People in Bitcoin businesses are experiencing a sharp dichotomy between the world of the normie and the world of Bitcoin, in organizations trying to come to grips with the power of this new and very powerful messaging network, and how to exploit it to onboard new users.
If companies try to use Bitcoin by its nature, they immediately collide head on with this prickly dichotomy, especially if they’re burdened by an ignorant, computer illiterate “Compliance Department”, staffed with refugees from the anti-matter Twilight Zone Bankster Dimension. They want to know who is sending what messages on the network in every instance, but the tools they build, constructed by genius developers, make this impossible unless they “break Bitcoin” by violating the most basic elements and requirements of utility.
Companies trying to style themselves in the Ethical Bitcoin, or “HODL” mold are staffed by people who are confronted with this thorny dichotomy directly, causing them to enter into paroxysms of doublethink. On the one hand, they are tasked with providing tools that allow people to use Bitcoin “properly”, but on the other, they can’t countenance or accept at face value how things actually work in Bitcoin.
They offer the ability for users to create Bitcoin addresses at will and then receive Bitcoin “on” those addresses, but simultaneously want to know who is sending Bitcoin to those addresses. They’ve unwittingly opened Pandora’s box, or a gateway directly to the Event Horizon of a Black Hole, and are desperate to put that box, that portal, into another box, or put that other box into a room inside a gated community where there is a policewoman at every window and entrance.
It’s completely absurd.
The reality is this; you cannot run an Ethical Bitcoin company that is “True to Bitcoin” or that maintains privacy and abstains from spying on your users and also want all the controls and surveillance that comes with Unethical Bitcoin. The two universes are not compatible, they are matter and anti-matter touching. They are mutually exclusive, and wanting them to comingle is 100% irrational, and in the long run, it cannot possibly work.
Because Bitcoin is math, there are effectively no possible gatekeepers for the billions of people who have calculators at hand.
Anyone can generate Bitcoin addresses and send messages on the network. Because this is true, all gestures designed to placate double digit IQ types are the worst and most embarrasing folly. As I’ve written before, it is inevitable that all Bitcoin in circulation will be two things; “Non KYC” and “Tainted”.
https://medium.com/@beautyon_/bitcoin-adoption-and-conway-s-game-of-life-54ca71db7b88
https://medium.com/@beautyon_/bitcoin-surveillance-an-ahistoric-market-error-d3871f671c8c
Normies are going to have to adapt to Bitcoin, not the other way around, just as they did with BitTorrent. If one company refuses to capitulate, another will arise, and then another and another, until the battle is won.
This is now absolutely inevitable, and fighting against it is completely irrational, pointless and stupid. No one who can think accepts the pretexts, pretenses, pettiness, pathetic and pointless garbage trotted out by people from the “Crypto Compliance” world. Their world is dying and the Bitcoin world is the invasive species out competing every weed in their overgrown and nutrient starved pest infested Victory Garden.
You can’t run from this. You must either embrace and accept Bitcoin at face value on its terms, or you will be out-competed by others who are not self sabotaging, weak minded, brainwashed cowards and non Anglo-Saxon salary addicts.
Fiatjaf, the person who created Nostr created a good example of this dynamic.
Nostr doesn’t have to be perfect for it to be the perfect example of what is going to happen with Bitcoin services. Someone is going to write a Bitcoin client or service that changes everything, and which puts forth a proposition that billions will easily accept and consume unquestioned.
This novel protocol that spawns clients will not be run by cowards, corporate types, cretins, creeps, creatures or delusionistas, dullards, dimwits, dope, or dummies…or other things. It will, all of a sudden, change everything.
You can do and say whatever you want; you cannot stop the inevitable from taking place. The only real choice you have is to be the hero or the villain, the hero or the loser, the champion or the defeated, the man of destiny or the chump.
That’s about it!
