Satoshi's vision has been defeated

Shire Cryptocurrency Community
#1

Last night, defeat settled in for me regarding Satoshi’s vision. Here’s why I feel that way.

Satoshi’s vision for Bitcoin was to be adopted by everyone with a device and access to the internet, which will be almost every individual on earth by the end of this century. Fast cheap secure transactions for everyone, regardless of geographic location or state citizenship. It was to usurp the existing financial institutions and regulatory regimes, which would slowly crumble under their own weight as Bitcoin’s ease and efficiency would be overwhelmingly preferred by the entire world.

That has now been spoiled. The efforts to halt any block size increase has successfully hamstrung bitcoin into providing slow, expensive transactions. This has bought time for the regulatory state to catch up to Bitcoin’s success, restricting people’s access to the currency and tying their wallets and transactions to their identies via KYC requirements. Governments are notoriously slow to react to ideas that threaten their power, so this precious time has allowed them to step into the market. The Segregated Witness/Lightning Network protocols will take at least a year to produce the desired effect of increasing capacity and lowering transaction fees, and that’s not even a guarantee. So this buys governments even more time. Bitcoin’s stagnation has and will continue to allow governments to enact more restricting controls over the currency.

This really began with Satoshi’s disappearance, which itself was caused by the state. States demanded that banks stop servicing Wikileaks, which made them desperate for funding. Julian Assange turned to Bitcoin in 2010, against Satoshi’s wishes. Satoshi stated that “the heat they would bring would likely destroy us at this stage”. When a major article was published denoting how Wikileaks was using Bitcoin to fund their operations, Satoshi disappeared, saying little more than “the horde is coming”.

So now with a third and possibly fourth Bitcoin on the way and a fragmented community at war with itself, how do adoption rates continue to rise? How does a newcomer who’s told by several different people, “Don’t use their bitcoin, use my bitcoin” make a decision? How do they do most of their economic activity in Bitcoin when it’s not economical to do so?

Now that the regulatory regimes of the world are catching up, Bitcoin is no longer a solution to their monopolistic power. At best, it is simply a new “asset class”, to be traded next to oil, silver, and grain. Satoshi’s vision is dead.

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#2

I know from my own experience why “Satoshi” has said the things he did. A member of the Satoshi team, Hal Finney, had coded PGP for Phil Zimmerman in the 90’s and saw Phil get arrested by the feds over releasing that email software to the world, claiming it was an “armament” that he was “exporting” over the internet. Since then, people who tried to back digital currencies with gold and silver saw their metal seized by government under vague claims that it was abetting money launderers, drug smugglers, and terrorists. This is WHY. It became apparent that metal was a point source security risk, hence why proof of work was created to simulate the macroeconomic behavior of investing capital and labor into mining gold and silver out of the ground and making it into money. The public ledger was created not just to make the blockchain immune to government seizure, but also so that coin holders could potentially use it to track down and recover, if the market saw value in it, coins that were stolen, thus giving the market the ability to enforce itself and protect its own participants. This is also why the Satoshi paper was published under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto”, because all the players knew the government would try to destroy the project by coming after the team members personally.
Satoshis opinion of WikiLeaks was that this would increase government scrutiny of bitcoin. He was right. The actions against Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht proved this to be a valid concern. Plus the valid criticism of WikiLeaks that they never seem to leak stuff about actual bad actors in the world, like Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea, would lead US intelligence to conclude that WikiLeaks was working for one or more of these nations.
As for the forking: This is a good thing. The Satoshi team always focused on consensus. You cannot force a decision on everyone or a minority, justly. Forking lets each faction secede from the others, and compete in the market against each other, letting the market as a whole, which is a far more pure and fair democracy than any election that government has ever run, make the decisions about which fork survives and succeeds.
Nor are the forks the only solution. The Satoshi paper is merely the start of a conversation. Newer technologies like Ethereum, smart contracts, etc evolve the ideas to apply them to even more of the economy than mere currency transactions. You can use smart contracts to decentralize government itself. I know this was in the roadmap with the Satoshi team. Smart contracts were a thing being discussed by team members in private and at futurist conferences back in 2003 and earlier. I was at Extro3 when Nick Szabo made his presentation there about smart contract technologies. Hal, Ralph, and Wei were all there as well.
Blockchains are going to transform our whole world, and the part transformed the most will be government. Smart contracts will dismantle the centralized state, simply because the state can no longer afford to sustain itself, it cannot fund the unfunded liabilities it is committed to even with 100% tax rates.

