#interstellartrade — Public Fediverse posts

@thor @herag Though not a bitcoin maximalist, I'm pretty pro-bitcoin, and it is a ponzi scheme.

But so is the US dollar, at the end of the day. Successful bubbles are called currencies.

So "why #1" is : it is a ponzi scheme and the benefits of keeping it around outweigh the costs (in providing an alternative to closed remittance systems, central banks and their corruption, paypal and its jankiness, etc) outweigh the downside that one day, entropy will win and your keys will be useless trinkets worth about as much as an ancient greek obulii (pictured below). Once upon a time what you see below could have got you a few nights high with a hooker. Today it's scrap metal that is fit for the junk pile, at best.

"Why #2" is that, while yes, it has virtually all the properties of a ponzi scheme...but the length from beginning to end can be functionally infinite and can include the facilitation of otherwise very difficult trade across interestellar distances - imho #interstellartrade ledgers will be blockchains of some kind - perhaps bitcoin itself will only ever be used on earth, but it's sidechains *won't*. So if you start with a ponzi scheme, and as a currency extend it far into the future....if it's "counterintuitive" enough, and difficult to pull an exit enough...people just won't bother, and it'll continue to go for long, long periods of time. Maybe it'll collapse tomorrow. Maybe in 2100/2200/3000/etc when we have a big fight over minting new coins again. But so far it hasn't, and a lot of us are betting really good money that it won't.

"Why #3" is that yes, it is a ponzi scheme. But that it's a means of facilitating trade *as* a ponzi scheme in a way that is not just globally and locally useful but useful *in a new way* that until bitcoin we didn't even have a word for. It is useful for things like analyzing the true cost of energy (by tying the value of energy directly to the value of computation), something that now that *that's* out of the bottle, is not going back in - but even that is minor in comparison to the value of human interactions that are now possible in this new, albiet ponzi way. Economics has yet to learn about this aspect fully imho, though Graeber's Debt: the first 5000 years hinted at it: there's a level of commitment that you need to do to enable complex trade and complex institutions - in a sense, double entry accounting is a bit of a 'scam' from the perspective of those who run institutions - as eventually their cut goes away. Until the invention of double entry accounting you would run a business for personal profit, and little ancilliary benefits that accrued to you and your family were just sort of an expected benefit of doing business. Post double entry accounting it became feasible, and thinkable that you could run something like a nonprofit/NGO. It was *implicit* in the idea of a double-entry system but it must have taken a few generations for someone try and successfully make the first one work. Similarly, depending from *who's* perspective - bitcoin might also remove value from you and your interaction with some blockchain enabled systems, because of similar reasons. If you're a RIAA gatekeeper, you should be afraid of artists being paid directly in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, because it means eventually the whole of the music world will run on DAOs without you. But, really, there's a lot more gatekeepers than that who should be so afraid. And that's a good thing.