Transactional utility is critical for Bitcoin's censorship resistance
The guest argued that Bitcoin must be actively used as everyday transactional money, rather than just a centralized reserve asset, to maintain its core value proposition of censorship resistance.
The argument
If Bitcoin is merely locked up in a few large institutions and not used for peer-to-peer payments, it will become too centralized and vulnerable to censorship. The speaker argued that once an institution can censor transactions, they can ultimately alter other fundamental rules of the network, including its fixed supply.
The thesis, stress-tested
✓ What validates it
- ✓Increased transaction volumes on merchant payment networks like Square/Block
- ✓Wider availability of point-of-sale terminals accepting direct Bitcoin payments at local businesses
▸ Risks discussed
- ▸Antagonism from prominent Bitcoin figures against its use as a currency can slow down merchant integration
- ▸Regulatory crackdowns on peer-to-peer transaction rails
Hear it yourself
"Now, that doesn't mean that everybody needs to be paying for things in Bitcoin today, but as an end state or an end game, that needs to be the end game because otherwise, if Bitcoin was just locked up in a relatively few large institutions, it would be so centralized that it would not be resistant to censorship."
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