#3

Though I agree that bitcoin is imploding and it’s sad to see, I lean towards optimism as Mike describes. Cryptocurrency and blockchain, in whatever form are here to stay. Governments will continue to fall behind and lose legitimacy and power.

It’s only a matter of when. :sunglasses:

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#4

If we can get more libertarian crypto people here in NH, we can accelerate the process.

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#5

As I’ve apparently successfully coined: “The Model T wasn’t the last word in automobiles, and Bitcoin isn’t the last word in crypto.” There will be more, and as exhibited by the wars on contraband, you can’t stop something people want. Countries willing to turn into despotic hell-holes can stop it (hi, China, you’ll never be truly successful that way) but any country pretending to be free cannot stop it.

BTW, there’s no reason to believe most bureaucrats even know cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin exist. How could they possibly figure out how to regulate them?

#6

I appreciate the calls for optimism. However, I think some of you are missing the point. Blockchain is here to stay, but if it’s tightly controlled by government, it’s not going to have the intended or desired effect. wftk’s comment, “most bureaucrats don’t know cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin exist”- that’s what I meant by buying time. They have years to learn, now that Bitcoin is incapable of scaling and spreading. Bitcoin has slowed and they are catching up. Not long before they have totally tamed the blockchain space.

As far as blockchains transforming government, governments are likely to subcontract non-ideologues to take advantage of the technical efficiencies of blockchain, ensuring that they remove anything useful to agorism. And the zombie masses will use it because that’s what they’re told to do. They won’t use Dash or Zcash when the government and the media says those are only used by drug lords and hitmen. They will blindly use the government blockchain that’s accepted by Amazon and Wal-Mart.

The car analogy is apropos, that industry is also so tightly regulated that cars just aren’t fun or exciting anymore. Eventually it’ll be illegal to manually drive a car. That’s the fate of blockchain as well.

Bitcoin’s only real chance was to become so big, so fast, that any attempt at reining it in would be rebuffed by the mainstream.

#7

Well, while they’re taking years to learn, other cryptos are maturing. They will never “tame” the blockchain space. They will formulate a losing strategy, as with the war on drugs.

As for governments, some are actually eager to work with crypto developers in a surprisingly earnest way. Yes, they want AML KYC EIEIO, but only to placate Washington DC, I think, so it’ll probably be half-assed. There’s no doubt plenty of banks and governments will “do blockchain.” Doesn’t bother me.

As for the gloom and doom such as making it illegal to manually drive a car, then I guess we’ve lost already. :roll_eyes:

#8

Bitcoin is not incapable of scaling. The conversation in the community about which fork to use is an essential consensus reaching mechanism using the market itself to determine consensus. This is how strongly confident the Satoshi team is in the power of free markets and technology to free people. All you need is the confidence to use what is provided, to participate in the conversation, and not take a “my way or the highway” attitude. You may THINK your opinion is the only way for bitcoin to scale, but the rest of the market may disagree with you. Trust the market to be smarter than you are. If individuals were smarter than the market as a whole, then communism would work, but they aren’t so it doesn’t.
Governments may TRY to suborn the process, but they cannot be smarter than the market, else the soviet union would have succeeded, but it didn’t so its not. Trust the market!

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#9

I don’t think the Blockstream crowd could make it more obvious they’re not actually interested in scaling.

