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@ mike
2025-02-11 12:13:41
Definitely the NGU phenomenon is the entry point for all Bitcoiners and it is still a factor for me.
But honestly my life has been so expanded by studying Bitcoin, not just the technology, which I had a good grounding from my electronics, computing and Internet expertise, but the lessons it teaches you in everything from economics, banking, politics, psychology, history, mathematics etc.......
What a lot of people think of as faults, are actual choices. The best analogy to this is in the world of photography.
Photographers always have to balance three elements,
ISO (film speed / sensitivity)
Exposure Time
Aperture
If you are photographing sports events, you always sacrifice Aperture and ISO in order to maximise Exposure time.
In portrait photography you are able to sacrifice exposure time to allow plenty of light in through the aperture and you able to choose the best ISO settings for your environment.
Bitcoin chose to sacrifice transaction throughput in order to not sacrifice decentralisation. The third element, encryption, can not be sacrificed in a public blockchain.
Bitcoin doesn't have faults (at least not large ones) it made design choices, both originally from Satoshi, then later with the community through the fork (blocksize) wars.
The correct decisions were made. Bitcoin is a scarce resource that cannot be changed giving it it's value to society.
If it were scalable or had an infinite supply its value would be lost.
This is why gold is more valuable than dirt. It's difficulties to mine and the scarcity of its supply make it valuable.
If there was lots of gold everywhere and easy to obtain it would have no value.
This is why diamonds are becoming rapidly less valuable. We can make produce "lab diamonds" in volume at extremely low cost that, once cut, are indistinguishable from natural diamonds.
We effectively have an unlimited supply of perfect, extremely low cost diamonds.