2023 Feb 25

• Bitcoin’s utility

  • In the short-term, for specific problems, other things can probably accomplish things better. If people just want to hold value when their country’s currency is failing, they can use a stablecoin. At the end of the day, there needs to be demand for a trustless censorship-resistant money in order to pay miners for the security budget and for bitcoin to succeed. In the short-term and for many cases, absolute trustlessness may not be needed. But odds are that there will be times when its needed, and for those cases it seems to me it’d be necessary for the foundation to be trustless. Will these cases be abundant enough to pay for a sufficient security budget? I don’t know!

    • At the same time it has a lot of interesting economic things going for it. Fixed supply means if other moneys continue to inflate, Bitcoin will outcompete others as a money, especially as a store of value. Bitcoin’s relationship with energy while block subsidy is present

    • If your bottom layer isn’t trustless, then the only way to make trustless payments would be to on-ramp to a separate currency, which could be censored. If you don’t on-ramp, you’d need to hold some of the trustless currency at all times in case you needed censorship resistance, which only makes things more difficult.

  • Generally: censorship resistance! But many other things. Separating the money and the state. Replacing a predatory financial system.

• A college organization should prioritize it’s most advanced members. Within college, people are likely to not reach a point where they don’t want to continue leveling up and want to solely give back to newbies. Even in general research that’s a thing. I think the goal of a college club should be to always have something for the most advanced members to get out of it. You can still have a very welcoming environment for newcomers, but if you want newcomers to even have people to learn from, or if you want to do anything real, you need the people at the top.
• Should maybe try to map desktops to shortcuts at some point.