Bitcoin is social consensus around the idea of following a default rule (heaviest chain) to keep agreement around something (a global ledger of value) for which there would normally be very little agreement. It's just a default rule, that can be overridden at any time when there is social consensus around something else. If there was social consensus for deleting bitcoin, it would be gone in a split second and it would be hard to prove it ever existed. In the early days, in presence of a catastrophic bug and with the full agreement of the very few participants, the rule was neglected, and patched. It's a human tool after all, therefore human agreement is always king, when it exists. However, despite being just a default rule, it can become an incredibly sticky one, because of the well known difficulty of humans to take any kind of coherent and durable collective decisions, especially at a global scale. Newspapers contain very little traces of social consensus. And when alternatives are shaky and not immediate, the default rule easily becomes the only rule. So while it may sound like a contradiction, I think bitcoin exists thanks to a form of social consensus, but is also nourished by a total lack of it.

Come talk about the fundraiser for getting #Kaspa $KAS to go to the Imperial College London. x.com/i/spaces/1qKVmmNEjkPxB

How do you subtly defend bad actors while also not appearing to do so: “It Bitcoin can’t survive this it deserves to die, and any criticism of bad actors is moot. “

"Let's keep throwing plastic bottles into the ocean. If the world can't survive, it should die."

Everybody is scared of Chinese models because it won’t let you criticize the CCP while Anthropic won’t let me use their models for live saving medical research ? Who’s the real villain again?

A single small group owning that much is unbearable for anything with presumptions to replace fiat, or even becoming a fiat alternative as a base of economy, useful fir anything but trading based on its fiat valuation. It devalues Bitcoin, and undermines the hope it could be recognized as a commodity. That doesnt mean anyone should (or can) do anything about it. But turning a blind eye to the implications instead of acknowledging what Bitcoin is and trying to work with it will definitely wont help.

If you own 1 single bitcoin, it’s worth $62k. If you own 21 million bitcoin, it’s worth zero.

How to get rid of the MSTR cancer without killing the patient (BTC). Step 1: massively sell the stock, and buy BTC with the proceeds. --> BTC becomes more distributed and more valuable, MSTR price goes down a lot. Step 2: at some point, the stock is so low that it becomes optimal for shareholders to demand the dissolution of the company. Some BTC will need to be sold to cover the debt, but most of it can simply be transfered directly to the shareholders without hitting the market. --> the cancer is removed, BTC takes a temporary hit but also becomes fundamentally more valuable by being infinitely more distributed and getting rid of its de facto CEO. Step 3: 1M coins stop being a giant source of terror, and suddenly become a source of freedom and self empowerment instead. They're also no longer seizable by a single nation state, which makes other players more willing to join the race. --> BTC can resume its journey to making the world a better place.

And here we are, the entire BTC market is now a terrified mirror of what saylor says, doesn't say, signals, promises, retracts. The threat of 1M coins hitting the market is far worse than the actual execution. Saylor is discovering market expectations, after causing a 10% BTC crash with a modest coin sale. And suddenly all the collateral ratios make no sense anymore. And that's not even his fault, this is on all of you idiots who allowed him to become so big. Ignoring that if a guy controls 5% of an asset, nobody will look at it as a global neutral reserve currency.

If there were many people like saylor, like a Chinese, a European and a Russian equivalent, then the system would be much healthier. But having a single country hoard most of the coins makes it way less desirable as a global currency, and it's a game theoretical catastrophe.

Saylor has stripped the soul out of bitcoin. Once it's no longer seen as freedom money, the original believers have left in disgust, and numbers don't even go up, wtf are we even doing here?

Just found a way to use my $KAS, turns out it's accepted on @NanoGPTcom, which is awesome. Come on guys, let's go smash their coin leaderboard stats!

Ok so Americans still love Trump, interesting.

Suppose there's a bitcoin fork, larry&saylor decide to hold the version with the rules they like, and nuke the other one to zero. Will you still go around saying that coin ownership doesn't affect the rules of the network?

These appeals to the white paper always strike me as authoritarian. A white paper is a technical spec, not a religious text. Bitcoin is a consensus system, not satoshi's toy. It is what people want it to be now, not what we think someone had in mind 16 years ago.

Est-ce que tous les opérateurs mobiles sont malhonnêtes ou juste @bouyguestelecom ? x.com/i/status/2053053835145…

La grosse blague chez @bouyguestelecom. Je leur indique que je paye deux fois plus que le montant affiché dans leur propre site pour le même forfait, et au lieu de s'excuser et rectifier, ils me disent qu'il faut que je continue de me faire plumer 🤣🤣

How long until someone launches a Kaspa fork starting from Bitcoin's UTXO set? (same as what ecash is doing but with a modern stack)

Just listened to @hashdag's talk in Oxford. It struck me that this "stag hunt" idea of creating a framework where players can find a way to commit to cooperation for a better collective outcome, is roughly the same thing that I had in mind when writing the Adaptive Block Size proposal for Kaspa, and partly also the "social oracle" idea that I posted on the R&D chat. These proposals are very far from perfect, but they both try to carve a space between "no trust" and "blind trust".

$kas crowd, what do you want to build or see built as soon as covenants/based apps are live? I see a big hype around the new functionalities, but almost nothing about what you'd like to do with them.

The problem with DeFi is that it essentially relies on Tether, a single corporation that guarantees a big chunk of all the value locked. Once you accept that, then the idea of a security council with 12 people must appear as supreme decentralization.