317 lines
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317 lines
16 KiB
HTML
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<head>
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<title>Pablo here</title>
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<meta charset="utf-8" />
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<meta viewport="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles.css" />
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</head>
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<body>
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<main>
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<h1>Hi, Pablo here</h1>
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<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
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<hr />
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<section>
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<h2>One property where gold beats Bitcoin</h2>
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<p><em>Published: 2026-06-25</em></p>
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<p>
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Gold is typically mocked by Bitcoiners (along with Peter Schiff). The
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honorable grandpa pet rock of sound money was the best thing we ever
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had, up until Bitcoin, and now Bitcoiners find it hilarious. No
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practical way to verify it, insanely hard to transact with, consistent
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inflation (even if not rampant like fiat), must be stored physically...
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Once you get used to Bitcoin, there are certainly many properties of
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gold that make you wonder why people still hold on to it. I must admit I
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have regularly taken part in the memetic "Ha-ha" aggressions towards
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gold and had my fair share of laughing when listening to Peter Schiff.
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</p>
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<p>
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But in my mother tongue we say that wise men change their minds when
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they're wrong. And recently, as I've become more knowledgable about
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Bitcoin (does the rabbit hole ever end?), I've come to realize there is
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one category in which gold woops Bitcoin's ass. And I think in the long
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term, this will become significant.
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</p>
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<h3>Wars</h3>
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<p>
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I'm not an OG. It took me many years to pay any attention to Bitcoin,
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and a few more to actually become enlightened and start to understand
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what I was looking at. This means I was not around when the Blocksize
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wars happened, and thus all I know about it comes from posts, books and
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grandpa Simpson styled ramblings of Bitcoiners with more years of
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service than me. And as much as the story makes sense, it always felt
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more like history than a story. I mean to say, I can understand the
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facts I'm told, but I can't imagine going through it. I can't imagine
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how it felt. It's just a bunch of cold, timeline facts.
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</p>
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<p>
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But now, time passed since I fell down the rabbit hole. And it seems
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we're heading for new wars, and this time it is my turn to live through
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them, not just be aware of a few journalistic-styled facts.
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</p>
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<p>
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A bunch of Core developers have been acting stupid for years. I won't go
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into details because others have documented this issue much better than
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me. Now, theoretically, in the astral
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plane of "bitcoin is the invincible honey badger because muh game theory
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will fix everything no matter what", a bunch of devs being corrupted by
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VC money and flashes of prestige shouldn't be a threat because "the rest
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of the network" will go and do what needs be done: fork the code, ignore
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whatever proposals which are harmful to Bitcoin they bring, and just
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continue to build good code, run it, point hashrate to it.
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</p>
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<!-- TODO: ADD LINKS TO JON ATTACK INTERVIEW | ADD LINKS TO HODLNAUT PIECES | ADD WHATEVER ELSE MARCELLUS SENDS ME -->
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<p>
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And it's true: this immune system like reaction is kind of happening.
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The recent increase in the adoption of Bitcoin Knots over Bitcoin Core
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is testament to it. And now we have BIP110, which keeps on getting more
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nodes and more hashrate. I don't know if the softfork will be adopted
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widely and become the chain with most work, but surely it seems there is
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a reaction to the fuckery that a clique of big pockets with their teams
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of devs tried to pull.
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</p>
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<p>
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But even if BIP110 goes through, and we keep preventing and perhaps even
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undoing malicious changes and mistakes in the protocol, I'm left
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concerned. Because living through this conflict in detail, unlike the
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Blocksize Wars, has allowed me to see the trenches with my own eyes: how
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plebs think. How they react to the actions of each side. How they form
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their opinions. How they come to decide. What they do, and what they
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don't.
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</p>
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<p>And it makes me worry.</p>
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<h3>Crowds</h3>
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<p>
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Most Bitcoiners deeply hate collectivism and instead root for
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individualism. Powerful states that take aggression on the individual
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with the pretext of favoring the group are not seen with good eyes by
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Bitcoiners. I certainly share the feeling. Following that rabbit hole has
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led many Bitcoiners to actually find Democracy itself a flawed model:
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they see how the crowd is short-sighted, stupidly greedy, aggressive.
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How it votes for evil taxes to support unfair wealth redistribution. How
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it allows and applauds authoritarian measures promoted for the sake of
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some supposed security. The crowd is seen as a dangerous animal, and
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representative democracy is a way for powerful evil men to unleash the
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crowd on all individuals who won't bend the knee.
