> The network has ongoing costs and only people that spend money contribute to, unless there's a tail emission. In that case, in addition, everyone holding contributes to maintenance of the network to the degree they benefit from it's maintenance in the form of debasement of their savings, which go directly to the miners keeping the network alive. Holders are free riders in bitcoin, game theory wise this is a fact.

I see the hard cap, with 100% fees from transactions, as optimisation for storing large amounts for large periods of time, which is the use-case you want for bitcoin to become as valuable as possible. It's just Gresham's law. People will hoard the hardest money and sell any softer money supply inflation.

> This is a statement of fact but has not been thoroughly demonstrated. The 2 bottlenecks to throughput are 1) block size, and 2) network latency between nodes. Block size is only an issue for decentralization if you have to store all historical data forever to get theaximum security guarantee possible. Mimblewimble eliminates this requirement, and therefore enables the same decentralization regardless of block size. At that point, block size is only limited by how fast transactions propagate across the network, that is, latency, and verification of them, which is trivial, within the block time. You can have 1GB blocks in mimblewimble and have the block chain shrink one block to the next with no sacrifice in security guarantees. All transactions count.

I appreciate that I'm making assumptions that technology like MimbleWimble can't compete for robustness/confidence in the network with Bitcoin's straightforward approach to validating the total supply, but MimbleWimble is also certainly not thoroughly demonstrated. I'll investigate the technology though and get back to you. Are you confident that MimbleWimble will adequately protect against rogue issuance that nation states can use it as their reserve asset?

> You don't really believe that do you? This is a system built on cryptography and we just accept that our finances are open to anyone, to be blacklisted, to make a single mistake and our entire transaction history can be tied to us, and even, other peoples history can be erroneously tied to us, weust behave with the most rigorous sterile technique or anyone anywhere can know everything we have and everything we have ever bought. You believe this is all we need?

The reason I believe it's all we need is because I see the bitcoin network simply as a base layer network or savings tool. The transactions will either be limited to peoples savings, pensions, investments etc. or the transactions will be to/from higher level networks such as lightning, or even centralised payment rails like Paypal. In both cases, supply auditing and simplicity (i.e. robustness) wins over absolute privacy in my view. This is what makes sats the ultimate store of value, and any future faster, more private layer 2 network that doesn't use sats as it's native "token" won't be able to compete, just as the dollar won't.

> Fees are an issue. If I have a not insignificant sum in bitcoin and I can't move it, bitcoin is broken. I've saved nothing, I've thrown it down a well. I don't like to talk about this because my above points are the cause of it and the solutions I talk about that exist already resolve it, so it's not something that we need to go into depth on. But, I did an analysis about this a while ago that I published on nostr and I think that bitcoin fees will rise asymptotically to reach the median transaction value, which is a positive feedback loop. It's not a problem until it is, and it is already a problem for a lot of people.

Fees aren't an issue if its used for large enough values as they tend to 0. I can't see how the fees could ever end up being average transaction value because people will simply stop using the network if it gets anywhere close. As the demand for the network drops, so do the fees.

> You can stop fractional reserve banking. It began because moving and protecting gold was expensive. Moving and protecting cryptocurrency is cheap, people don't need custodians, but we are getting fractional reserve bitcoin because it is artificially kept expensive. The tools exist to alleviate this, you can, right now, have astronomically higher amounts of commerce on a layer 1 chain directly than bitcoin provides, and I'm not talking about some sham scamcoin like iota or whatever. The solution was developed at blockstream! It was initially a BIP!

I firmly believe there will always be a place for custodians. Most people simply aren't capable of keeping private keys safe - especially once it becomes more popular and scams are rife. How much rehypothication goes on depends on how much demand there is for fully auditable custodians - bitcoin provides the option if people want it.