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You're still conflating money, payments, settlement, and credit. This is why your replying with weird hot-air "fallacies" and metaphors. Bitcoin does not need to scale (it could never) for every economic interaction on-chain. Layers, altcoins, stablecoins, etc, already concede that. Bitcoin only needs to be censorship-resistant sovereign money with large-enough proof of work. Lightning "scales" payments by reusing liquidity and delaying final settlement ... thanks to trusted unconfirmed transactions, not amazing protocol design. Atomicity scales further by digitizing trust explicitly, so obligations can be routed, netted, and settled incidentally instead of pretending every meaningful economic act must be immediate final settlement. It's a mutual credit system. It coordinates trust where it exists, not as a last resort. An occasional block increase does not solve for global retail, commerce, or finance. It just moves the bottleneck while increasing centralization pressure on validation and propagation. The real fallacy is thinking Bitcoin failed because finance cannot be made fully trustless. Trust is not a bug in finance, nor for massively scalable payments. It is a requirement. Trust is the subject. The gap is whether trust is explicit, contextual, and user-controlled, or, managed by institutions and platforms. The next step is not pretending the base layer or LN should become Visa. The next step is building open payment and credit systems that preserves Bitcoin as the settlement anchor, to the degree its users require, not a crusade for Bitcoin domination. 📝 07e98769…

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Replies (7)

Eede3d9…7953828d ago

Horizontal scaling on chain is perfectly possible. The only thing one needs to give up is Bitcoin maximalism. Meaning, I choose BTC for large settlement where I don't care about my privacy, while I use bcash or Litecoin or Nano or (you name it) for everything else. Their security assumptions are way better than any pegged in pegged out, layered BTC where we introduce custodians like ecash or strangle liquidity like LN. Monero is my opt out money. Where I speculate on the downfall of the West while protecting my wealth + family.

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moonsettler7d ago

my interest in credit money is purely academic at this point and conditional to us figuring out we need an elastic money supply for a real world economy to function. it's possible we are going to need it, but we should not capitulate just because scaling ownership without custodians and IOUs is a technical challenge. If we end up needing it so the wheels keep turning, because we run into a liquidity crunch with base money alone. then we should explore ways that only introduce elasticity and not perpetual debasement! https://x.com/4moonsettler/status/1892561462750502955

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John Carvalho7d ago

Sorry, I don't have time to dismantle all of your preconceived personal limits and misconceptions about our work. Your posts are hot air. Just propose something specific instead of nihilizing everything. Trust is society, you must design it into any network.

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moonsettler7d ago

i'm talking in general, i have a rough idea about your work and can already tell it's not going to succeed. what you are actually doing is softening the resistance against trust and IOUs. and that's not going to end well. you could say my posts are 6 moves ahead not about your work.

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moonsettler7d ago

let me help you understand what is going to happen. you think you are normalizing p2p credit for Alice and Bob and Carol who are like normal people or small hawala brokers. but that's not what's going to happen. yes there will be credit network emerging to solve the liquidity issues with lightning and ecash mints and other custodians will start using it for their transfers and "settlements". that's what happened every time before and that's what is going to happen again on this path where we don't scale bitcoin without trust. and when that happens, the bitcoin in these credit networks will quickly far exceed the total on-chain supply. which will absolutely obliterate long term NgU as new demand will meet new paper claims, which will make bitcoin completely pointless as it adds no value whatsoever to the world anymore and not even for those who self custody.

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moonsettler7d ago

obviously there are levels of trust in every interaction yadda yadda... the important distinction is will the protocol be actually constrained by the on-chain supply or not? credit networks with ecash mints will not be in any way constrained by what is going on on-chain. credit ecash spent via lightning is absolutely constrained by what exists on-chain. Ark and other covenant pool constructs and rollups can not double pledge sats, every satoshi is expressed on-chain. and i know for a fact there is an easy magnitude of scaling there. with a level of trust (it's not completely trustless) but no perverse incentives and no capability to issue paper bitcoin IOUs. trust is not inherently evil, but fall-back on settlment without trust and unilateral exit capability are necessary, not optional.

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John Carvalho7d ago

Layers are just unconfirmed transactions. They do not provide scale, they provide coordination of trust. You're just arguing for bigger blocks in the end, which is fine, but also requires coordination or trust to pull off, and can only do so much. What you're missing about our work is that being trust-compatible enables actual scale, and having a credible exit from that scale is all you need to commoditize central providers. You're just reciting your script while remaining ignorant of the design.

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