Bitcoin Forum

I was reading this post by Hal and I realized how he was basically talking about what I interpret as additional layers on top of Bitcoin. Was the Lighting Network being described here, or did he talk of something else?


When he mentions "issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins". Would this look like in practice as a sidechain?

For instance, Adam Back recently talked about the new CMSTR token, which is a tokenized version of the MSTR shares (MicroStrategy, now known as Strategy), as described here:


So in a way, holders of Bitcoin are being the bank, and CMSTR is the issued digital currency. Would this meet the criteria described by Hal?

And speaking of banks, in this context, Strategy would be the world's biggest bank, since they are the public company with the biggest holdings of Bitcoin. Considering the unknown possibilities of this in the future, the stock may be undervalued the current mNAV premium of under 2x.

I was also considering ETF's serving as banks. BlackRock is filling for in-kind transactions im not sure if this points to them wanting to be something more than a traded ticker for a BTC proxy. I would still claim that Strategy would be a better bank. And so those companies would compete with each other and an interest rate would emerge as described by Selgin. In this sense, I was wondering how does the software for all of this look like. I think Strategy should hire people such as Adam Back and others and try to work this angle to monetize their massive Bitcoin stacks. This may be on their plans and right now they are still focused on acquiring more Bitcoin with intelligent leverage through the convertible bonds, ATMs and other methods.

I believe Strategy may play a big role in Bitcoin in the future that is not priced in. It's still seen as a Bitcoin proxy alternative to ETFs. I think Hal Finney described there what they are going for +1 decade ago, but how the sofware will operate is not clear to me, I would like to know if anyone has some ideas for this.

I guess it't not the LN or second layer, it's a different token backed by Bitcoin and we have the bitcoin backed tokens on multiple chains but it didn't solve anything.

The concept of Micropayments came in the year 2013 [ANNOUNCE] Micro-payment channels implementation now in bitcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=244656.0)  and the concept of LN came into the discussion since 2015 and finally implemented on the year 2018.

He is clearly talking about IOUs of bitcoin, and you can tell from his mention on fractional reserve banking. What he probably imagined is a digital initiative of a gold standard. Banks used to provide IOUs of paper money, that were redeemable for gold; I understand it by the emphasis on nationalization of money:

(Before "nationalization of currency", there was gold standard.)

It is already there, and is implemented in centralized exchanges.

It is quite simple. The bank has some public key, which is displayed to the user. You deposit BTCs there, and they appear on your account, exactly as when you deposit physical cash into some ATM, and it is credited into your bank account.

This step is optional, and it happens only after some time. First, you have just deposits and withdrawals, and you have no token, owned by the exchange. However, as things are evolving, it is profitable to release a new token, and then you have for example things like BNB on Binance.

If you have just some web page, with "deposit" and "withdraw" buttons, displaying you just some amounts, then you can have any kind of fractional reserve. But: when some exchange is getting more serious, then it is slowly moving into "100% Bitcoin backed", just to convince users, that it wouldn't collapse, as other exchanges in the past.

None of them. Because when you have LN or a sidechain, then you can explore many details, related to your coins. So, it no longer behaves like a typical bank. Because if you deposit some cash into some ATM, then can you really go into your bank account, and trace your banknotes, by seeing their serial numbers? Can you see, that your $100 bill went from bank A to bank B, then it was taken out of another ATM, and deposited back into bank C? Can you count all coins, and audit the supply?

In case of LN and sidechains, you can see a lot of traces. In case of exchanges, you just see, that you have N coins, you can see some order book, and check the latest price. But: all of that is not backed by any proofs, exactly like in banks, so after you deposit 1 BTC, you no longer know, if that exchange still have your 1 BTC or not. You just trade, and things are getting "real", and you can get some "details", only when you click "withdraw" (while in sidechains and LN, you need to approve your actions with your signatures, and you can read a lot of traffic, related to the whole network).

I didn't know about this post of Hal Finney, I guess I should dig more into this forum and understand the past days of Bitcoin. But I don't understand why he says that Bitcoin can't scale to have every single financial transaction included on blockchain. Why did he think that it was impossible? If we modify the Bitcoin's code and make block sizes dynamic, I think it's very possible, especially today when you can buy a terabytes of storages for a few bucks and I imagine in the next 10 years there will be something more evolutionary and cheap. We advance, technology advances, Bitcoin should advance too to my mind.

