brockm on Nostr: I’m somewhat skeptical that there’s some technological solution around the ...

I’m somewhat skeptical that there’s some technological solution around the corner, where the scaling issues around bitcoin are going to be solved to such a degree, that all payments themselves can be trustless.

The main reason being that all of the solutions being pursued thus far, achieve trustlessness by giving up on the possibility of recourse in the transaction. The only real counterparty probelem being solved then, is eliminating the possibility of settlement default, once a transaction has been arranged. But this has never been the only trust issue in payment arrangements.

Most of the kinds of default that people think about in the real world, have nothing to do with the possibility of non-settlement, and everything to do with the possibility of breach of contract on the delivery of goods or rendering of services. To the extent that bitcoin scaling discussions set these issues aside, and instead center the discussion around durability in only the most adversarial situations (resisting state overreach, usually) — a broader understanding of the way economic advancement comes about is ignored.

Economies don’t flourish simply because they have reliable money and payment schemes. They flourish because social trust is possible — that people will honor contracts, commitments, won’t resort to violent means of dispute resolution.

This is actually why I find the anarcho-capitalist frame of thinking around bitcoin so distracting to moving bitcoin forward. The target it’s aiming for, simply bypasses all of these notions, and is really just an exercise in question begging.

“But if we have recourse on payments, how will that prevent the government being able to regulate or censor it?”

If that’s what you think is the highest good to be considered in the project of finding ways to scale bitcoin payments, then I’d suggest that none of the solutions you land on are going to be satisfactory for mainstream use — ever. Because there can never be a way to control for matters of social trust through cryptographic protocols alone. We are not digital light beings that live inside computers, that can be forced to act or not act based on computational rules. Our interaction with any technology is always analog and mediated by a social context — where all the interesting problems of counterparty risk exist.

This is, of course, what the insight was that led to the creation of tbDEX. Instead of any doubts being raised in me about this observation, the stridency of my stance here has only increased, as I’ve watched the conversation move forward.