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</p>
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<p>
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The view on this problem, I think, is widely shared. The solutions, on
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the other hand, tend to be more varied. I find some Bitcoiners don't see
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any solution, or think any alternative is worse. Others have fallen in
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love with the strong man in charge rethoric, monarchical or in other
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flavors. Others fall in between, proposing various forms of Aristocracy.
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The common thread is: most people don't have enough virtue to rule over
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others and make the world better (or at least not make it a hellhole) in
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the process. So either it's only a few, or none. The common thread is the
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view that the crowd can't be left in charge, for they will mess everything
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up.
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</p>
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<h3>Meritocracy</h3>
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<p>
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Bitcoiner is an overloaded word. I find myself using it every day,
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meaning different things each time.
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</p>
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<p>
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If the definition of being a Bitcoiner was to have exposure to price,
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things would look great: I would guess that group must be at least in
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the double digit million size worldwide already.
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</p>
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<p>
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If the definition of being a Bitcoiner was to hold your own keys... that
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would narrow things down quite a bit. Single digit million? Perhaps even
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less than a million?
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</p>
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<p>
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Notch it up to only people who also run their own node and now we're
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certainly under a million. I would be surprised if it was more than a
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hundred thousand.
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</p>
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<p>
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If we dive deeper into people who also mine, I don't think there is more
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than ten thousand.
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</p>
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<p>
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And I'm picturing the final stage of this peculiar cypherpunk ladder to
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Olympus would be... writing their own code. How many can actually fork
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Bitcoin Core and work on adjusting the code to their wishes, without
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forking themselves off or introducing deadly bugs accidentally?
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</p>
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<p>A thousand? A hundred?</p>
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<p>
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What's the picture? There's millions of people who "use" Bitcoin, at
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varying heights of the rabbit hole. But probably barely a few thousands
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have anything resembling sovereignty in the network. Are you even
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sovereign if you don't have the knowledge to fork off on your own,
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should someone push a soft fork you don't support into Core, and no one
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else write the right URSF you need to run to oppose it?
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</p>
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<h3>Email and the healthbar that doesn't refill</h3>
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<p>
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The death of email as a decentralized protocol has been documented by
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others thoroughly. I won't try to replicate that here.
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</p>
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<p>
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I'll just emphasize one ugly fact: the capture of email did not happen
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suddenly. It happen slowly over decades. It happened as many individual
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people took decisions that they probably didn't feel were terrible, even
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important, when they were doing so. We would have trouble having someone
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point himself in the mirror and yell: "It was me! I killed email".
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</p>
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<p>
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The decentralization of email disappeared because mistakes piled up and
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they were not reverted. Why weren't they?
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</p>
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<p>
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Well, that's a question we could ask ourselves today. Why can't we save
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email right fucking now?
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</p>
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<p>
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Email died due to many decisions related to spam. There are solutions to
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spam that could be embedded into the protocol. But none of those would
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be backwards compatible, and that generates a massive issue: if you
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apply the solution yourself, you cut yourself out of email since others
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didn't follow along. So you need to bring everyone along with you and
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have them all apply the same backwards incompatible change with you. The
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only issue is that is impossible. We're all too busy doing things to pay
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attention and coordinate and trust each other to do such a thing. Does
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it feel somewhat familiar to Bitcoin?
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</p>
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<p>
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To me, it does. Millions of people out there holding IOUs. Some of them
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puting their life savings into it. But most have no time or willingness
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to run a node. And barely a fraction of them will spend any calories
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judging what side is in their best interest when a fork war, hard or
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soft, comes around. And then only a sliver of a fraction of a minority
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would even be able to escape the duality of such a situation and say
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"fuck you guys, it's not red or blue, I'll go write my own color and
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show you".
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</p>
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<p>
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And so, small bad decisions piled up with no way to undo them, since the
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crowd will just accept whatever is on the table, until they had grown
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into the cancer that killed the patient. Any time you manage to sneak
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any tiny damaging into the protocol, it's as if you've soldered a
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leeched onto it. And it's so scary: we already fucked up with Segwit.
