Starting a city is easy, growing it into a real city is the hard part. If you look at the fastest growing cities of the last decades, they had economic freedom or booming industries, nothing that requires authoritarianism.
Actually, no. Even a perfect quantum computer can only attack a key if its public key has already been revealed on-chain, which is only the case for a small amount of coin. The other QC attacks rely on cracking a private key after it was broadcast, and before the transactions make it into a block.
Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere.
I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them.
Interesting. So as long as your wallet has only received Bitcoin, it's untouchable but the moment you transfer any of it, it's at risk of being emptied. The only way to protect any of the funds is to simply move it to another new wallet. We would be in a situation where any wallets (with known keys) can only be sold off in their entirety to prevent theft. However, who is going to want to buy any Bitcoin if the potential buyer's market decreases with each user exiting the market? The inherent value immediately drops to zero because each successive sale would be less than what it was purchased for. Kind of a Schrodinger's wallet, do you really own any Bitcoin if you can never withdraw from it?
The attack when sending a transaction has a time constraints. It will take many any years to go from being able to crack private keys in years/month to doing it in minutes.
Studies are never able to prove causation. Phenomena in the real world are very rarely so simple as to have one trigger, often there are multiple involved.
Very often mechanisms are so complex, or simply hard to detect that it is only feasible to look at biomarkers and not the actual cause.
Crypto doesn't solve any of the actual problems here.
These kids can't access any services because they don't legally exist in government systems. No birth certificate means no school enrollment, no healthcare, no social grants.
You think a 15-year-old footballer who can't play in tournaments because he has no birth certificate is going to be helped by Bitcoin?
What school is letting them enroll because they have a hardware wallet?
This is a civil administration problem that needs government solutions: streamlined processes, digital systems, reduced fees, and political will.
They are definitely getting fucked by not getting the documentation they are owed, no two ways around it.
However I don't see the binary extremes you see.
The undocumented people can pool together and start their own schools. They can start their own soccer league. They can hire a pooled doctor. They can put some amount of stored value into a crypto account, which might be better in some cases than hiding gold in a hole or something, because they aren't going to be able to access banking.
And yes, that situation sucks, and it's wrong, and it encourages apartheid-light, and is not an acceptable solution. But in the meanwhile, it would be better for them than nothing and it is something they might have the agency to do.
The counter there is that it takes a lot of optimism to be more optimistic than the ANC, an incredibly amount of inefficiency to be more inefficient than the South Africa government, and not much luck to get higher likelihood than sitting around waiting for some bureaucrat to give you birth certificate this year.
Why not just use cash at that point? Crypto doesn't make it any easier to create your own social institutions. It just adds volatility, complexity, and risk.
So the government creates a problem, and you think more government is the solution? Bizarre. Yet the 15 year old can find a teacher and pay them directly, they can buy and sell services globally and get paid. Yeah, bitcoin doesn't solve any problems..
Can't you just say that about any less than perfect solution? Bitcoin has been used to facilitate illegal drug trafficking, which is a problem. Yet you think more bitcoin is the solution? Bizarre.
So there's already a lack of a stable, functioning government, and the solution you're touting isn't currently a reality, why? In the US when there's little friction in a marketplace people in some communities resort to using Tide laundry detergent as a medium of exchange. There's nothing stopping them from using bitcoin or cryptocurrencies currently, but navigating a market place, finding qualified teachers, finding motivation to use what little resources you have to use a novel medium to pay for teachers in a place with no opportunity, etc., doesn't seem too easy. One tool alone doesn't usually solve any problems.
> One tool alone doesn't usually solve any problems.
I completely agree. The world of developmental economics has had so many great "One tool to fix everything!" ideas, but at the end of the day, they generally don't add up to much without a functioning government that's focused on serving its citizens.
So in 2025, what self-hosted options does a 15 year old have to manage his finances using Bitcoin? Assume he gets a monthly paycheck of 0.00125 BTC. How would his employer pay him? How much would be eaten up by fees?
Back in 2013, I loved the idea of Bitcoin. Then I actually tried using it. Such a pain. I switched to Coinbase until I gave up entirely on crypto around 2017 and became highly skeptical it was going to change the world as promised. I would love to hear that the world of self-custodied Bitcoin has become less onerous.
KYC/AML is largely there to increase profits for corrupt politicians and bankers at the expense of the honest segment of poor. Criminals and the dishonest can bypass that stuff easily enough through corruption if they are large, and by slipping through the cracks with "dark" IDs if they are small.
This is a common retort used by crypto proponents (of which I am one). It overlooks, however, that is it much, much, much easier to do large-scale financial crime using cryptocurrencies than it is to do so with USD due to the intense and robust controls applied to USD for precisely that purpose.
One need only look at the rapid rise of cryptocurrencies in criminal enterprises over the last 10 years or so to see the truth in that.
I have been saving in bitcoin since I understood it, and people who tell me bitcoin has no use simply make no sense to me. My purchasing power goes up in the long term, and much more than theirs even if they "invest" with traditional banking.
It’s because we were promised cheap, fast, and decentralized and got the opposite.
It’s expensive as hell to use crypto to move money. It’s very slow, and I’m forced to use centralized coin exchanges which destroy the original decentralized nature of the currencies.
Why should we be excited about a product that is the opposite of what it sets out to do?
You want what was promised, but you use it in the way that's prescribed by the state, that's your failure. Besides, why do people keep pretending like lightning doesn't exist..
I find a good use in it via making legal, but otherwise “high risk” transactions traditional financial institutions either don’t touch or make very difficult to engage in.
Much easier for me to send a small amount of crypto to a VPN provider, or a custom parts supplier in a “strange” country where Visa/MC/bank wires are a huge hassle if available at all.
It’s not a huge use case, but it removes a ton of unnecessary friction from transactions traditional banking left behind as deemed “not worth the hassle” to them.
Or as I describe it: Digital cash. I don’t need the flea market vendor to need to be vetted by some financial provider to sell me their 3d printed parts collection.
Donating to Wikileaks is entirely legal. The blockade undertaken by Visa and MC at the behest of the USG was extralegal; there were no charges against anyone at the time.
Even had there been charges, donating would still have been legal.
Furthermore, your criterion was “not better served”; please don’t move the goalposts.
Remittances and cross-border donations are way better served by cryptocurrencies than any other mechanism, full stop. It’s faster, cheaper, and way more reliable than any other method.
The fees come from fulfilling legal requirements like detection of money laundering and terrorism financing, and also customer security features like fraud detection and multi-factor authentication.
There are fintechs for customers who want lower fees and don't need e.g. physical branches or phone support. That's perfectly fine.
But a fintech that didn't perform KYC would be shut down pretty quickly by the police, so there's a floor on how low fees can be while remaining legal.
> more competitive because of government regulation
That's the same as "not legal".
But I agree that it's still a useful technology, because the moral argument sometimes trumps the legal one. If a north korean defector uses Bitcoin to exfiltrate their life savings, I don't think anybody will complain how it was technically illegal under North Korea's law.
Hrm, I've never used it, but maybe I should. I've really only used claude and chatgpt, but it's annoying with how they agree with whatever you feed them.
Claude has been super annoying in the last few weeks, I ask it a question and it always immediately starts to write or update code instead of answering.
Read your instructions from Agents.md
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