At which point, Bitcoin proponents will up the requirements again. This is an excuse people use to avoid talking about the fact that Bitcoin has spent the last 2-3 years consistently proving that it doesn't scale and that it is unusable as a currency.

> had what some call an "immaculate conception"

Or, it was a good first try that needs iteration now that we understand that hyper-deflation is a bad thing for a currency, now that we understand that pseudononymous addresses don't provide any real privacy guarantees at all, and now that we understand that transaction speed and cost has to be something that's optimized for early on in a coin's life and that those issues can't be fixed by pasting an ad-hoc, unproven non-blockchain solution on top of the coin 10 years later.

The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building.

I’d say it’s not weird or religious - it’s a predictable outcome of the incentive structure of then currency.

A key criteria for a better alternative is that it doesn’t incentivize hagiographic thinking.

in what sense is bitcoin "hyper-deflation"ary? i think you are thinking of the word "deflation" but i know that doesn't sound as smart

>The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building.

there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better, so go on

They already did. Half the crypto ecosystem is already better than Bitcoin if you're trying to build a functional currency. We're talking about a coin that doesn't have any privacy guarantees, it's not exactly hard to improve on that.

When I talk about religious loyalty, what I'm getting at is that it turns out the Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't seem to care that much about stuff like privacy, and whenever anyone brings up Bitcoin's flaws, or the fact that it has been outclassed by other coins, suddenly the conversation is all about "stability" and the trust of having an old coin that hasn't fixed its problems in 10 years.

It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. It turns out that PoW is unscalable and prohibitively expensive, which is a barrier to real decentralization, but we have people on here arguing that's a good thing. It's understandable that Satoshi didn't know in advance every problem, but it's not understandable that in all of the years since then, the Bitcoin community has largely failed to evolve or learn anything about the initial flaws that the coin had.

And this is honestly a tricky conversation to have because we have to keep dancing around the fact that Bitcoin is a speculative asset and that very little of the community cares about making a currency at all. But the community won't acknowledge that, so instead we get a lot of weird deflection around "stability" and we all have to pretend that the community is in good faith actually trying to create an alternative to cash, and that people genuinely believe that Bitcoin's tech is the best way to do that.

But obviously that's not what's happening. Nobody would really look at the state of Bitcoin and argue that it's best-positioned to replace traditional currency. It's worse than cash for privacy, it has higher transaction fees than almost any other payment method, it doesn't scale environmentally, and it takes 10 minutes to add a new block. But... it is for the moment an excellent speculative investment because the speculative market is irrational and doesn't care about technology. And the speculative market benefits from pretending that it exists for some kind of grand purpose rather than just as an end to itself, even if doing so makes it harder to accomplish any of the original goals behind the coin.

As a currency? It doesn't. Do people actually think that Bitcoin is succeeding as a currency right now? If you want to talk about the market deeming something sufficient, the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency.

As a speculative investment? Because of what I said in my last paragraph.

> chaumian coinjoin

I've seen multiple vulnerabilities pop up with coinjoin wallets, plus the process costs extra money to do, plus it's not network-wide so the coins involved can still be blocked from future transactions. I don't understand why a community would go down that route when solutions like zero-knowledge proofs already exist and have a better track record. I mean, that's supposedly the whole thing with Bitcoin, right? Stability and security?

The single advantage that coinjoins have is that they don't require iterating on Bitcoin itself, which the community seems to be desperate to avoid. This is something that pops up a lot with Bitcoin-centered "solutions". We have coinjoin, because having a coin with real privacy guarantees would require iterating on Bitcoin and we can't have that. We have the lightning network (which also has serious privacy problems) because building a completely separate layer that operates off of the blockchain is preferable to the community over fixing the problems with transaction delays and fees in the coin itself.

you don't understand why a community at a nash equilibrium wouldn't jump at the opportunity to break consensus? bitcoin is favorable because it is relatively speaking the minimum viable collection of traits needed to function as a cryptocurrency, reduced complexity leaves less attack surface. if zk proofs become obviously necessary or superior to cj because of coin blacklisting, people will switch to zcash or whatever else uses it, but in a world where regulators or businesses block cj'd coins, i don't know why you think zk coins would be any better off. in any case these alternatives still exist and people use them, so why does it even matter? if you're right, everyone will see and you will probably be rich.

> the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency.

man in 1910: the market has universally declared horses superior to automobiles

Reduced attack surface only matters if the remaining surface is secure. Privacy-wise, the comparison here is that you've got a door with no locks, and you're arguing against putting a lock on it because "that'll make it more complicated, and then people will get in and steal my stuff."

There is no particular reason to be confident that coinjoins will protect your privacy in the long run. They've both broken in the past and they're easier to regulate than something built into the core design of the coin. This is a situation where you need a more fundamental guarantee, because Bitcoin at its current complexity level is not capable of protecting your privacy well, and I don't see strong evidence that coinjoins will solve that. You've got to put a lock on your door, even if it makes your door more complicated.

Even disregarding the fact that coinjoins are unproven, paying coordinator fees every time you want to make a private wallet is a bad solution anyway. Even if you could be confident that coinjoin wallets weren't going to leak information, you still wouldn't want a solution that had those fees, because we don't want a world where only rich people have privacy.

> at a nash equilibrium

I think the whole point of what I've been saying is that the nash equilibrium of Bitcoin is terrible. If the crypto market stays in the state it's in, it will not become a viable currency. So yeah, I don't understand why a community in a nash equilibrium where >50% of the network is subject to interference by the PRC, where transaction fees are spiraling out of control, and in which tracking is already a serious problem -- I don't understand why a community would be happy to stay in that state, complexity or equilibrium be damned.

That's what I've been saying. Bitcoin as it exists today is terrible, and making it better is going to require actual iteration, not just sitting around and trying to pump the market so somebody can buy a porche.

> why does it even matter?

Because some of us would like a functional, private, inexpensive online payment system at some point, and the entire crypto market is intertwined in the public eye, and silliness like speculative investing and NFTs distort that purpose and get in the way of other coins doing anything useful.

There's a reason why cryptocurrencies are now classified by the IRS as an investment. If you're trying to build a currency, then that's a bad outcome, but none of that matters if the only thing you care about is "becoming rich" instead of building something that's actually useful for the world.

> man in 1910: the market has universally declared horses superior to automobiles

Well OK, then don't act like 5-10 year temporary consolidation around Bitcoin means that the crypto market has decided that Bitcoin is the technologically superior option for a currency, rather than a temporarily valuable speculative asset. Particularly, don't act like Bitcoin prices prove its superiority during the same week that heckin Dogecoin prices spike.

You can't have it both ways here, either the market is always rational or it's not.

If the market is always rational, then credit cards are better than cryptocurrency in its current state. If the market isn't always rational, then speculative investment based on FOMO does not indicate anything about Bitcoin's quality as a tool for transactions.

It's a fallacy to consider bitcoin as an apriori better system than either traditional currencies or other coins when it has failed to achieve the hoped-for results.