I believe that we cannot really have a world without attacks on bitcoin.

Even satoshi anticipated a lot of scams, attacks and snake oil salesmen.

I am NOT saying that those attacks should not be denigrated or called out for what they are, but I do not consider myself even willing to go down a road of hypothesizing a world without such attacks, because that seems to be nearly pure fantasy thinking and the world does not work like that.  Human greed does not work like that.  Even honest people will try to find ways around bitcoin, and they truly believe some of the bad analogies regarding the first generation does not work.  They put bitcoin in a first generation and try to act like nothing preceded it and then they try to create bitcoin 2.0, and they may even purposefully be in those false histories.

I also don't proclaim to be any kind of bitcoin expert, and so I appreciate that there might be symbiosis between bitcoin and the various shitcoins and even some learning that bitcoin does from those various attacks and experiments, so in some sense, bitcoin might not really be able to go up, until it has been attacked a number of times and proven itself worthy of continuing to go up.



I am not either familiar with all of the various attack vectors to figure out which ones are more pernicious.  Of course the forks were to some degree attempts to attack bitcoin from the inside, so yeah in 2017, it is possible that the BIG blocker nutjobs could have won that battle and gotten bitcoin into a place that is no better than paypal.. or just easy to change at the whim of any group that could muster up the most kind of whining.... but probably some of the cyperpunks would have gone off and started working on a new bitcoin that was really censorship resistant... but instead, we are in a history in which, so far, that has not need to be done, and bitcoin continues to exist in a kind of bullish variation of a cyperpunks wet dream, with second layer systems that are built on bitcoin, but a lot of optionality too.  Sure, not everything is perfect in bitcoin in terms of any of the cyperpunks principles, but it seems quite difficult to imagine any other more better scenarios of where bitcoin is at as compared to where it could be.  

Yeah, we are likely to have a lot more attacks in terms of fungibility and privacy, but there still continue to be a lot of options in bitcoin that help us to consider that we are in a much better position by having bitcoin (those of us who know about it and invest into it) than we would be in our current precarious money printing situation and a kind of world calamity of various  ongoing productivity uncertainties.  I say fuck gold to some extent, but we are in a world that even gold is likely to perform quite well even though it does not seem to have as much flexibility as bitcoin in terms of a lot of things, including portability, divisibility and ease of access and self-storage.  So, yeah, even though a lot of BIGGER players seem to know about gold and trying to get some security in gold's likelihood to retain its value, bitcoin is still quite likely to outperform gold in magnitudes in the coming couple of years... so even with uncertainties, including likely ongoing snakeoil deceptions in various shitcoins, including stable coins, I am still quite confident that bitcoiner could not really imagine too much of a better place to be, because I still believe it is a bit unrealistic to just wish that the talented shitcoiners would work on bitcoin rather than wanting to get away with printing their own money... cannot really stop those behaviors and get those people to "work" on bitcoin.



Sure.  Hate to quote Roger Ver.. but there is a tragedy of the commons problem, too... so some people can get away without fighting.. or at least not battling as much.. so the amount of outward fighting might not always be clear, and maybe in the end, we just have to have various tests of bitcoin that motivates others to figure out ways to make bitcoin more resilient or to speak out about bitcoin being superior or just superficially and unambiguously calling all the shitcoins, shitcoins, even though there might be one or two that has a tiny bit of value (am I being too generous?   ).


Yeah, maybe we will get lucky and some of them will disappear more quickly, but I don't see them going away very quickly and even if the scammer craig wright gets thrown in jail, BcashSV probably will not die, and it might even pump.  So what I am saying is that it could take 50 years or more for the value to gravitate into bitcoin, including periods of time that some of us could make way more money by supporting various shitcoins that are printing money and we happen to be in the right (or should I say Wright) circles at the right time.  

I am not sacrificing my own psychology to get involved in a bunch of shitcoins, but it is difficult to really stop people from doing it, and maybe we might even meet people who end up getting involved in "superduper the best coin" for the next 20 years and making a killing, while bitcoin is merely just plodding along with only averaging 50% price appreciation per year rather than some higher performing shitcoins.. that end up crashing down 20 years later, but in the meantime the shitcoin pumpeners were buying multiple lambos, hookers and blow... while we were suffering in our Rav4 and other lesser and more practical luxuries because we are "only" averaging 50% per year returns.. but yeah, in the long run, the value would still likely still be gravitating into bitcoin until there is some kind of meaningful other sound money asset that even comes close to bitcoin... and can you name any that come even close?  I thought not..  



O.k.  Fair enough.  I don't see any problem calling out Cøbra, and to the extent that he wants to defend himself, then that is fine, too.  Probably in the end, there are going to be a lot of decent people who are deceived into promoting shitcoins, or bitcoin imitations, so yeah, it could take a long ass time to work a lot of this out.. and sure it is possible also that bitcoin could fail in the process or get on a lower trajectory than what the stock to flow model would proposition.

Even something like stock to flow could still be correct, but have to be jiggered in order to deal with reality, such as moving the curve down or even tweaking some of the parameters in order to deal with the real impacts of some of the fuckery and trickery in the space and including some of the frequently subtle aspects that can deceive good people into supporting the wrong project.

Each of us merely has the choice about how we are going to proceed forward based on our own circumstances, so we have to consider our own particulars including cashflow, other investments, view of bitcoin as compared with other assets, our timeline, risk tolerance and our time and skills to research, manage and tweak our allocations which can include ongoing learning and figuring out how to spend our time, too.  

Maybe even if we are feeling less confident in bitcoin we might take some higher stakes in some of the shitcoins, and yeah, if we are in our early 20s we are going to be more willing to take higher risks and be a bit more adventurous and maybe even engage in a bit more of an active battle against shitcoins or even invest a bit higher allocation in shitcoins because we are not even sure about the direction of matters and what coin to support with our limited financial resources, but our more plentiful resources of energy and a longer time horizon, but sometimes our own personal circumstances are going to limit us more in terms of how we can participate, so even if some older people might be presumed to have gotten their shit together financially and even more worldly smarter, but there are even some older people who have been engaging in a long life of ongoing gambling, and they cannot stop themselves from continuing to gamble and wondering why they had never built up a strong base of wealth.. so they get lured (again) into shitcoins.  

There is only so much that any of us can do to help others, and I am NOT saying not to help others, but still one of the most important things is to make sure that each of us has our own shit together and to put our own oxygen mask on before helping others with their mask....   So, yes, we can also do both, and I don't subscribe to all or nothing, but we have to also think about matters in terms of ourselves and getting our own allocation to a comfortable level and tweaking our own situation from time to time while we venture out and call bullshit on other projects or even figuring out how much time, energy or finances to put into either fighting shitcoin projects or investing in them... None of us has perfect information, either, so the best that we can do, most of the time, is to attempt to tailor as well as we can to what we can figure out about our own circumstances.