WLKNSN on Nostr: I wouldn’t be too smug about bankruns. Bitcoin has value because people believe it ...

I wouldn’t be too smug about bankruns. Bitcoin has value because people believe it does. That numbers in UTXOs are widely agreed to have real monetary value is a remarkably unlikely bit of coordinated textual interpretation, which is a lot more contingent and fragile than bitcoiners let on. I think much of the discomfort around ordinals, for example, comes from the fact that it highlights just how much the meaning of anything within the system is a matter of convention. The durability of the convention that the symbols stored in the big bitcoin database represent money and not, say, a codex of mystic numerology is only minimally a matter of math or consensus mechanisms. It’s mostly a matter of the durability of the belief system that constitute BTC as a synthetic commodity money, which is at least as brittle and prone to sudden collapse as shared belief in the safety of deposits in a conventional bank. Bitcoin isn’t subject to fractional reserve bankruns, but it is subject to a loss of faith, or drift in the worldview that constitutes it.