Nic's Unpopular BTC Opinions @[email protected]

Bitcoin will never be universally adopted because late adopters will always resent enriching early adopters. This is a problem for every cryptocurrency.

Applications like Opentimestamps are both an incredible application of Bitcoin and also an oblique threat to its security model. Embedding high-value arbitrary data in Bitcoin increases the incentive to attack it and makes it more vulnerable

Bitcoin banks are appropriate and inevitable, as is credit creation on Bitcoin

Economic nodes are not made equal. Nodes connected to exchanges do have more political weight. However threats to partition the network are compelling and only a minority of users need to threaten for it to work.

Bitcoin isn't a panacea for the world's evils. It's just one tool. Monetary policy is not the root of all evil, it's just very prone to mismanagement

All of Bitcoin's core features can and will eventually malleate. The challenge is retaining its _soul_ while doing so

Success for Bitcoin does not mean becoming a global currency and UoA. Minimum Viable Success in my mind is becoming a large, independent virtual commodity that is easy to move wealth in and out of without restriction

We still don't have a good way to value Bitcoin. This excludes a whole class of investors from taking a position

The chief value of bitcoin is not in hashpower, the community, or the software, but as a fairly and widely dispersed UTXO set

Bitcoin's success is very likely to increase global instability. It may not be a force for net good (but the genie is out of the bottle now)

Applications like Opentimestamps are both an incredible application of Bitcoin and also an oblique threat to its security model. Embedding high-value arbitrary data in Bitcoin increases the incentive to attack it and makes it more vulnerable

Bitcoin is critically centralized in some key ways, other coins are more centralized, but Bitcoin still has obvious pressure points

Bitcoinism is totally distinct from the cypherpunk, libertarian, Austrian, or anarchist movements. It is a philosophical movement in its own right

Bitcoiners should be preparing themselves for full Bitcoin criminalization. This won't be an easy road

Inflation is manifested in Bitcoin through the creation of competing projects. Forks genuinely do confound newcomers and (at least temporarily) redirect attention and value

Bitcoin isn't a panacea for the world's evils. It's just one tool. Monetary policy is not the root of all evil, it's just very prone to mismanagement

Bitcoin banks are appropriate and inevitable, as is credit creation on Bitcoin

Bitcoin developers are not unimpeachable. They have no special purchase on traits like the economics of bitcoin, and their proximity to the code might actually impair their ability to take a 10,000 foot view of the system

A world where Bitcoin is successful is one where Bitcoiners are demonized, hated, and attacked. Citadels will be a necessity

All of Bitcoin's core features can and will eventually malleate. The challenge is retaining its _soul_ while doing so