Damus
Lyn Alden
Recent notes
GM. Some people say that everything is good for Bitcoin. I almost, but not quite, agree. Everything that fails to land a critical hit, is good for Bitcoin. What doesn't kill it, usually makes it stronger. The bigger and more robust it gets, the more resilient it is against even the idea of a critical hit, and that has required work. When threats materialize, programmers program, financiers finance, and podcasters podcast. Bitcoin is a growing, robust ecosystem that responds to threats and hardens against them. Sometimes at the base layer, often at higher layers. It doesn't put too many premature resources against threats that aren't currently hurting it, but can swarm massive resources in response to something that does start to hurt it. Nobody's in control; it's a well-designed swarm of incentives trending toward life, and in this case life means functional operation as a permissionless and high-quality global ledger to store and transmit value (i.e. electronic cash). I've long since viewed it in that self-healing way, since it's a similar lens to how I view the established macroeconomic system as well. People continually underestimate a lindy system's response functions against threats, for both good systems (like Bitcoin) and bad systems (like central banking). It took me a bit of time to be convinced that Bitcoin was lindy, but once I did, I haven't seen any reason to waver. Bears doubt its robustness. Bulls consider it highly robust. I'm a bull. It's not that I consider it invincible though; it's that I consider it as having a high probability shot at resisting forces against it, and a better shot than any of its competitors. And for those who don't know, my background is in electronics engineering with a control systems focus in my early engineering career, so the fact that I became enamored with the robustness of a decentralized money's inbuilt control system and the ecosystem surrounding it was no small hurdle. It probably contributed to my skepticism early on, but once my skepticism was satisfied, it instead contributed to my conviction. I agree with those who say that one day state attacks will be the biggest threats against Bitcoiners. Not against Bitcoin's existence itself, most likely, but against its permissionless and private usage. The defense against that comes from those writing high quality code that gives people tools to resist, educators and financiers that help expand them, as well as jurisdictional arbitrage as high-conviction people can and do move around between legal jurisdictions toward freer ones. It'll be a longer process than many expect, I think. But the ecosystem is built for it, and attracts the best people to deal with it. And Nostr is currently part of its epicenter.
There are those who say Bitcoin doesn't scale, and build blockchains with more throughput at the cost of more centralization (generally in the form of it being way harder to run a node), and then also point to Bitcoin as having low fees as a criticism. The limiter it turns out, 16 years in, is not how many people *can* self-custody bitcoin. It's how many people *want* to. Not everyone wants to deal with the technicalities of their own car, and not everyone wants to handle the technicalities of their own money. Quite few, in fact. It's always a subset for these types of things. People who are hardcore over their area of knowledge. I leave my car details to pros down the street who I know the name of, and handle my money myself. There are those who handle their own cars but leave their money details to others. Bitcoin currently processes about as many transactions per year as Fedwire, which handles $1 quadrillion worth of gross settlement volume per year for the US and for a good chunk of the world (in context, it's approximately 200 million $5 million average-sized transactions). That's actually a crazy stat. Bitcoin is casually this open-source global Fedwire with its own scarce units, and unlike Fedwire anyone can permissionlessly build on it or transact with it, for low fees despite it being a +$2T network. And if it gets clogged there are all sorts of permissionless layers above it with certain trade-offs. Some people say paper bitcoin holders detract from the network. I say the opposite- their willingness to hold IOUs helps add to price stability and network size without clogging it. That leaves more room for cypherpunks to develop with, and work on. And those who finance them. This has been foreseen as early as Hal Finney in 2010, when he wrote about bitcoin banks ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg34211 ). We live in a sweet spot by most metrics. A golden age. Historically, so few recognize it when they have it so good. Bitcoin is big enough to be of interest to many, and yet is still niche enough in a global context to have low base-layer fees. Suitcoiners are happy to add to its scale, and yet cypherpunks can also build, and users can transact right on the base layer, and move to Lightning and Ark and BitVM and Liquid and any sort of trade-off they want if fees get high. And you're bearish, anon? The real battle, though, is the ongoing government crackdown on privacy. Bitcoin itself is in a pretty good technical place. It's a great tool. Certain conservative low-risk covenants might make it better, but even the existing design space is great and still expanding. The US, Europe, and China cracking down on privacy is the threat. The headwind. And they're all expected. They're not surprising, but they're indeed fierce. That's the real battle- for the hearts and minds of people to embrace why privacy and permissionlessness are good traits. In this ongoing funny contrast between podcasters and developers, that's the ideal role of podcasters- to spread the good news of what developers have built. To educate people. To tell them what's now possible thanks to developers. To articulate why cypherpunk values are good to a broad non-technical audience. That's where the overlap is. In overly-simplistic D&D terms, those with high CHA try to spread the work of those with high INT. It's not so much that "governments" are the problem. Governments often at least partially represent the people. If you convince a lot of people that privacy and sound money are good things, then you defang the problem. And you also challenge them legally in jurisdictions where it makes sense. The technical foundation is good. The development of the past 16 years has been amazing, and it has brought us here. The scale has reached institutions, which is expected, not a threat. The actual threat is not treasury companies; it's anti-privacy regulations by governments. And more deeply that's a social issue, given how many people accept it. A vast amount of people believe privacy is only important for bad people who have something to hide. There's a ton of education work to do on it. Privacy is good. It's the default. But most people don't realize it when it comes to money. We're winning. For 16 years ya'll have been amazing. But we'll need another 16 years more. More developers. More podcasters. All of it. We're a $2 trillion in market cap entering into a global fiat network of hundreds of trillions. And as their own institutions melt down from their own failures, their own top-heavy demographics and false promises, they will look for scapegoats. They will look toward those who are winning, and say they are the enemy. When interviewers ask my price predictions, I tend to be conservative. That's mostly a liquidity assessment, and a rotation from OGs to new buyers. Price growth does take time. But under that surface, I also have the benefit of being a general partner at among the largest bitcoin-only venture funds. I see what people are building, and I'm bullish. And for those who are working on stuff that doesn't align with profit, entities like the HRF and OpenSats are doing great work. Across all of the options, people are building great things. I couldn't be more bullish on the ecosystem that's in place. All of you. Let's go. Good evening.
A big conservative political podcast (seven figure YouTube subscribers) asked me to come on and talk about bitcoin (sat next to them on the plane out of the May conference in Vegas, which sparked their request). Last week when I went on the show, they decided to emphasize a talking point of why tariffs are great and will usher in a golden age, and some questions about bitcoin. When asked about tariffs, I generally disagreed that they would be bullish or usher in a new golden age, mentioned that the past three months of data doesn’t show a decline in import prices which means it has been a tax on Americans, and eventually we moved to discussing bitcoin. They ended up not airing the talk, and instead ran the clip with someone else who agreed on the tariff points. Waste of time, basically. It’s a reminder that a big percentage of what you see in heavily politicized media is about narrative framing and talking points rather than genuine attempts to discuss or explore. It reminded me why I normally decline to go on political shows; I had only agreed to this one because the catalyst was in person and so the agreeable side of me was like “sure, why not”. Well, that’s why not.