ZACHARY.SUNFORGE on Nostr: The biggest problem I see with Bitcoin maxis is there refusal to accept a valid ...

The biggest problem I see with Bitcoin maxis is there refusal to accept a valid purpose of *any* other digital asset. I understand that this may come from a legitimate place where there are a lot of scams and tokens trying to cheaply capitalize on Bitcoins success without actually providing any of the benefits of Bitcoin (would be to long to phrase my own way in this post but, digital gold, etc, etc,). A lot of these projects were also direct "competitors" to Bitcoin in the same way silver is a competitor gold, they were meant to be used as money and were generally much worse than Bitcoin at being money.

The main thing I think there is a ton of value in that Bitcoin can't provide is some digital asset with similar characteristics to Bitcoin but that is used as equity in a decentralized project / businesses as opposed to money. For example, you want to start a decentralized Uber competitor but you don't have any money to hire developers or entice users away from the entrenched competitors. So you say I will give out equity to contributors, developers, artists, even users and even though that equity is valueless right now, we all believe that if we do our jobs well it will have value one day. Just tokens that are to stocks what Bitcoin is to money. You wouldn't pay for your decentralized Uber ride in this equity token just like you don't pay for Uber rides in Uber stock, you would pay in Bitcoin. You would just perhaps take some sats from each ride and distribute it to the equity token holders.

The problem right now is that people trying to build Bitcoin focused products have a hard time funding the work to really compete with traditional alternatives. Either you get donations which is not sustainable or you create a traditional regulated company which can't possibly build products with cypherpunk values without getting shut down by governments. Not to mention self-sovereign software probably does need to be open source which means the business model of selling licenses is also out the door from day one. I've always though it was ironic that a community that prides themselves on an understanding of game theory doesn't see this.

I'm also not suggesting that these other assets could be as sovereign for the holder as Bitcoin itself, of course they are high risk assets so most people would probably mostly want to hold Bitcoin. But if we want a serious circular Bitcoin economy full of cypherpunk teams we need a way for them to issue equity. Regulators will never accept it but that's the whole point of this type of asset as opposed to stock. There's demand for this type of asset and it will be filled (possible in a very shitty way that doesn't actually achieve what it claims to) so Bitcoiners can either push this market away from Bitcoin or embrace it and compete for it in a way that keeps Bitcoin at the center, which I would argue is the only way it's really going to work well long term.