I think that he thought about Bitcoin as a reserve currency of other currencies instead of gold. I.E. today there is a talk about national Bitcoin reserves. As I understand from this quote, he thought that Bitcoin would be the reserve currency for banks that would have their own version of digital cash, i.e. their own altcoin. If I'm wrong, correct me.

I understand that he meant mainly IOUs and Bitcoin stablecoins (=stablecoins pegged to Bitcoin's value). But also sidechains could be described as such a "bank" -- they would be one of the "100% bitcoin backed" solutions, with a special technical mechanism responsible for the two way peg.

Finney mentioned George Selgin and his idea of a free, competitive banking sector. If we think a bit about it, and take into account that BItcoiners have embraced and popularized the idea of "not your keys, not your coins", probably the competition in the Bitcoin banking sector could eventually make it almost mandatory for players in this sector to offer a way of self-custody of their own "financial asset", i.e. of their Bitcoin-pegged token. That would be sidechains and solutions like Ark. Just like the "proof of reserves" became popular some years ago after the major crypto exchange hacks.

However, even with a "Bitcoin Banking sector" comprised mostly by "sidechains" and other L2 variants which allow self-custody, there is still a loophole for something very similar to fractional banking: premined sidechain utility tokens. Such tokens would indirectly dilute the system: although they wouldn't dilute the Bitcoin-pegged coin directly, they could be used to raise funds which otherwise would flow into Bitcoin and redirect a big part of them to the bank owners. This is basically what "L2s" like Stacks (or Arbitrum on Ethereum) are doing.

OP, I believe "Bitcoin banks" could be anything that utilizes Bitcoin as THE currency where everything is settled. It could something like what you have already posted. An off-chain layer like Lightning, a sidechain that pegs its currency with Bitcoin, there's wBTC in other blockchains with the Bitcoins stored in a centralized entity. OR perhaps in the future a sort of Bitcoin derivative issued by the legacy banking system?

That probably makes a debate for Bitcoin doesn't need bigger blocks to "scale" and "have all the world's transactions on-chain in Bitcoin", no?

Because if you have just the mainchain, which has no upper layer, then you have to keep all data from the Genesis Block, to the current time. And that history is always growing, and never shrinking, so you have more and more data to process (and less and less nodes, willing to do so).

Great idea, we have 600 GB blockchain, and people don't want to start full nodes, because of that. So, let's make it bigger, so even less users will do that.

It is not about storage, it is about verification time. To better understand it, you can try to run a full node for some CPU-mined altcoins. Their history takes just a few GB, but it requires more than a month of verification time. Why? Because if their hash function requires for example 10k tries, to hit a block, then verifying 10k blocks is as hard, as mining a new block.

Along with several custodial wallet/service. Some of them even have feature to send by email, phone number or username rather than Bitcoin address.


Good luck getting majority of Bitcoin community agree with block size increase, especially when you only consider storage capacity. There are so many factors such as CPU, RAM, storage I/O, network connection and block/TX propagation.

It sounds to me like Hal was describing something very close to the WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin) that's managed by BitGo, Kyber, and Ren.

That truly questions, or opens a debate, towards the big blockers' stance on the matter of "scaling". Because centralizing the network towards a few entities could be self-damaging to its existence, it also questions the motivations of the higher in the ranks of big blockers. But it's also that the either don't care, profit-seeking reasons, or they simply didn't learn enough for how this works.

I believe profit-seeking is the strongest motivation.

It is his idea as same as ideas for Escrow years ago are different than now, but to be honest, I don't care too much about Bitcoin banks, ideas and how it can be deployed by any business entity.

Because with Bitcoin wallet software, open source, non custodial, I store my bitcoin in it, and I have my own bank. It's easily achievable with non custodial Bitcoin wallet, and I no longer need any bank, commercial bank to Bitcoin bank.

Be your own bank with your Bitcoin non custodial wallets.

Although the idea is working since send coins via off-chain not require any fees, but if everyone agree with this, it will make all Bitcoin will belong to centralized institutions. Not many people use Bitcoin in daily transaction, hence there should be a limit how many coins belong to centralized institutions in order to prevent from Bitcoin getting controlled by centralization.

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It shouldn't matter what they build on top of Bitcoin to improve UI/UX as long as the parameters in the base layer hold to maintain and protect Bitcoin's censorship-resistant feature - its main value proposition.

