Cool. This is what I've been looking for finally - a reasoned debate with someone who understands bitcoin.

Okay, so the hard cap.

>To start, let's commit blasphemy: the hard cap. It's a bad idea. So is a percentage debasement rate, as is the supposed target of central banks. I'm partial to continuous, linear debasement, which translates to a geometrically decreasing debasement as a percentage of supply. For one, holders free ride the network. Two, no other asset anywhere ever behaves this way. Bitcoin is the most scarce thing in the universe, and that's a good thing until it's not. Something that's always predictably scarce temporally but, taken to infinity, has no hard limit, is superior IMO as long as there's no feedback loops in the supply change.

Now yes, that is blasphemy.

1) Personally I don't see holders as freeriding. They are simply storing their wealth until they need to buy something. They can also lend it out to receive interest which most will likely do, once there's safe methods of doing this.
Far better this than storing their wealth in real estate, pushing up prices for people that actually want a home to live in and are forced to be rent slaves for the rest of their lives.

2) That no asset behaves this way is a pro for me. I'm interested to hear why you think an ever increasing supply is superior? As you say, we could deliberate on whether a constant sat rate of issuance is preferable for an economy for days on end, but ultimately, the scarcer asset will always be more attractive to large amounts of wealth that need to be stored and so will go up forever when priced in a less scarce asset. Dare I say "honey badger don't care"?

Next, transaction rate.

> Bitcoin cannot handle enough transactions. Lightning is just fractional banking with extra steps. Again, you're not here to sell layer 2, you're here to convince me (or at least make the case) that this is a strength.

No blockchain will be able to both accommodate retail transactions of 50,000 tx/s like VISA and also be decentralised. The equipment needed will simply be too expensive. The slow transaction rate is a strength for a number of reasons:

- almost anyone on earth can afford to run a node

- the network can run on very low bandwidth networks such as ham radio

- it increases security and is optimal (through decentralisation and robustness) for the transactions that count - large amounts of value. It's the large amounts of value, stored for long periods of time that are going to take bitcoin to $100M+, even without any higher layer payment rails.

> All monetary exchange for all of history is public to anyone. For the strongest security guarantee, all history must be stored forever by everyone participating in consensus. Note, if this were solved, block size would be a non issue. It is solved actually, believe it or not, just not in bitcoin.

Yes, monetary exchange is public to everyone. But the source/destination of the exchange are as anonymous as we need them to be. I see it as flexibility. Coinjoining or moving the value temporarily through an anonymous network like Monero or Lightning helps maintain privacy if required and the public transactions mean we can hold governments and public bodies to account who can voluntarily remove the pseudo-anonymity. More importantly means that everyone is able to confirm that the bitcoin issuance is not being violated - I'm interested in knowing how this has been solved elsewhere - this is obviously very significant if it truly has. My assumption is that the solution is very complex - and this is why being able to validate the supply by looking at all the transactions is important - it's very simple and robust.

I don't think fees are really an issue at all. Ultimately, the network will be used for very large sums of money and to pay even $100 to store $1B losslessly for 50 years sounds like a bargain to me. To the point that the fee is insignificant.

I'm glad we can agree on PoW. After all, what is money if it's not proof of work?

Just to add, I don't think we'll ever stop fractional reserve banking. But as Satoshi's message in the genesis block implies, bitcoin's job is to prevent zero-reserve banking - that is the real cancer on the world. If banks can't print infinite money then they can't be bailed out and so will need to have a hard lower limit on their reserve %age, or else risk going out of business, just like before central banking. Although there will be fractional reserve banking, the total supply will still be hard capped. It will at least be a big improvement on gold - Bitcoin is far more auditable - custodians can easily supply the bitcoin owners with the public keys to the owner's wallet to prove they have not rehypothecated it.