The US government is only months, if not weeks, from the adoption of stablecoin legislation, which will set the playing field for the global economy for decades, if not centuries, will come.
During this crucial moment when we should all keep our eyes locked with precision on the award, the best and brightest defenders of the one neutral digital asset again have bifurced in the trenches of “us. Vs them.” As sure as the next block, apparently every ten minutes, there is another attempt from a fraction in the group to put an intense ethical intention over the invention of Bitcoin. These groups converge to share interpretations of the Holy Text – Satoshi’s WhitePaper – or pour over his forum posts on Bitcointalk hoping to find a path forward. It seems without failure, regardless of when you look at the fractional part or the amorphous whole, the chosen writings of Bitcoin’s inventor, which always easily enables the exact behavior and option – or lack of – – it is best for the current demanding party.
This must say, the observer of Bitcoin when trying to influence multiple users, simply projecting and reinforcing their own reflection on the monetary protocol as it relates to their own position via their specific share in the system. There is no neutral reflection or position to be expressed – every voice and every idea should basically come from a place of origin. While many are trying to go very much to limit this bias from their publicly articulated analysis – not to mention the many more who can completely demand ignorance – whether you are capable, willing or attentive, your belief is seen by the context you are witnessing and cannot be separated to create an objective meaning from a subjective experience. In short, everyone speaks their own book. It is a requirement to speak.
On today’s social media platforms, the actualization of someone who speaks their book is even further manipulated beyond strictly basic financial incentives, and each idea becomes a piece of content competing for air in the rough sea of algorithmic influence. Not having an opinion on the latest thing, not to express and formulate the said opinion in public is to drown in the void of irrelevancy. On Twitter, a Bluecheck fleet is seen as a necessity, normalized by both the supposed dissidents and the mainstream. The digital front, while an important, is eroded not by the proverbial stick, but of the poisoned carrot. Payouts, likes and supporters have replaced credibility as currency for relevance, not because of consumer actions, but of the creators. Even worse, many creators have off-shored their creative abilities-ie. Their ideas-to AI-Chatbots and large language models that remove humanity completely from output, making the content ocean filled with homogeneous globe of untrained thoughts. The late phase creator economy has ultimately failed to promote originality and has instead given rise to a multi-headed hydra of Next-up influencers ready and able to avert the freshest of chatgpt chum at the request of a curtain algorithmic masters out of sight.
The unseen incentives will be our downfall – not our ideologies, not our intellect and not our readiness or the lack of any of these things. Although they apply to many media and championships, the hidden incentives of programmable money show this concept far greater than, for example, independent media figures, fitness and health gurus or dissidental philosopher.
Today’s Bitcoin culture war comes at a dangerous time when the greatest threat to its neutrality of incentives comes to the protocol layer. While hours and hours of podcasts from both sides of the divorce may make you believe that this attack vector comes from JPEGs or the filters that discourage them, actually remains the impending corrupt agent from reintroducing the dollar stablecoins to blockchain, as Bitcoin itself remains infinite as a means of exchange that can service
Both sides of the debate, the knots/pro films or the core/filters of the artists do not deal with the core of the real problem of brewing in Bitcoin today. The knots claim that all non-monetary application cases of Bitcoin are against the nature of the protocol, while remaining absolutely silent as to whether the same ethics should be used for Tether’s Homecoming “Bitcoin-native” USDT dollar stableecoins via tapot-assets storage in the distributed database known as Blockchain. The core defenders who rightly claim to stand next to the most ambitious and successful Open Source project throughout all time have a little to say about maintainers lack of interest in pursuing options that would allow billions of users to take advantage of Bitcoin’s disinfederating monetary policy, rather than just the millions of already adopters. Both sides are at best silent partners in the scaling-to-financialization of Bitcoin via shares and debt instruments, pre-germs, exchange-traded funds and tokenized dollars rather than doing utxo ownership feasible and efficient. Filters, spam, core, knots, are all distractions from the real problem that brews the horizon: the incentive distortion of stableecoins.
If Bitcoin remains programmable money, and the mere existence of this protocol level debate forced the idea that ossification has not yet arrived, why should we promise allegiance between two teams that directly earn none of the questions available? Bitcoin deserves more client optionality and knots are not congenital a bad idea and many of the mining concepts marketed by sea employees. Bitcoin Core has secured trillion of dollars value with an unmatched up-time for a financial protocol. Men Bitcoin vil undlade at stablecoins, utilsigtet forevige De Forenede Staters statskasse Ponzi over hele kloden, mens de introducerer dollariserede, perverse incitamenter til hele spilteorien om Bitcoin’s blokproduktion –– og således ikke er afskrækket transaktionsafvikling-hvis vi er dæmpende og distraherede ved at ikke maksimere selv-custody og holde dollar-tokens for the only thing if we are currently becoming underweight.
Created inscriptions a newly found demand for blockspace that directly competes with the companies that enable Larry Fink’s vision for Bitcoin as “a technology for asset storage?” Make Dickbutts and Monkey Jpeg’s Tether-Holding-ie. The dollarization —– of Bitcoin more expensive? Perhaps. But there is simply no evidence that the players on each side of this cultural war are actively or willingly compromised, and to suggest that such is a dangerous game.
As we wrote almost two years ago in a previous call for action, “the network must remain practically useful to someone, or it risks becoming practically useless for everyone.” The only responsibility that today’s Bitcoiner has to maintain is to leave the protocol as permitted and as useful as it was when they found it. Part of this innate involves the mission core that exposes to achieving its tireless approach to perpetuating an extremely complicated, new piece of software across an ever-changing landscape of hardware and software updates. Part of this also involves congenital missionary knots and marine attempts to achieve with its persecution of purity of economic activity and mining decentralization through block construction and payment methods.
Blindly opposite or support the current thing because of Twitter posts and podcasts will not deliver us from the known evils nor are preparing for the unknown. Ultimately, both paths forward on their own will not achieve the promise of Bitcoin to the full extent.
Reject the binary presented by the Cultural War and think for yourself.
This is a guest post of Mark Goodwin. Expressed expressed is entirely their own and does not necessarily reflect BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.