not the other option) controls it. Signal is open source, but won’t federate, its controlled by people who are way more into crypto than helping their users (moxie was actively against federation, using such examples as email to prove how federation is a failure)
100% that being open source is not enough. Just like the fediverse the protocol is really important.
But if the fediverse protocol and all servers and clients are proprietary we would be in a bad place.
The bitcoin protocol makes it possible for everyone to run a bitcoin core node very similar to that anyone can run a fediverse server.
Btw, that signal is actively working against federation makes me so incredibly disappointed…
The big difference between bitcoin and cash is: When my employer pays me in bitcoin, they can see which wallets I give it to. If all stores and online shops use bitcoin, they’ll publish their bitcoin adresses on their website etc. like they already do with bank account numbers. That means my employer could see where I’m shopping at.
yeah i dont think anyone seriously buys into bitcoin=private in 2024 thankfully. they are still deluded on monero, but its only a matter of time.
Bitcoins indeed have much worse privacy than cash.
As you outline, if people use the worst possible privacy choices the privacy is ridiculously bad. It does not have to be that bad.
The current best practice for on-chain transactions (as in not all the layer 2 stuff needed to scale) is to use a new address for every incoming transaction. That way a shop would not have one address but thousands, none of which your employer can easily know about.
This type of privacy is still not anywhere near cash. To get that type of privacy you would need to mix your coins with others. Essentially putting all the coins into a sack, shaking it, then handing out coins to everyone. It is not perfekt but we are getting to cash like levels of privacy. Cash is not perfekt either, bills have serial numbers, etc.
The elefant in the room is that for most people what will really matter is the layer 2/3 solutions and what properties they have. On chain transactions does not scale to planet level. The thinking these days is that the bitcoin blockchain should be used more like a court and less like the ledger it was initially intended to be.
thats not the point, there have been studies that show bitcoin is fairly vulnerable to 50% control due to early adopters and other wHaLeS controlling the currency. and the studies can show this because bitcoin isnt private.
Alright, do you mean concentration in hash rate (mining)?
don’t recall, it covered both bitcoin and etherium and investigated who owned what. ill see if i can’t find it. edit: this seems to be the academic version of it, but theres a prettier journalism version with more stories and pictures: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02871
in this case i seem to have misremembered owners vs miners, but I’ll keep poking around. this one is also older than i remember.
That is super interesting! But yeah, that was really early days. Hash rate centralisation could of course still be a problem today but it was most likely 100 times worse in 2011.