Upper layers built on top actually illustrates that the network isn't merely about "Bitcoin the network". It also shows that "Bitcoin the currency" is valued enough that groups of developers are working on applications to make Bitcoin easier to use.


I believed that during the early phase of my journey. But almost nine years later, that has never happened.

What is described here sounds more like a bigger category that also includes side-chains. Generally it is anything that is "pegged" to bitcoin, from shittokens like Wrapped Bitcoin all the way to anything that claims to have been pegged to bitcoin with any rate (1:1 or 1:10 or anything) whether it is created as a sidechain or not.

And I have to say it is a terrible idea specially the part about "fractional reserve banking". They may provide some utility and attract some costumers but they'll destroy Bitcoin market until it ceases to exist. Because if such a system is created and largely used and then it can print bitcoin out of thin air without cap, the supply will no longer be limited! That will hurt bitcoin reputation and the price, but eventually it will be categorized as a shitcoin and stops having anything to do with Bitcoin...

The description is not like Lightning Network either. LN is not a separate "chain" with a separate token that is pegged to bitcoin. It is a second layer (not a sidechain) and a second layer is built on top of a first layer and depends on it. A pegged coin on the other hand, does NOT depend on what it is pegged to. For example if Bitcoin were to disappear today, technically WBTC can continue to exist because it does not rely on bitcoin network (it's a useless token on a token creation platform).
Same with the banking system that is being described, since it wouldn't have anything to do with bitcoin and doesn't rely on it from a technical perspective, it can continue to exist and operate without Bitcoin!

Wrapped Bitcoin cryptocurrencies are altcoins and they are not bitcoins.

Wrapped Bitcoin tokens have their pegs to Bitcoin price but pegs can depeg, and if depeg happens, holders of Wrapped Bitcoin tokens will lose their money like many people lose money to Terra and their ironic and terrible "algorithmic stable coin" UST.

Stable coins are risky and I warned this risk in Tether minted more USDT. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5479450.0)
They are tokens, not even coins.
Definition of tokens. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2251834.0)

If people want bitcoin, only purchase bitcoin, and avoid all Wrapped Bitcoin tokens.
If they want to store capital in not volatile currency, use fiat currencies, and avoid stable coins. Fiat currencies aren't good, but they are better than stable coins.

I agree that Hal Finney predicted the sidechain/offchain solutions as layers on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. He knew that the BTC blockchain can't handle large amounts of transactions. What he didn't predict back in 2010 was the price volatility of Bitcoin. I don't agree that volatile assets can serve as a collateral of other assets. Bitcoin lending failed as a business model, so the idea of "Bitcoin banks" is also a failure.
The Lighting Network didn't receive mass adoption, as Bitcoin failed to gather mass adoption as a currency for everyday retail payments.
The concept of "competitive banks issuing their own competitive currencies" has been created by Friedrich Hayek, not by the guy mentioned by Finney.

Your keys, your bank, that's how it goes ;)

I do not think he was talking about actual banks in the traditional sense. Maybe he was thinking of an early type of DeFi? After all, the very point of Bitcoin is "to be your own bank".

Anyway, I think the point is moot with the dawn of altcoin DeFi. If only we had a better way to integrate Bitcoin into the DeFi ecosystem, then maybe it would really become a type of decentralized reserve...

Today many out there think about that bank being in their reserves, so Hal's insight about that role of BTC was particularly ahead of its time.
And even then, way back, he saw through the block-size wars years later..

I wouldn't be willing to run node in 2010 because that PC requirement would be too expensive for me but did it stop people from running full nodes? My point is that it's not necessary to do rapid advancement, we can slowly and steadily increase it, in a speed that will match the development of technology and accessibility of it.

I think that community agrees with the increased block size but the problem is that we can't agree on what's the optimal block size. Some might advocate for 8MB, some for 16MB, some might advocate for 1GB and so on. I think that if we don't increase the block size in the near future, we will kill Bitcoin payments and people will use altcoins for payments, which is not the good for Bitcoin because Bitcoin was created for solving payment problems.

By the way, CPU, RAM, Storage, I/O, network connection, storage and so on, are at least 10 times better today then they were in 2008-2009.

Bitcoin always adapted to changes in the wind.
And it will do so again, enduring all the hardships.
It will prevail, because who else will?

