Thank God for Bitcoin influenceoors
The influencer class in bitcoin is looking pretty bad right now...but I never would have learned half as much about Bitcoin without them. The podcasters (many of whom made their bread through sponsorships), the guide-writers, the dev personalities who have so much time for Twitter -- while it is true that they are all scammers, also couldn't help but teach me a little about Bitcoin.
As many bitcoiners describe, when I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole there wasn't a podcast I didn't listen to or a guide I didn't read. I tried out every wallet available at the time. I did IBD like seven times because I kept screwing up running an indexer on it and was so bad at computer stuff I didn't know how to keep my blocks data when I needed to try again. Like a child, the only way I could get some things done was if I want back to step zero and tried to follow the steps again.
For all their attention-grabbing, don't-trust-verify hypocrisy, the clique of bitcoin cool kids managed to get me through a good number of levels.
So when things like the Coldcard fuckup[1] come out and all the influencers look like total chumps, I find that I can't be too mad at them because I don't know if I would have really gotten into bitcoin if it weren't for all their "content."
My sats aren't stolen yet
I still have my sats, and while I didn't get tripped up by this particular Coldcard blunder, I may end up falling for the next one...or making up one of my own.
In the course of my time in Bitcoin I have had at least three major incidents where I thought I had completely screwed myself. These were good learning lessons. You can use testnet all you like, but it isn't until you are riding the high seas of mainnet that some things really hit home.
I know that I am not some shadowy supercoder. I'm still quite ignorant about many things in Bitcoin (getting Bitcoin details wrong is still pretty much a daily experience). I often am disappointed with how incredible my Bitcoin ignorance is. But dammit, it's so interesting, I can't seem to focus on anything else!
Bitcoin is black market money
I've heard it said that Bitcoin may not be for normies, that if you don't need to transact in bitcoin, you probably shouldn't be messing around with it. This is a pretty sobering assessment.
I'm more like a normie than I'd like to admit. I'm a fairly unimportant person who hasn't even bought drugs with bitcoin or something mildly transgressive like that. I live in the US where the financial system works well enough and I can use e-trade if I want. I certainly don't do very much with black markets.
When I transact in bitcoin it's usually because I've gone out of my way to buy a cute coffee or something (well, except that I zap people all day long on SN and I currently don't know of any other platform that provides similar functionality sans sats...). And yet, I can't seem to get past bitcoin.
I don't know if normies should use bitcoin or not, but I still stand by the idea that Bitcoin is for anyone. It's incredibly easy to fuck it up, but if you want to use it, learn about it, try it -- don't let these fuckups stop you. You'll probably do something wrong and make a bunch of mistakes, but what else are you gonna do -- watch the next season of Survivor or something?
You don't become the Dread Pirate Roberts by staying home
One of the things that I most enjoyed writing on SN was the True and Accurate History of Boating Accidents. The conclusion I drew from researching that meme is that it's not your bitcoin unless you can fuck it up.
Here's something that didn't make it into that piece, but which nicely sums up the way I feel about self custody right now:
In The Princess Bride there's this moment where Wesley tells Buttercup about how the Dread Pirate Roberts would say to him every night:
"Goodnight, Wesley. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."
Bitcoin is my Dread Pirate Roberts. It may kill me in the morning, but it's been a fine time for me.
I refer to it as the
Coldcard fuckupbecause hack is really not the right word and while vulnerability may be the right word, it isn't strong enough. ↩
When you transact with Bitcoin, even if it is only on SN, are you really a normie? Even if you only run custodial LN.. Are you a normie?
I'd say no.
There will always be relative normies compared to the most insane among us. But you're not a normie if you're here. And I think that even if you're doing something basic like connecting your cashu npub thingy to SN and participate here, and that's your entire exposure to Bitcoin, you're at the very least on your way out of being a normie.
And then, you're definitely using Bitcoin as an MoE, even if it is just for zaps. Even if the amounts transacted here will not put bread on the table anywhere. It still is a very humble beginning.
So when I say that Bitcoin is not for normies, see that as modulated by a qualifier for what's put at stake. You do not cash out your entire fiat pension and put it all on a singlesig. But that's what has been sold for at least half a decade now. To normies. And I think that that's predatory. That's just bag pumping. And it brings grief. Because we're all so busy hyping that NgU that we forget to do what we were here for.
Or are we really all predators around here? Like the mortgage pushers of 2006. The guys we once thought were worth pivoting from. Building an alternative to. Are we just the same creature simply lining our pockets? Or were we going to actually change something?
but isn't there a question of the role of self-custody in a "strong" bitcoin? Naively, but perhaps more commonly than not, I have labored under the belief that self-custody is somehow "good" for bitcoin.
What exactly that means I think I've always fuzzed around and not been too clear about. Let me see if I can clarify this thing in mind at all here: if only custodians hold bitcoin, then the custodians control the rules of bitcoin, because a node without coins is like a tree falling in the forest -- nobody cares.
Possibly, though, depositors could put pressure on their custodians to enforce rules they like. But it seems unlikely to me that this would be very effective. In short, if everybody used custodians, it would probably be a pretty weak bitcoin.
But we aren't talking about that. It's just the idea that normies shouldn't use custodians. People who are only here for the number go up. The culture of bitcoin has been one of somewhat aggressive proselytization to such people (well, to everyone really). Orange pilling felt very Church of Latter Day Saints two guys in suits riding bicycles knocking on your door.
Can Bitcoin be freedom money if only 30% of users self custody? (obviously, all coins are always held by someone, but let's make a distinction between custodians -- people holding other people's coins -- and people holding their own coins). 30% seems way high though, so like Abraham, I will ask: but what if there are only 20%...and if there are only 10%?
If 90% of coins were held with custodians, it seems likely that bitcoin would not function the way we expect it to: there would not be much in the way of an ability to resist state pressure to do things that bitcoin was supposed to defend against.
So don't we need the normies...at least some of them? I'm not trying to say we should do a shoddy job teaching normies about bitcoin just to get more bodies in here, but I'm wondering if there is some minimum ratio of self-custody which we must maintain.
A freedom-enabling bitcoin needs liquid coin, i.e. a network with active participants that actually transact. If you're actively transacting then you're an active participant. You accept good coin and you will decline fake coin.
Deferring this decision to a bank of sorts is not the idea behind peer to peer electronic cash, because then bank A will make a deal with bank B, C and D and that's it: Global Bitcoin Reserve Bank, modeled after the Fed. Like some consortium of whale custodians working together for our safety
*cough*.So if there is a ratio, that ratio is not % of bitcoin in self custody, but perhaps % of bitcoin freely transacted from and to self validation and custody (which is hard to measure).
However, we cannot influence this except for ourselves and that freedom comes at a cost that is not just spend $200 on some device, set up auto buy on River and autowithdraw to selfcustody and done. It's an active constraint to convenience because you need to run a node and you from time to time need to think about which node software you run. Oh and keep it updated, which is shitty, but necessary.
So, maybe we shouldn't orange pill random people on the street. Maybe we should SN-pill and work it from a knowledge perspective instead. Learn before act. Enable that
DYOR. ETFs aren't going anywhere as long as Saylor is able to obtain more debt to pay off debts. And in the meantime, we spend some sats.Many of the first astronauts also died. Bitcoin's ascension is a path to glory, even if you fall along the way.
It is both terrible and magical at the same time how Bitcoin has consistently brought the truth to surface.
Notwithstanding that thing about influencers -- which I agree with -- the phrase should probably be appended:
stack sats and be humbled
Wow... interesting post... you learn something new about Bitcoin every day (study Bitcoin). This Coldcard error is serious and offers a lesson for all Bitcoiners—you just have to know how to read between the lines. My advice is self-custody, multiple layers of security, and—don't put all your eggs (or BTC) in one basket!
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