Thread by @allenf32

thanks so much to @EpsilonTheory for indulging such degenerate plebs as @AleksSvetski and me.

I want to do a thread while it's still reasonably fresh on trying to steelman Ben's "Wall Street swallows Bitcoin" thesis, as I have a newfound appreciation for it after our chat.

okay, so first of all here's a strawman, which I will admit is more or less what I thought going into the chat:

"investment banks comes to control so much of the circulating supply they can do all kind of annoying forky statist shit and it will become unusable for the good guys"

that's NOT what he means!

what he means I think is much subtler and more sophisticated. I'll say upfront I don't agree with it (assuming I've even captured it properly) but I do think it is amongst the best articulated threats worth being aware of.

what I think he means is that precisely the attraction of Number Go Up will mean Wall Street's propensity to financialize and skim flows will lead to them not crushing it at all, but something far more like: offering a fake version that attracts far more capital.

now you might reply: "that's dumb, my bitcoin is real bitcoin, I don't need JPMorganCoin."

and again, Ben would agree (I think) but he'd add that if you end up in the distinct minority, that doesn't matter at all.

he isn't concerned about Wall Street coopting *the protocol* - he knows that's stupid. he's concerned about it co-opting the *narrative*, such that so many noobs from this point go through a hyper-KYC/AML'd Bitcoin Lite that a blacklist would make perverse financial sense.

in his dystopian vision, EVERYBODY USES BITCOIN!

except it's bitcoin-lite. the regular user doesn't even realise the difference, and "real" bitcoiners screaming on the sidelines are socially ostracised.

I think this really is a very sophisticated concern.

it's clearly an attack vector, but of a variety I don't think I've heard of: it's a social attack. it's really a form of psyop, and where bitcoiners and Ben can firmly agree: if there are two institutions running a psyop that you don't want to cross it's Wall Street and the USG.

I thought of an analogy a little too late in the conversation to naturally bring up, but I wonder what @EpsilonTheory makes of it:

he's worried Bitcoin gets facebooked.

so, from the perspective of the creative and developmental explosion of the web leading consumer internet services away from the early walled gardens of AOL and CompuServe, eventually nearly everybody ended up back on AOL 2.0: facebook.

I'm obviously skipping an enormous amount of history here but I also kinda assume this audience knows it all: as this transition happened, a small number of passionate enthusiasts for privacy, sovereignty, decentralisation (sound familiar?) got agitated, but couldn't stop it.

not because facebook "sent jackbooted thugs" (as I've noticed Ben likes to say) but because it was just easier, slicker, more natural, etc.

regular people simply didn't care that it was in direct violation of the ethos of the web, because it worked so darned well.

and the people who wanted wider adoption of more deemed-to-be-moral tools were just pushed aside. they were still free to use these tools themselves, and even free to convince others to use them.

it would just never work.

and that's what Ben is worried about here.

interestingly, he identified NgU as potentially a curse in this regard, because (benefits aside) people attracted for that reason alone *will not care* whether they are using real Bitcoin or facebooked Bitcoin.

@AleksSvetski made a great point in response: that's why education matters. it's why toxicity matters. it's why NgU must be understood as primarily a technical benefit, not an advertisement to get rich quick, and that if number does go up, stay humble.

given we all seemed to agree on this, that seems like a good point to end this thread.

please correct any of this I have misremembered or misunderstood, @AleksSvetski and @EpsilonTheory.

and, Ben, wen laser eyes?