The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 210 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Balaji Srinivasan: Centralized Bitcoin on Coinbase and MicroStrategy will likely be seized
“Like, will all the centralized Bitcoin on Coinbase's servers, Sailor servers, et cetera, get seized? I think it's quite likely. I think it eventually gets seized in some exigent circumstance.”
Buterin: Ethereum and Bitcoin are useless for many apps due to scalability
“So, you know, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Classic, and Bitcoin with Segwit, like, all four of those are just pretty much completely useless for a lot of what people want to do because the scalability just isn't high enough.”
Krugman: Significant probability Bitcoin's value eventually drops to zero
“Now, I'm not a hundred percent sure of that, but maybe, ah, ah, but I think that there's a certainly a, I would say a quite significant probability that the whole thing just drops to zero, ah, because I have not yet seen any reason why this has to be a valuabl…”
Andreessen gave a $50,000 Bitcoin grant to AI bot Truth Terminal
“I gave it a 50,000 dollar no strings attached grant this summer in Bitcoin.”
Balaji Srinivasan: US government clash with Bitcoin will match the Crusades
“The US government and the US dollar versus Bitcoin is as big a clash as like, you know, I don't know, Christian Muslim was during the crusades or something like that.”
Gluchowski: Hyper-Bitcoinization based solely on Bitcoin is utopian and impractical
“The idea of hyper Bitcoinization just based on Bitcoin is kind of utopia because of a lot of usability issues and a lot of issues with just general lack of functionality, which you need for a real financial system.”
Back: Everyone agrees Bitcoin needs a block size increase
“If we need to increase the block size, which I think everybody agrees with at this point in time.”
Back: Three or four colluding mining companies could influence Bitcoin policy
“You know, it's probably the case that you could, you know, If you could get collaboration from three, four companies in various parts of the world, you could start to apply some policy influence to Bitcoin.”
Back: Raising Bitcoin block size to 1GB would cause network failure
“If we jumped up the block size to a gigabyte now, security would fail, the network would probably fail.”
Hearn: Reaching Bitcoin capacity limits will kick users out of the system
“At worst, things break quite badly, but even at best, even if things don't break, some users won't be able to use Bitcoin, right? They will be kicked out of the system, effectively. There won't be enough capacity to handle them.”
Felten: Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap is changeable by community consensus
“Right now the monetary policy is grow asymptotically to twenty-one million Bitcoins, but that could change by consensus of the community. That twenty-one million limit is not inherent mathematically. It's just a number that is hardwired into the currently used…”
Paul Krugman argues Bitcoin mining energy efficiency gains are self-defeating
“Bitcoin is what people are owning now in large value, and any gains in energy efficiency just gets swallowed up very quickly. You just push further into that margin, and it, ah, it, it's, ah, it's a self-defeating form of progress.”
Krugman: Governments will quickly strip away crypto freedom if Bitcoin becomes serious
“And if Bitcoin became really a serious, well, ok, it you'd be amazed at how quickly whatever freedom you think you're getting via the blockchain would disappear.”
Krugman: Bitcoin mining costs will always expand to extreme levels
“Bitcoin circulation will always expand to drive the cost of producing a Bitcoin up to the point of being insane.”
Krugman: Crypto replaces institutional trust with digital gold-biting
“So, the interesting thing about all of this shift to cryptocurrency is it's saying, let's throw away This technology, it's more, it's a social technology rather than a, you know, a mathematical technology, but let's throw away the social technology of repeated…”
Levchin: Crypto has proven successful as a store of value, not payments
“And I'm not convinced it's a payment method now, and it's been quite some time. But as currency and commodity and a star value goes, it's certainly proven to be extraordinarily successful.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Most Bitcoin usage will be de-anonymized over time
“A lot of Bitcoin use will be de-anonymized over time.”
Balaji Srinivasan: SpaceX, Uber, and Bitcoin represent network alternatives to states
“SpaceX's network, NASA's state. Uber is the network. Taxi medallions are the state. Bitcoin is the network. The Fed is the state and so on and so forth, right?”
Dixon: Bitcoin could not have existed prior to social networking
“Bitcoin is something that couldn't have existed before social networking”
Andreessen: Bitcoin is a trillion-dollar outcome created by one person
“You already do it already exists. It's Bitcoin. And so there's experiment. Yeah, built in Bitcoin. So it's a trillion dollar outcome with, you know, one guy and one guy with a bunch of people kind of weighing in and helping”
Choi: Hamas stopped accepting Bitcoin donations because the blockchain is traceable
“And, you know, even Hamas, like, I think in like, 20, 22, 23 announced that they were no longer gonna be accepting Bitcoin because it was too traceable.”
Horowitz: Bitcoin reached a $1 trillion market cap without a corporate structure
“Bitcoin started in 2008 and it's, you know, a piece of software and there's probably four engineers working on it at this point and there's no company and it's worth a trillion dollars.”
Dixon: Cryptocurrency adoption is a second-order consequence of social media
“I think things like cryptocurrency, for example, in many ways, it's a consequence of social media. If 20 years ago, someone invented Bitcoin, you'd have like a couple New York Times articles quoting some Yale economists. This is stupid. It's over. Maybe it'd b…”
Monegro: Bitcoin will not become a currency for buying coffee
“But I also don't think we're heading to a world where you buy your coffee with Bitcoin.”
