Anyone who understands what Bitcoin enables and still doesn’t agree that Bitcoin is valuable and good for the world has a wildly different set of values that I can’t understand.
David Rosenthal’s article says he IPO’d 3 startups back-to-back. I suspect he’s living in a different world than the people who can see the biggest benefits from Bitcoin.
In the Fight Against Extremism, Don’t Demonize Surveillance-Busting Tools like Signal and Bitcoin
How Bitcoin Can Help In The Fight For Human Rights - Your financial transactions say a lot about where you’ve been, what you were doing, and what you intended to do — making them a perfect way to surveil you.
Bitcoin with its public ledger of every transaction ever made by a person, as well as a public record of their current holding is "surveilence busting" or fighting the good fight against having your financial transactions monitored?
Are they confused as to the difference between encrypting messages and cryptocurrencies? I guess they both have crypt in them, but that is also the chamber beneath a church.
> anyone is free to contribute and build on top of it
These are great features, certainly welcome. However, I believe my point still stands, bitcoin is not philosophically 'private' indeed the entire basis for it working is that it is a public ledger (yes more private crypto does exist, like monero, but the conversation is about bitcoin). The public ledger is the feature, not a bug.
One day it might be all those things, one day I might be pope. But you can no more say it is that than you can say I am his holiness.
Unfortunately, cryptobros can enforce the latter and the system will go from decentral to federated to centralized.
I hope you can understand me.
But ultimately, alt projects don't affect the Bitcoin technology and centralized platforms don't affect anyone's ability to self-custody.
You have that right at least.
I cannot understand anyone who promotes the use of systems that catastrophically increase the risks of human error, particularly for the most vulnerable, and which pointedly ignore that other solutions may work better.
Particularly when the people promoting those systems have an obvious financial incentive to misrepresent them.
I can't speak for others, but I think it's great to promote whatever solutions may be solving problems for a particular use-case. Ideas like social key recovery give users an option to trade some level of full self-control for a safety net. I expect user-friendly implementations of ideas like this to be successful in the near future.
I think it's great that users can choose to participate in Bitcoin however they want. Some people will write their own private clients that nobody else uses. Some people will give all of their coins to a billion dollar company to hold for them. In-between the two extremes, people make their own decisions on what risks they can tolerate and participate in a way that's right for them.