Have really appreciated all your work bringing insight into the workings of SN, in addition to your kickass more traditional posts. So glad you're here!

Decentralized inheritance is a big problem to tackle. Keep exploring this!

As for the stabilized Bitcoin: I think it's 50-50 that the bounty gets claimed by the end of the year.

People in the early days were techonologists, cryptographers, programmers, curious people. It wasn't political at all, there was no maximalism. I didn't get the sense people were in it for a quick buck. namecoin and litecoin was accepted as a curiousity, there was pretty much no animosity toward new projects. maximalism became more of a thing once these projects started to promise insane things and innocent people started losing lots of money. maximalism is just free market SEC.

I remember mining on my gpu when it was worth $1, I never did it for the money I just wanted more coins to play with and send to friends.

It was a pretty chill and small community back in those days. The politicization came after, and it became necessary, just due to the sheer number of cargo-cult scams that cropped up and continue to crop up around bitcoin.

Sadly much less. The clients have gotten better and I really like the idea of the protocol but interaction, engagement, and zaps have all but dried up. Whenever I post anything now I feel like I’m just throwing my note into the void to be forgotten. The first 4-6 months were great though. Seems like things went downhill when Apple banned zapping notes and then got even worse when Wallet of Satoshi pulled out of the US.

Some of it might just be me. A Twitter style social media never really appealed to me. Reddit (now SN) is more my style.

So true, great post. There are many examples of this in society. Like @kr discussed in a recent podcast we could have had flying cars already. We could also have had abundant chemical & salt-free water from our oceans and water-powered engines & vehicles.

It’s not just the incentives to build these innovative products don’t exist, it’s that the existing power structures in place have very very strong incentives to ‘neut’ or prevent them from taking off & gaining traction.

The reason we have so many plastics in our society is not because we can’t create biodegradable packaging, just like the reason we can’t have natural pharmaceutical products with no petrochemicals in them is not because it’s hard but because the oil giants have every incentive to monetise their waste products and impose their usage on society.

When you start thinking about it, there is sooo much suppression of innovation and technology in today’s society. When the cap is lifted and these dark incentives cease to retain such power, there’s going to be such a huge economic boom IMHO.