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Now Core is a bunch of amateurs salaried westerners that sit in a couple
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of offices, and they do whatever shit they want on each release and
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people just upgrade. And then you go to Twitter and read on the BIP110
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discussions and most of it is just ignorants on either side that
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understand nothing, slinging noise at each other. And then you go to
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reddit and it's just normies memeing about dips and pumps and asking if
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DCA-ing 100$ a week will retire them at 32.
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</p>
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<p>
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This all made me think that a decentralized protocol is like a character
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in a shooter videogame where there are no health potions, no medkits, no
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bandaids. And you only get to play once, no second tries. You can be as
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skilled as you want, but it's still a fact someday you'll get hit. With
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no way to recover your health, over a long enough time horizon, you will
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die.
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</p>
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<h3>Mix it all up</h3>
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<p>
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All of this combined is what I find concerning.
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</p>
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<p>
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Most people in this world are not fully fledged participants in Bitcoin. They don't have the willingness to actively engage in the maintenance of the protocol. They don't care. Most don't even know what they don't know. Their "usage" of Bitcoin is like second-hand smoke: the only way they can interact with the network is via tooling that others build and run. The only knowledge they hold on its inner workings come from metaphors brought by third parties, which many times are wrong, biased or outright maliciously crafted to confuse them.
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</p>
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<p>Instead, only a minuscule minority can play the game properly. People intelligent and educated enough. With filled bags that both give them the freedom and the incentive to engage.</p>
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<p>It wouldn't be that terrible if Bitcoin ended up being an aristocratic monetary network. It would be orders of magnitude less useful than if it was global money, surely. But it would surely help, not hurt, the world.
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</p>
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<p>
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But the problem is that there are no meritocratic barriers to participate in Bitcoin. Both brilliant people and absolute brutes are welcome alike. The crowd comes in. And the crowd becomes the stone foundation that makes the protocol resistant to change: you have to convince them all to push changes. </p>
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<p>This ought to be good, right? If you want to change Bitcoin, you have to convince the participants that your change is in their best interest, hence nobody can take over maliciously the protocol.
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</p>
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<p>But the reality is that the crowd is ignorant and lives in an incredibly dense fog of war. They know jackshit of the protocol and how it works. They don't know how software works. They don't understand economics. Their opinions on protocol changes are either non-existant ("Oh, a new version of Core! I'll update right away! Have I read the changelog? What do you mean? What is a changelog?"), or instead formed from the result of online propagandistic crossfire.
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</p>
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<p>And so, I come to this observation: that the decentralization of Bitcoin surely makes protocol changes expensive. But it hardly guarantees that bad changes are less likely than good changes. With enough resources and patience, I'm confident you have a decent chance at psy-oping the network into crazy shit like supporting tail emission. And once you fuck the protocol, it is very hard to unfuck. After all, it is the crowd who turned email in to Gmail.
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</p>
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<p>And the healthbar doesn't refill.</p>
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<h3>Gold's latest fork war</h3>
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<p>
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I started this rant heretically proclaiming there is some aspect of gold
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that is superior to Bitcoin.
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</p>
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<p>
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Well, do you remember gold's last fork war? Of course not, because there
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wasn't one. There's nothing to discuss.
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</p>
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<p>
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I'm not saying gold is superior. Hard to custody, hard to transport,
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hard to verify, forever inflationary, tends to be centralized.
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</p>
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<p>
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But at least it escapes the crowd: it is what it is, and no human can
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change that. There's no signaling, no forking, no socratic seminar of
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people discussing the greatest and latest update proposal from Pieter
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Wuille to make TheMempool™ 0.7% more schgaboozing, no ugly VCs
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pouring money into young devs who still get yelled at by mom when they
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don't drop their undies in the dirty clothes bag. No greedy masses who
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completely ignore the nature of the technology their betting their
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financial future on. No hashrate competitions, no threats of changing
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the PoW algorithm. No Tone Vays.
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</p>
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<p>
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I can shit on gold, but the truth is it's done its thing for millenia
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because we can't change it. It might be a shit money in the 21st money, but that's because the world has changed, not because gold has enshittified.
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</p>
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<p>
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It makes me wonder: will we ever truly find good money? Is it even
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posible?
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</p>
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<p>
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It also makes me think how materially effective it is to indebted in
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money: you get to buy real hard things today, only in exchange of
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promises of imperfect money in the future. With so many ways for the
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unit your liability is denominated to go upside down, letting you run
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free with the asset while you pee on the debt.
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</p>
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<hr />
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<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
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</section>
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</main>
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</body>
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</html>
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