One argument against forcing a big drop in Bitcoin is that “most people won’t hold back, so why bother?”
This is a delusional, arrogant, and false argument. It’s the same kind of logical fallacy that people just can’t stop. The current situation is an indication of what the future situation will be.
“It’s raining today, so it won’t rain tomorrow.” This is exactly the kind of thinking that led Bitcoiners during the last cycle in the market to easily take 100-200 thousand dollars as the highest price. That assumption was brutally destroyed by a double peak at 69 thousand, which is just ~3.5x from the previous all-time high.
The very nature of the digital age we live in, and the many big changes we’ve all seen in a short span of time during our lifetimes should shake people into thinking that the present is a reflection of the nature of the future, but for most people it doesn’t.
First of all, most people are currently not saving their money they don’t even understand the difference between holding them and their coins sitting on Coinbase. For most unsophisticated users, they are all apps that hold their bitcoin. I have come across this misconception more times than I can count in my time in this space dealing with new users. These users have not been informed of the possibility yet, to discount them is foolish and presumptuous.
Second, users who currently choose not to store their keys often do not do so for fear of losing their keys. It is not the fear of “commitment.” It is the fear that they will not be able to handle the loss of work in their important management, and lose everything they have invested due to incompetence or legal mistakes or unexpected accidents.
This is not 2013 anymore. People can no longer make backups of individual private keys in a digital file. Key management schemes have come a long way since then. Mnemonic seeds, money bags, etc. Basic vaults using pre-signed transactions exist, although they are not widely used. Tools exist to make safekeeping available in ways that provide safeguards and helping hands in the event of errors and the need to find lost coin keys.
Unchained exists. Casa is there. The Nunchuck is there. Bitkey exists. All of these tools will get better and better as time goes on. Accommodating Schnorr and Taproot, these recovery friendly storage systems can blind third-party servers so that during signing and normal use these services learn nothing about the coins held by users or the transactions they co-sign. Taproot enables wallets to send emergency keys to friends or family members without them knowing anything about those coins other than they are needed.
Using a tool for self-defense is evolving, and people’s attitudes toward self-defense will change along with those major advances in technology. Decreasing the need to expand because people have reasons not to be is pure arrogance.
It’s nothing more than a “I’ve got mine, so fuck everybody” attitude. The current state of the world being a certain way does not guarantee that it will be so in the future. Only the arrogant think so.
This article is a Take it. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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