Nick Szabo  🔑

I agree, tho I'm amenable to the position on, say, climate change that if the possible negative outcome is existential then you should probably take it seriously... I'd also wonder what it would look like if this were applied to people worrying about US hyperinflation spiral

It's long-shot speculative "existential threats" that are most likely to be Pascal Scams. That said, one should be concerned about the less speculative aspects of CO2 rise, including as I understand it global warming, fertilization effects (both good & bad), and ocean acidity.

& don't get me started on the supposed "existential threats" that are not remotely close to any such thing. Extreme death & suffering still usually fall far short of an actual threat to our species or even to civilization, but these very different things are constantly confused.

“Don’t get me started” falls on deaf ears when people want to hear your thoughts

If you’re talking about climate I agree there’s a lot of silliness that seems to come from confusion about risk and poor reasoning about economics. I’m only focused on the supposed runaway effects that, I’m told, can’t be adapted to or unwound if they were triggered

The supposed runaway effects are, as I understand it, the most speculative aspects of the theorizing and are highly likely to be Pascal scams.

Like for instance BTC to become a global currency ?

As a technological matter, that's not improbable or speculative: there are good objective and historically based reasons for expecting the most trust-minimized cryptocurrency(s) to win. Political reactions and efforts to stop the superior technology are another matter.

Thanks Nick.BTC has undeniably the first mover advantage and the strongest community, not sure it is the best technology, because technology evolves faster than adoption of the new money paradigm. BTC has many issues that only believers and speculative observers can overlook.

They're generally far from being overlooked by Bitcoin developers. The vast majority of these issues are just altcoin marketing points for which the coin doesn't have a solution that doesn't make some more important aspect, usually trust minimization, far worse.

TPS, energy consumption , degrading exponentially with adoption are hard to fix, as is the ASIC exploitability. Distribution inequality is not a technical issue, neither is oligopolistic coltrol over the mining. Altcoins are not silver bullets either, but help to progress faster.

Alts don’t help at all. It’s a masquerade of technicalities. You can’t fake hardness, costliness, or salebility. Take those away and you get fiat and game credits aka tokens. We have a long history of what has worked. None of what you mention meets that. Sorry.

Beliefs, that was my initial point, thanks for confirming the thesis.