Bitcoin is a massive improvement over fiat currency and PMs

Twitter highlight of the week. If you missed it, it’s well worth a read and show your support to the author by sharing, liking and commenting on their thread.

After receiving an over reaction to one of his earlier posts, Jake put together some insightful thoughts in one of the best, most controversial threads I have read in recent months.

Bitcoin and the state of inaction

Bitcoin is a massive improvement over fiat currency and PMs, but to pretend it is complete or cannot be improved upon is incredibly naive. Bitcoin is an open public service that allows people to transmit and store value, which is way fairer than systems that came before it.

Once you have an open system for storing and transmitting value, other questions naturally arise:

• How are decisions made for the network?
• How private are transactions on this network?
• How do you fund the growth of the network?

Rather than innovating and extending the Bitcoin network to address these natural follow-on issues, the choice was made (by whom?) to treat btc like a SV/VC corp, raise capital via meatspace corps, and have all the ancillary services adopt the same model. The end result is essentially a SV/VC corp that is owned by the same investors who own every other major corp.

While many people have not heard of Decred for various reasons, it is the result of taking the other path, where the network is extended by innovation and tech. Instead of by sv/vc centralization and financialization, which dominate btc businesses. A side effect of taking this path is that it does not endear Decred to the sv/vc community.

While this has certainly impeded our growth relative to other projects, it is clear that taking btc's path will do little to change the status quo and lead to legitimate societal change. Yes, people will get rich, but most of the gains will be captured by the same people that already own everything else. Decred has innovated and offers additional public services

• Project decision making for consensus changes and budgets
• Strong opt-in privacy
• Subsidy-funded decentralized treasury
• Exchange and price discovery via atomic swaps

This is all stuff bitcoin should have done, but lacked the insight and vision to execute. Instead of taking the harder path, key members of the bitcoin community took the easy way out by letting sv/vc money and influence take over. btc people are more preoccupied with selling widgets and masturbating about how great they are than delivering real insight and real tech.

The revolution will not be centralized. The revolution will not be sv/vc dominated. The revolution will not be a gigawatt mining farm. The revolution will not have a social media network that censors competing products. The revolution will not depend on shitbag zealotry.

Revolution takes true sacrifice and grit. Revolution is not something co-opted by the establishment. Revolution is not replacing the old broken shit with new broken shit. Real revolution is about fixing real problems and doing it the hard way.

Human society is coming unglued because it is built on hyper-rigged ponzi schemes administrated by hypocritical sociopaths who have no skin-in-the-game. Why bother trying to improve anything when there is no incentive alignment?

Decred is the missing incentive alignment. Through inventive incentive alignment, we will build fairer public services to build a new fairer society. In an age of plenty, Decred represents that which is truly rare - that which is truly fair.