#10

The Core is interested in Bitcoin Classic, lets call it, becoming a currency of international settlements, much as gold once served that function under Bretton Woods and before. That is one opinion, and if they are dedicated to using their code base for that purpose, the market will decide if that function has utility. Using it as an international settlements currency automatically means that it won’t be for you and me to use unless we become sovereigns with our own micronation somewhere. So given that seems to be their intent, the two main candidates are Segwit2x and BTC Unlimited. Segwit is actually one of the more moderate proposals for scaling. Unlimited just tested a 1 gigabyte block and successfully mined it. So Unlimited has scaling by block size adjustment down pretty well. Their goal is to make Unlimited capable of handling Visa scale transaction rates (3,000 per second) on a regular basis. That is also a worthy goal but is also quite different from the role of an international settlements currency.
Whether any given team is not interested in scaling is really immaterial: the market decides, not some small clique.

#11

Well, if they do the jokes on Blockstream, because I bought in before them, but it still pisses me off, because that’s not what it was supposed to be.

Where it’s material is that Bitcoin was supposed to be a cash system, and by taking over the “real Bitcoin” and making it not usable as intended, they’ve jeopardized not only its daily use, but, I believe, in the long term, its actual value. It wasn’t “tulips” before they got ahold of it. It may be now.

Bitcoin Cash, as you eluded to, will scale, and we know this. It’s just that the newbies don’t recognize it as the “real bitcoin” because it’s not BTC. Thus, BTC currently continues to climb on name recognition, but when it crashes, if it does, it could damage BCH, and the whole cryptoverse.

Bitcoin S2X, or just Bitcoin, if you ask their people, MAY work out, particularly in the short term, if it obtains all the miners and BTC chokes to death. I’m believing Roger Ver, though, and I think they go full hypocrite and hard fork to avoid that.

My ideal world would have BCH win and attain the status it should have without segwit. In the long run, though, I think the Model T will be replaced by all sorts of better vehicles, and I support choice at every step.

#13

Dont call it Bitcoin Classic, theres already been a fork with that name by “some people”.
Call it simply, Bitcoin.

These forks have been about branding and thankfully its not switched chain.
See attached image.

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#14

Technically, a shit coin is a shit coin because it starts off at zero with no user network and has to grow organically. The shittier coins premine a large percentage and either sell that or give it out or some combo to encourage adoption. A bitcoin fork is really a marketing ploy where you are suddenly giving everyone who holds any bitcoin a stake in your new blockchain, so it creates instant adoption, even if its largely people liquidating their free forkcoins they received. Given that BCC is crashing, its shittier, in the markets opinion, than BTC, and given the 97% adoption rate for Segwit2x, that is less shitty than staying with a congested blockchain.
If BCC recovers and sees an increase in usage after its price plummets, that would be indicative that it has value.

#15

I personally don’t trust “Bitcoin” anymore. It has become too political and will likely turn into a shitty, state controlled asset over time (even if the price continues to rise).

However, I don’t believe the vision is dead. The blockchain technology is free and open-source, and as long as it’s available for people (and organizations) to use it to innovate, it will still continue to transform the world as we know it.

It’s ok to be a fan of the blockchain technology, and not what “Bitcoin” has become.

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#16

Yep.

#17

I can’t take anyone’s opinion seriously if it involves “shitcoin.”

#18

Thats not my problem. If you actually knew the industry, you’d know its a common term of use.

#19

Enough of being a pompous ass. Your talking points betray you. The vulgarity makes it worse.

#20

I’ve heard the term “shitcoin” used by at least two people in the crypto industry (real paying jobs, real companies) in discussions with them. Considering its widespread use across the internet, I’d have to say it’s a real term…shitty as it might sound.

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#21

I’ve heard all sorts of foul language, but not usually in a professional context. When I hear it in a professional context, I disregard it entirely. I’ve also heard the terms “altcoin” and “fork.” When I’ve encountered “shitcoin,” 95% of the time, it’s come from a specific community with a specific hostile agenda to all other cryptocurrencies.

It started in reference to ICOs (most of which are, naturally, dubious), and expanded out from there. This is terminology almost exclusively associated with the crowd who identify themselves with “[NO2X]” and frequent r/btc, along with the “World Crypto Network” clique.