People in the future will marvel that in the early years of bitcoin that we allowed 5 people to just decide what bitcoin is. And half of them didn't know the difference between a man and a woman.

People will look back on this time as one of the most morally depraved, inhumane and dangerous times in history.

They will look back on us like we lived in the dark ages.

We are cavemen who discovered lightning.

Meaning, besides the incredible advancements in technology, we are so early in the evolution of human governance and morality that what we tolerate today will become unheard of in the future.

I believe technology can actually play a huge role in this.

Either we adopt a sound money or governments will inflate away all the productivity and prosperity that would be achieved through AI and robotics.

Either we treat each other decently and leave each other alone or there will be endless wars.

Either we shrink governments or they will inevitably lead to tyrant after tyrant.

As the world goes so does bitcoin, or maybe vice versa.

Just maybe.

The solution is simple. Opt out. Buy what you need from friends and family with bitcoin and accept it as payment for your products/services.

Save your data on your own computer.

Shop locally.

Go to church.

Get married and start a family.

And have fun.

I think we would be ok if we all just did that and didn't worry about much else.

Thanks to @Jeff Booth for the constant reminder to try to see the world in a new light and to @Efrat Fenigson for putting out an excellent podcast with him. What a great way to start the year and I wish you both a fantastic 2026.

This podcast is what inspired my new years resolution to move to a bitcoin standard. Wish me luck.

I'll see you in the future.

-monk

Who built @Haikustr?

That is so cool!

“Which way does a tree fall?
A tree falls the way it leans.”

- The Lorax

How much is one is one bitcoin worth if you couldn’t denominate it in fiat currency.

Anyone who claims fees are the only filter that works please tell me how this is wrong.

"Why not let the fee market manage data storage?

The fee market is designed to prioritize transactions based on economic urgency.

However, the market for data storage on the blockchain is a completely different market from the market for payments, with completely different incentives.

Specifically, the fee for a monetary transaction incentivizes a miner to include the transaction in a block, representing a one-time transfer of monetary value, i.e., a payment. The miner thus provides the one-time service of securing a payment, for a one-time fee.

Once the payment is secured, the payor does not receive any additional benefit from the Bitcoin network, besides the integrity of Bitcoin's transaction history (a service to which all node operators are happy to contribute, because Bitcoin would not function as money otherwise).

Conversely, the fee for a data storage transaction still goes only to the miner who includes the data in a block, but the burden of storing the data falls on all node operators, who never received even a part of the fee, yet are forced to continue downloading, storing, and serving the data forever.

In this case, the miner accepts a one-time fee, and in exchange, the priceless service of highly-available, uncensorable data storage is provided in perpetuity for free by node operators.

The problem becomes even worse when the data is objectionable to node operators, as this represents an even larger, unexpected cost for them."

This is an excerpt from the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork.