Nick Szabo  🔑

As you've now fully reverted to your usual truculent self, I won't engage with you any longer. You make some good points in your book and in the debate. But you couldn't be more unversed in the requirements for civil discourse.

1 part of @saifedean's argument from the debate worth probing: his view of BTC as purely settlement w/ PayPal, Visa, etc. handling payments. Isn't PayPal a security hole? Why would a gov't fighting to keep USD as base $ allow this? Curious what @bitstein & @NickSzabo4 think.

PayPal is absolutely a security hole. Wikileaks is the extreme example, where they were shut out from PayPal, but they could receive bitcoins. PayPal is just a layer-3 or 4 dollar payments solution, not a direct monetary base interface.

So to be clear you disagree with @saifedean on this point? BTC's uncensorable quality—immunity to state interference and control—is essential, and its fixed supply/low stock-to-flow ratio isn't all that really matters?

That's a bizarre twist of what I was saying. An uncensorable currency with a perfect monetary policy is all that matters for creating a base monetary layer for civilization. This is part of the missing dialogue. Our opponents are arguing about higher payment layers, not the base.

Apologies. My question: In the path to serving as a "base monetary layer for civilization," is it essential that BTC's uncensorable quality be extended down to the payments layer, via Lightning or a 2nd layer tech with similar properties?

secondary layers can censor all they want. (some providers like Coinbase & CashApp already ban undesirable users). it's only a security hole if ppl are forced to use them, which they are not, bc bitcoin users can hold their own keys

I don’t understand this message. Are you calling exchanges “secondary layers” to bitcoin? Like Lightning is?