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@ Dikaios1517
2024-07-19 02:04:30There is a general perception surrounding Bitcoin that it is prohibitively difficult to use for the average person. This perception can even infect those who are familiar with the various tools to optimally preserve their privacy, sovereignty, and security while using Bitcoin. After all, there’s 12 words you have to keep safe, or someone might steal all of your money. There’s all these tools like hardware wallets, software wallets, running a node, coin-join, and so much more you have to figure out in order to save and transact in Bitcoin securely and privately. Not to mention everything you have to learn if you want to use Lightning in a sovereign way, such as setting up channels, managing liquidity, learning LNURL, and setting up a domain so you can have a Lightning address.
All of these things can be intimidating for those considering whether they want to adopt Bitcoin, especially when comparing it with how little is needed for how most people interact with fiat today. As long as they have a debit card with their four-digit PIN memorized, and their password to their online banking, they have access to their money, and can use it virtually anywhere. Moreover, if they mess something up, they can just go to their financial institution and get a new debit card, or have their password reset. If a fraudster gets access to their account, their bank can often credit the money back to them and change their account information. The very real danger in Bitcoin of losing your funds and having no way of getting them back is scary for a lot of people.
One answer that Bitcoiners often give is, “Don’t worry. We’re still early and these tools will get easier to use as time goes on.” All that really tells someone is, “It might be better for you to wait and see if it actually does get easier.” Ease of use is a major factor for most people, and telling them that it is something they can expect from Bitcoin in the future just makes them more likely to wait until that hypothetical future arrives before they adopt it.
This perception of Bitcoin’s difficulty is really just a matter of perspective, though. Bitcoin looks incredibly difficult to use when you compare the way most people currently interact with fiat to using Bitcoin in a sovereign and private manner. This is comparing apples to oranges, though. If you instead compare apples to apples, looking at what it would take to use fiat digitally in a sovereign and private manner, suddenly Bitcoin is not more difficult than fiat, but less.
Someone may say, “Using fiat in a sovereign and private manner is easy! Just use cash.” Let’s explore that idea a bit, though. Cash can be very useful for transacting privately and without any intermediaries, but that usefulness diminishes when you want to transact with someone who is not within a short drive from you. As soon as you want to purchase something from a merchant in another state, or even the other side of the same state, a large amount of friction is added because you must travel to one another to complete the transaction. The farther you have to travel to transact in cash, the more convenient Bitcoin’s privacy tools begin to look. Indeed, the types of transactions that cash can easily make private and sovereign are exceptionally limited.
The next thing to consider is that cash may be convenient for transacting locally in a private manner, but it is much less convenient for storing your wealth privately and securely. If you want to store large sums of cash privately, a fire rated safe is much more expensive than memorizing 12 words, and is not impenetrable. Its only benefit is in making it take longer for fire to burn your cash or for a thief to break in and steal it, and that added length of time is measured in mere minutes. Meanwhile, the amount of time it would take someone to access the Bitcoin stored in 12 memorized words is measured in billions of years and the cost to secure it is just the transaction fee. Choosing to hide your cash instead may be less expensive than a safe, but then you will need to do some research on how best to protect it from the elements, which adds complexity, expense, and physical labor that is more cumbersome than rolling dice a few times and memorizing 12 words. Regardless of the method, securing cash is more difficult than securing Bitcoin and carries less assurances against theft or destruction. These shortcomings of storing wealth in cash become even more acute if you ever need to move that wealth, especially across any national border. Hiding thousands of dollars of cash in your luggage is much more difficult than carrying 12 words in your head that preserve your access to millions of sats.
Where there is no contest between the ease of using Bitcoin vs. fiat, though, is when you attempt to use fiat digitally in a private and/or sovereign manner. While privacy in Bitcoin is certainly an involved process, digital fiat is nearly impossible to use privately and is fraught with even worse “gotchas”. Forget about trying to use digital fiat in a sovereign manner. That actually is impossible. When people say using fiat is easier than using Bitcoin, they mean that using centralized, custodial, financial institutions that are surveilling your every transaction is easier than using self-custody, sovereign, Bitcoin. That’s a completely lopsided comparison, but it’s the only one that most people can imagine making, because they have never attempted to use digital fiat in a private manner in the first place.
What we should do is compare using Bitcoin in a sovereign and private way with using digital fiat in the same way, and likewise compare using Bitcoin via custodians to using digital fiat via banks and bank alternatives. When we do so, we find that not only is Bitcoin much easier to use privately than digital fiat, but it is impossible to use the latter in a sovereign manner and custodial Bitcoin is even easier to use than custodial fiat.
Anyone can get set up on a custodial wallet, with a Lightning Address, and be zapping people on Nostr, in less than 5 minutes. When was the last time you could do anything similar when setting up a bank account? Buying anything online with a custodial wallet has far less friction than using a debit or credit card. Scan the QR code and hit send. Done. No filling out card numbers, expiration dates, and billing addresses. Do you want to send money to your friend? All you need is their Lightning Address, and even if they are using a completely different custodian than you are, they receive the funds instantly and with virtually no fee. Custodial Bitcoin on Lightning already has better ease of use than any fiat custodian can provide, and it’s only improving.
Now, admittedly, the ideal in Bitcoin is to avoid custodians if you possibly can, and that is where things begin to get complicated, adding difficulty for the average user. However, avoiding custodians is not complicated or difficult with digital fiat, it’s entirely impossible. Most of us just never consider that fact when comparing the two. Instead we put the way we commonly use our fully centralized and surveilled custodial fiat up against the way we are told we ought to use Bitcoin to preserve our sovereignty and privacy, and we conclude Bitcoin is way more difficult, when that could not be farther from the truth. Sovereign, self-custody Bitcoin is far easier than sovereign, self-custody digital fiat, considering that the latter doesn’t even exist, and custodial Bitcoin is far easier than custodial fiat.
Then, when you add back into the equation the fact that fiat is constantly stealing from you, while Bitcoin is hard money that cannot have its supply arbitrarily inflated, the comparison is no contest. Bitcoin is far superior to fiat in every way! The tools to really take personal ownership of it without custodial risk may initially be intimidating, but they are not difficult if you take them on incrementally. You don’t need to dive immediately into hardware wallets, running a node, or managing the liquidity in your Lightning channels. You can start with a basic wallet app on your phone and your first few thousand sats and venture forth from there at your own pace. Bitcoin is hard money that won’t steal the value of your time and energy from you, but it’s not difficult to learn if you approach it like anything else new you have learned before. Take your time, and get comfortable with one new idea or tool every week or two, and before you know it you’ll be the one telling your friends and family just how easy it really is.