Exactly, and this is one of the reasons why I said this idea is a bad one. These things also introduce centralization into the equation, specially the "bank" idea that Hal Finney had in mind. That is another big negative side to that idea.
We are already seeing how bad they are in these supposedly pegged shitcoins.

I think Hal literally meant banks--  the shittyness of banks today is driven by two factors: Central Banks and the state regulatory environment.  Both groups impose requirements on banks which make otherwise good ones behave shitty and protect bad ones from competition.  Fixing the state regulatory side is not impossible but it's almost pointless with the central bank hold on the system.   The situation for Bitcoin has a fighting chance of being different.  I think it will be, due to the potential of technology powered 'banks' making real competition for more traditional banks and for the lack of a central bank forcing in bad policy.

To whatever extent that Hal was thinking about technology powered banking-- he himself was a developer of a unbacked chaumian token banking system, so I'd imagine he'd be thinking of something like that but backed with Bitcoin.  It's doubtful he was thinking of defi whatever mumble mumble because it didn't exist then (and much of what exists now is just fraud).  But we shouldn't be limited to just what Hal would have imagined back then-- we know about possibilities today that he couldn't have known of then.  (though chaum tokens are pretty rad).  So for example, for a Bitcoin bank to get lots of adoption it has to compete against on chain transactions and lightning, etc..

I see three relevant factors:

The first one is that Bitcoin is designed so that it's security is paid for as a side effect on the market price for space in blocks.  If that space is functionally unlimited (IOW above demand) then the market price for space is ~0 and security can't be paid for without perpetual inflation.  We've seen this play out in practice, where blockchains without functional limits are stuck at essentially no fee income and require inflation to survive and ones with function limits generate significant fee income and can survive without inflation[1].

The second is that the resource costs to run a full node increase significantly with larger blocks but for node operations to be wide these costs must be surprisingly low.  Early on in Bitcoin's life I expected node costs could go up a fair bit because businesses would run nodes.  But the reality is that businesses even supposedly bitcoin centric businesses reliably outsource node operations and are rather mercenary about maintaining Bitcoin's economic properties -- as in "Oh you want to inflate bitcoin? fine so long as you've got a way for it to make me money." :P  So for Bitcoin's security to be upheld it needs to be realistic for people who own Bitcoin to run nodes to force businesses to not adopt changes adverse to them, and because these people aren't IT experts the threshold is fairly low.    Similar to the fees point, we've seen this play out--  in BSV they removed the blocksize limit then pumped the chain with worthless spam until it reached terabytes in size.  At that point it became unrealistic (maybe not even possible without software fixes) for new participants to bring up nodes and the existing parties imposed changes to the system rules like granting themselves the ability to seize arbitrary coins from anyone in the system.

The third is just that it's gravely inefficient, non-private, and unnecessary.   In Chicago, you pass last night's hookup some money to buy Plan B after an oops. Why is a computer in a rice field in Thailand processing your potentially privacy destroying transaction?   With Bitcoin even without any banks of any kind it's possible to transact without every transaction hitting the global chain.  One of Satoshi's insights was that a global broadcast media is more useful than many people initially expect but that doesn't mean it solves all problems.  We know Satoshi envisioned people using payment channels because he both added functionality for that into the transaction format and wrote about it, and that he also considered Bitcoin users being militant about managing the size of the blockchain to keep it accessible.  It turns out that there are many ways to keep transactions off the chain while maintaining good or even better properties.  Given that transactions on the chain need to pay for the network security (see the first point) these schemes should save money, so we should expect them to be used and because managing the operating costs of nodes is important (see second point) we should be happy for it.  Because a transaction the outside world never sees *at all* will inherently have better privacy than even some pseudonymous or even cryptographically blinded transaction and because confirmation on the chain can often take an hour the ultimate user ought to be happy for the ability to keep some transactions off the global chain too.


[1] E.g. even though fees are low right now in Bitcoin it is still earning more in fees per block than several 'large block' competitors get from inflation and fees combined, which is a good argument that Bitcoin is viable long term.  Survive doesn't necessarily mean have strong enough security for a tiny number of confirms to be acceptable for many transactions, but assuming people have alternatives to on chain confirmations for fast transactions, having to wait some dozens of blocks for security isn't the end of the world--- bank transactions often don't settle for days or weeks today and people seem to be able to handle it.

I wish Hal Finney was alive to see and explain better what he was talking about. Maybe with the new technologies around bitcoin he would have made it clearer enough instead of us having to speculate on what we think he meant or not.