Walden: General base-layer protocols must ossify to foster developer trust
“The more general the service of a crypto network, the more it should be ossified. So again, coming back to this, IP is ossified, Bitcoin has ossified, maybe a general computation substrate is better ossified because it lends itself to the trust that the develo…”
Wilson: Twitter could have stayed open using a token business model
“If Bitcoin and tokens had existed in 2005 instead of 2009, I think it's very possible that Twitter could have adopted a token-based business model Left the protocol open.”
Haun: DOJ asked her to help shut down Bitcoin in 2012
“So for me, my story was in 2012, I actually was asked by the Justice Department to help shut down and prosecute Bitcoin.”
Dixon: ICOs are not necessary for crypto network success
“There's been so much attention on ICOs that, by the way, you don't need an ICO. Bitcoin never had an ICO. Ethereum had a very, relatively speaking, small one, eighteen million. And I don't think that was a key part of the network success.”
Benet: Silicon Valley dismissed Bitcoin by missing its core value of verifiability
“And so it's partly for that reason, I think, that Silicon Valley effectively dismissed a lot of the potential of Bitcoin. It just looks like such the wrong thing. If you could, you know, beat the throughput of Bitcoin with a SQLite database in your phone, why …”
Dixon: Protocol network tokens require a distinct valuation model from digital commodities
“My personal nomenclature, like I think of in the first bucket, the commodity bucket, there's Bitcoin, there's Monero, Zcash, maybe Dash. And then there's this other thing, which is kind of the networks, call them fat protocols, call them tokens. There's this w…”
Benet: Bitcoin solved protocol funding by enabling shared ecosystem upside
“Bitcoin came in and gave us the answer, which is you create cryptographic assets that allow everybody in this entire ecosystem to share in the upside of creating this value.”
Srinivasan: Bitcoin remittances will not beat legacy systems in their first decade
“Remittances are, to Bitcoin, what VoIP was to the internet. In the sense of, it'll work at some point in the first five years or 10 years of the thing, it's not high enough quality with the obvious alternative, namely VoIP versus landlines or remittances versu…”
Ludwin: Bitcoin will never go away as long as the internet exists
“Bitcoin is never going to go away. It will, Bitcoin will never go away. It will live on for as long as the internet lives on.”
Ludwin: Chinese investors buying Bitcoin to bypass capital controls caused 2015 rally
“The demand in this case is coming from the Chinese, who are anticipating a currency devaluation, which has been announced and in China, and are using Bitcoin as a means to circumvent capital controls.”
Back proposes scaling Bitcoin block size limit to 8MB over four years
“So the proposal I made was to increase to two megabytes failure immediately, as soon as we can roll out change, which to be clear, any of them would take about six months to roll out. Increase to four megabytes after two years, and eight megabytes after four y…”
Morkos: Non-consensus hard forks could split Bitcoin into two currencies
“You might end up with two separate currencies instead of everybody moving over to the new currencies.”
Back: 99% of Bitcoin transactions occur off the main blockchain
“Estimates are something like currently 99% of them are happening off the blockchain.”
Back: Massively scaling Bitcoin sacrifices decentralization, turning it into PayPal
“You can scale massively and lose the decentralization, and at that point, Bitcoin loses most of its distinguishing features, and you're left with a kind of PayPal situation With all the things people gripe about with PayPal.”
Back: Lightning Network could scale Bitcoin capacity up to 10,000x
“There's also right now quite active work on this sort of Bitcoin enhancement called lightning, which is a best described as a kind of right caching layer for Bitcoin, which might scale Bitcoin by a factor of a thousand or 10,000.”
Andreessen: Bitcoin technology will be a big deal globally
“Digital assets can basically, Bitcoin is basically a platform to be able to exchange those in a trusted way online. And, you know, this is an extremely powerful idea. Like, this idea is very powerful. The technology is very powerful. And this will be a big dea…”
Andreessen: Developing world financial inclusion will drive global Bitcoin adoption
“And so there's a very, very big opportunity to use these new technologies, and those include Bitcoin, and those include smartphones, to really up level the capabilities that people have in, in many countries. And I think that's a big part of how Bitcoin will p…”
Armstrong: Every investor should own one Bitcoin to learn about cryptocurrency
“Should every investor own maybe one Bitcoin? Yes, I think they should. And the reason is not so much as an investment. It's to start learning about this technology Which will be a major influence on finance in the future.”
Armstrong: Mainstream merchants like Starbucks will eventually accept Bitcoin
“Now, someday, if the world, if Bitcoin becomes more and more popular, like we all think it will then yes, even the Starbucks across the street will be accepting Bitcoin, because they still don't want to pay two percent, they'd rather pay a fraction of one perc…”
Armstrong: Bitcoin-native applications will create multi-billion dollar companies
“So, these are very small today, but I think in the future some of these will end up being many multi-billion dollar companies and systems.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin is the only way to build global, permissionless prediction markets
“Or if you want to build a global crowdfunding site, or a prediction market, or something like that, where people all over the world without having to register can, within a couple seconds, put money into this thing, or see it tip, It's like literally the only …”
Armstrong: Bitcoin will be the sole currency used on the blockchain
“I think Bitcoin will be the currency that, that everyone ends up using on the blockchain, and they probably don't quite understand what they're saying when they say that.”
Armstrong: Bitcoin usage will invert to 80% payments and 20% speculation
“And I think over time what'll happen is that those two percentages will shift. The 80% will end up becoming the 20% speculative asset, and it'll be 80% payment network actually happening.”
Felten: Bitcoin will become too large for traditional regulators to disrupt
“I think a lot of people in the sort of old school finance, finance and financial regulation world just think this whole thing is a bubble and will go away if they ignore it. I don't think that's true, and I think that as they wake up, they may start looking at…”