Maybe he really meant the decentralization in every sense of the word. If he meant a bitcoin bank, it is basically like a bitcoin holding and I think that is what the bitcoin ETFs are already doing.

I respect your opinion, but that doesn't actually matter because Bitcoin at the base layer, will always be Bitcoin with its consensus rules enforced by an army of full nodes. Anyone could build ANYTHING on top. They can be centralized, semi-centralized, fully-backed, partially-backed, DeFi pegged assets, ANYTHING. But everything that happens on the top layers will have nothing to do with the base layer.

Plus it was merely a shower thought from Hal. It wasn't a proposal.

  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Looking at past discussion, that's probably true although some simply don't like any form of hard-fork.


I agree, especially when Bitcoin sidechain/L2 have some trade-off that people don't want.


I'm aware of that fact. I just want to emphasize that people usually suggest arbitrary block size limit without considering many kinds of hardware and technology.

The frustration will start when users get to know the whole bank idea Hal Finney had in mind there is no way it will be decentralised because they must always be a way to regulate the operations revolving around it's transactions so as to maintain trust, Security and compliance of their customers like every other regular banking system. The negative side will varry from shifting focus from the initial innovation even if it won't affect the base layer, trustless system, obviously as an pegged coin there will be manipulation and most novice will get mislead if not properly educated to believe it is the original innovation or an improvement on the initial innovation of bitcoin not knowing it is a side-chain with a pegged asset.

I believe not, because if it's a layer on top of Bitcoin, and if it's built to scale and to serve millions of users to make billions of transactions, then perhaps some of those built will be centralized, no? Or will NEED to be centralized. It probably isn't only about Bitcoin the network itself, but also Bitcoin the currency as well.

It may be just inevitable in that case.
And after all - it will be an alternative, just like BTC itself.

I believe gmaxwell is closest to what Hal meant.  Banks.  Banks that work in a way very close to how the world was back when the Gold Standard was a thing.

The first thing that comes into my mind is hype, acceptance and real interest of the people.  I do not think there are many left who still think Fiat has any real value.  We all know the gimmicks and we all know how fake the entire economy really is.  Nothing seems real or certain any more, we are left to paving our own future knowing there is a good probability that our own Governments will become so inefficient we would run our lives way better off what we pave ourselves than what they are trying to ensure us we will have within 10 or 20, let alone 50 years.

Therefore, a significant REAL interest will spark into people once they hear a new system similar to the Gold Standard comes.  And if it functions like a Bank, it will not have to sit in a gray area of the economy.  It can be regulated, it can do everything with no more doubts.  Whether we like it or not, Bitcoin really is decreasingly efficient for larger payments.  Remember that at the time Hal posted this, Bitcoin was WAY less complicated than it is now.  The likelihood of a new person to Bitcoin understanding how it works was likely higher too.  There was just less information to learn.

Now that it became much more complicated, it complicates everything around it too.  For example, Replace By Fee was inexistent back then.  RBF sort of put a barricade between customers and some shops.  Now of course you can be a shop and warn the customers and clearly put one rule before payments,  It must NOT be an RBF enabled payment.  Because if the Bitcoin Mempool is clogged up, you do not want to ask your customers to have a sit and wait for an hour or so or to spend hefty fees for faster confirmation.

But all the trouble can be solved with a real Bank offering a digital currency backed by Bitcoin.  If it works like currency used to, you can deposit Bitcoin and swap it for the regulated digital currency.  Now you own a digital currency that you KNOW is worth the same amount of Bitcoin you initially deposited.

And obviously, the Bank will be a way better alternative for merchants and for the customer too.  All transactions can be instant with no waiting time.  Maybe the closest thing to this is how Binance offered 'Binance Chain Network' Bitcoin.  But again, they are not a Bank and they were in a sort of gray area too.

Realistically, we will most likely never have massively adopted Bitcoin unless it somehow becomes more controllable and regulated in a way that Bitcoin becomes closer to Fiat and wallets become closer to Banks of today.  Probably, the only solution is unfortunately this.  Will there still be people spending and receiving Bitcoin the classic way?  Yes, definitely.  Will there be many though?  Like Hal says, they will likely be extremely rare.  Because most of the Bitcoin will be circulating on the side of the network that is widest accepted, which would definitely be Banks because in that situation most merchants will move on to work with them only, and the little Bitcoin remaining to still circulate on chain will probably be so little it will be really inconvenient.

Come on.  We can say whatever we want.  If a real Bank providing a digital currency backed 1 to 1 by Bitcoin pops up tomorrow, most of the Bitcoin holders will move over there.  Most will say, I already have a Bank account.  Why complicate things like you Bitcoiners do when I can just purchase this regulated currency backed in it and I can hold it into a Bank that provides much faster support, quicker payments et cetera?

Most of the world would not give a crap.  Bitcoin may then only remain the way to store your money 'under the mattress' if you will.  Like some people hold Gold in their own safes while others feel safer holding it onto paper or into the safe of a Bank.  I wish I am wrong.  But particularly now when we are living an era of speed, when most of us feel like we have no time for everything a day should involve, when technology moves so fast, I think people will much rather pick convenience.  And the biggest motive will be the backing of the currency.  'I have Bitcoin too, it is ensured and proved!'.

Would this bitcoin-backed token be native to the Bitcoin blockchain?

Coincidentally (did not see this thread at the time of posting) I posted this recently about a bitcoin-backed stable token native to the bitcoin blockchain (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5529783.0). In your opinion is this in line with what is being described, to be used in line with whatever Bitcoin banking technology surrounds it?

In my opinion, I see clear utility in a bitcoin-backed stablecoin/digital cash, to avoid volatility while still being able to harness the benefits of using the bitcoin blockchain, though Bitcoin banks...I don't quite understand how they are necessary. Would the primary use case be for those who don't trust themselves with private keys, or to keep their coins safe?

You're RIGHT, it actually IS!

Plus will not merely be an alternative. I believe it will be seen by the world as mainstream, REAL WORLD, acceptance of an asset that originated from the internet.

What an era to experience waking life.

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That's true, It is a free world and we cannot prevent creation of anything on top of Bitcoin. Just like we cannot prevent creation of centralized exchanges and prevent people from leaving their coins there just to have it stolen when the CEX is hacked or just runs away.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't speak out against them. Every now and then people run a campaign on social media encouraging newbies to withdraw from CEX and use an actual wallet to store their coins.
It's the same here, I personally consider fractional banking to be a big threat...

Does it need to be centralized? I mean we already have second layer solutions such as Lightning Network and it is not centralized and it has the potential to handle very large number of transactions. So the alternative to centralized banking solution already exists, meaning we don't have to go in the wrong direction.

Won't be running on Bitcoin network so even if it's backed by Bitcoin still it's different coin/token.

WBTC is Bitcoin backed token but it's not stable coin, so what you're suggesting is something like DAI that holds the stable value while pegged by BTC, not sure is there any project in the market of that kind.

Like said even if it's backed by Bitcoin it won't achieve the same level of decentralisation as Bitcoin network so it doesn't have real world use case other than trading purposes.

I didn't tell you shouldn't. In fact, I said I RESPECT your opinion. BUT we should also accept its inevitability that because of Bitcoin's permissionless nature, ANYTHING could be built on top of it.


I don't know. But if it needs serve A BILLION USERS to make BILLIONS OF TRANSACTIONS A DAY, then I believe it will be tipping more towards centralization than decentralization.

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It is impossible now for us to know fully what he meant but the best we can do now is to try and understand his words the best that we can. He mentioned bitcoin-backed banks which to me implies centralized banks having bitcoin and offering their services to holding and transacting bitcoins. He also said that he sees bitcoin could be reserve currencies offering the same purpose as gold used to do back in the days except with more privacy security and much more efficient (https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/08/29/hal-finney-on-bitcoin-in-his-own-words).

He was definitely ahead of his time and 10 years after he died, almost everything he has envisioned has become into fruition.

I also see it that way.
It's either this, or no massive and overwhelming usage of the chain for daily transactions (we are not talking about bigger ones).

It would be fascinating to read his views on the matter were he here today. As far as the central bank grip on the banking system is concerned, I think a lot of that has to do with lobbying groups and in this case the financial sector. Those that have an interest in promoting their own agenda will no doubt make political donations to those they can influence. Crypto has to catch up.

The actual Cabal that really run the system doesn't need lobbying and "political donations" to get what they want. They already HAVE what they want, and it has been that way since the invention of the concept of Central Banking.

Read this book, "A History Of Central Banking And The Enslavement Of Mankind" by Stephen Mitford Goodson.

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Catch up politically?

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I believe people are starting to understand that for HyperBitcoinization, the path isn't only technological. It's also political.

I will try, thank you for the suggestion.

One the first (if not the first) crypto individual/company that made political donations was Bankman-Fried and FTX. I cannot recall how much was donated but it was a lot of money and there was no reason except to expect something in return. If crypto is to ever fully challenge traditional banking systems it will have to find support in political circles and that will only happen with donations.

I'm not merely talking about "donations". I'm also talking about politicians who will be incentivized by supporting the cause and there supporting Bitcoin's journey too. Didn't Trump start the "World Liberty Fund"? That might be a shit project with a shitcoin, but it needs Bitcoin to be a success to ensure its own success. I have heard that his V.P. is a Bitcoin HODLer. He definitely wants to price to surge. I'm very confident that there are other politicians that also HODL Bitcoin. They're like trojan horses that could be used to walk on a path closer to HyperBitcoinization.

HODL.

I understand what you mean but donations (a form of legally accepted bribe or payment for exerting influence) can help sway most politicians.

Absolutely  ;D

I never said that donations will not help sway politicians. I merely made a point that there are also those politicians that may already be in Bitcoin in some way that their incentives are aligned with the success of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin should have those kinds of politicians because they're not swayed easily away from Bitcoin if someone from the legacy banking system made their donations.

What we have seen with XRP and other altcoins is basically the power of lobbying since all these VC's have basically gotten on the crypto reserve by plain donations and helping the Trump team get notoriety or some sort of advertisement in exchange, but one could be said the same with BTC, but at least BTC does not print their own money to buy politicians. The thing is, even if the Bitcoin reserve is a bit of a flop, it clears the jurisdictional matters and now agents could be freely to start businesses in this sector without fearing random account freezes and whatnot. And with Saylor in the white house he has now the right contacts to turn Strategy into a powerhouse in the field and really become a monopoly that will sooner or later be translated in higher price shares for the stock.

Its just crazy to me that Hal has the foresight to see all of this stuff and comment on it long before its inception. I know a lot of people think Hal or ya know there is that conspiracy that he might have been Satoshi since he got the first coins sent to him etc etc. but the fact that he was so in tune with all this and just wise to have guessed a lot of it correctly and ya know there is so much more he said which we are waiting to play out like how he estimated 10 mil per coin or something like that, its the same thing that Saylor says too he basically copied Hal's prediction. Strategy is a Bitcoin Machine at this point basically. He's found a way to sell the public stock to fund more and more and more purchases of BTC. He will just keep doing it as long as he can pretty much, eh?

I agree with you @JollyGood, that most politicians can influence a lot if they want. They can influence a lot in Bitcoin, for example, Trump can influence a little if he wants, the transaction limit of Bitcoin or something else, and he can talk about something new if he wants. I think the Trump administration has invested a lot.


We will have to wait and see how much Trump helps make Bitcoin the primary currency of America. It will certainly be a decision of the politicians.

Precisely. That's what's I was going to say. On an exchange, you're basically holding IOU's of a Bitcoin (Which is also why it makes no sense to keep your coins on an exchange, and yet many still do apparently).

Hal was a visionary who was able to forecast the use cases of Bitcoin. However, these bitcoin banks aren't going to be successful until they get their security straightened out.

The banks must meet international western standards just like regular banks and adhere to regulations. I don't believe in some dystopian world where people are starting their own p2p banks and there is 0 regulation. It will basically be that the current established banking brands are able to custody and manage reserves and be included within regulation and law. The Trump administration is embracing this already but the rest of the world is still lightyears away from this and im not sure if certain places of the world are going to be ok with that given past precedents. The EU for instance said they are not interesting in holding bitcoin on their balance sheet and the guy from Czech Republic was told to not do it. In this sense the Trump admin. is doing a good job, however this is neutered by the crazy tariff wars that are tanking the markets.

And this has to be the reason why nobody should be storing Bitcoin on an exchange. I hope the IOU analogy eventually resonates with enough members in the forum (and anybody else that might read it) to give them time to think about the potential suffering they could face if the exchange they use gets hacked.

As for any Bitcoin Bank, Hal Finney was a commanding figure therefore he would have thought this through. We will have to wait for some time more before anybody might take steps towards creating one but as it would involve handing over the BTC to someone else, I think there will not be a huge demand for it.