Johnny

Why would a town dig up a water main that has never leaked?

Picture a small town with an iron pipe under Main Street. It went in around 1950 and it still brings clean water to every house. One spring a salesman shows up at the town meeting with a new pipe. It is lighter, it is full of sensors, and it comes with a slick brochure. Everyone in the room nods. It sounds better.

A woman in the back row asks one question. Is the old pipe failing?

That question has a name. It is called the burden of proof. In plain words, the person asking for a change has to show why the change is needed. Saying the new thing has nice features is one claim. Saying the old thing can't do the job is another. A new pipe can win on ten features while the town still has no reason to tear up the road.

Bitcoin hears this same pitch all the time. Its base layer is the core set of rules that every node checks. A node is a computer that keeps its own copy of the record and checks every payment against those rules. The base layer moves slowly on purpose. Every few months someone proposes changing it, and the pitch usually comes as a list of advantages. So I ask what she asked. What job is failing today, and how did you measure that? A wish for more features is a preference. A measured failure is a reason.

There is a fair complaint about this method. It can turn into a way to say no forever. Keep asking for one more study and nothing ever changes, even when the pipe is rusting from the inside. Slow failures are easy to miss, because the water keeps running right up to the day it stops. People who love the old pipe may also stop testing it.

So the test has to cut both ways. Defenders owe measurements too, and the question needs an answer that could change my mind. Here is mine. If someone shows a specific failure at a specific job, with numbers anyone can check, and a fix that adds less risk than it removes, the burden has been met. I would back digging up that road.

I have been in Bitcoin since 2015, and this is the first question I ask about any change to it. Before I argue about a new pipe, I ask to see the leak.

If this gives you a better question to ask, Zap ⚡

Why does a mask hide you on one night and expose you on another?

On Halloween, a man in a rubber werewolf mask can walk the length of a crowded street and nobody remembers him. Hundreds of other people are wearing masks too. Three days later, that same man wears that same mask into the grocery store, and every shopper in the building could describe him to the police. The mask is the same. The crowd around him is gone.

Privacy works like that. A hiding place is only as good as the number of people hiding in it with you. People who study this call that number the anonymity set: the group of people who all look alike to someone watching.

Bitcoin keeps a public record of every payment. Names are left off, but anyone can follow coins from address to address, and addresses are the account numbers on that record. One way to blur the trail is a coinjoin, where many people combine their payments into one transaction so an outside observer cannot tell whose coins went where. Ten people in a coinjoin give each of them a crowd of ten. A thousand people give each of them a crowd of a thousand.

So here is the question I care about. Does a privacy tool protect you, or does it point at you because so few people use it?

The worry deserves a fair hearing. Coinjoins have a shape you can spot, so the transaction itself can stand out like the mask in the grocery store. Some exchanges flag coins that went through one. Tracing firms also watch for slips after the mix, like spending those coins together again, which shrinks the crowd back down.

There is another side. When a privacy feature becomes the default, everybody wears the mask. The 2021 Taproot upgrade let many different kinds of spending look alike on the record, so a simple payment and a complex payment can wear the same costume. Wallets that build privacy in without asking pull in people who never thought about it, and those people are the crowd.

Here is how I would know I am wrong. If default privacy features spread across most wallets and tracing firms can still match most payments to their owners just as easily, then crowd size protects people less than I think.

I have used Bitcoin since 2015, and the first thing I check in any privacy tool now is how many other people use it. On Halloween you are hard to spot because everyone came dressed up.

If this changed how you look at privacy tools, Zap ⚡

What does it cost to keep a jewelry store safe overnight?

A jeweler on a small town main street rolls down a steel shutter, checks the cameras, and pays a guard every night to sit in a car out front until morning. When the case holds a few silver rings, a lock is enough. When the case fills with diamonds, she adds the guard. Her security bill grows with what sits behind the glass, because a thief does the same math she does.

Bitcoin has a guard too. Miners are computers spread around the world that bundle payments into blocks, the pages of a shared record. To add a page, a miner has to burn real electricity solving a puzzle, a method called proof of work. Rewriting old pages would mean outspending every honest miner at once. That spending is the shutter.

Someone has to pay the guard. Today most of a miner's income is the block subsidy, new coins the network creates with each block. About every four years that subsidy is cut in half. It went from 25 coins in 2012 to 3.125 in 2024. The rest of the pay comes from fees, the small amount each person adds to get a payment into a block.

So here is the question I keep coming back to. As the new coins shrink toward zero, will fees grow enough to keep the guard paid while the case keeps filling up?

The worry deserves a fair hearing. Fees have stayed a small slice of miner income in most months. If people move most everyday payments to faster layers built on top, fewer of them pay fees on the base chain. A cheaper guard in front of a fuller case is the setup a thief waits for.

There is another side. Those top layers still settle on the base chain, and big settlements will pay well for a spot in a scarce block. The coin's value has also grown faster than the subsidy fell across past cuts, which kept miner pay in dollars climbing.

Here is how I would know I am wrong. If over the next two halvings fees stay a tiny share of miner income and the total computing power securing the network falls for years in a row, the guard is getting cheaper while the jewels pile up.

I have watched this since 2015, and these days I check the fee share of each block more often than I check the price. A shutter only works while somebody keeps paying for it.

If this gave you a new number to watch, Zap ⚡

Picture a grocery store where the cashier reads every item in your cart over the store speakers. Bread. Diapers. Cough syrup. A bottle of wine on a Tuesday morning. Nobody is breaking a rule. Everyone in line just hears your week.

Most of us would walk out. Still, that is close to how a lot of payments work today. Every card swipe and bank transfer leaves a record with your name on it. Those records get stored, shared with partners and kept for years. Banks also have to watch for unusual activity and report it, and the dollar lines for what counts as unusual have not kept up with prices, so they catch more ordinary people every year. Nobody voted for all of it at once. It grew one rule and one threshold at a time.

People often say they have nothing to hide. That holds up fine for one purchase on one day. It holds up badly once the record is permanent and anyone with access can search it. A list of where you shop, who you pay and when can rebuild your habits, your health and your friendships. And when a bank decides it no longer wants you as a customer, you usually get a letter and no hearing.

So I treat privacy in payments as a starting right, and that right still sits inside the law. What it protects against is being cut off from the money system with no appeal, and a file on your life that never gets deleted.

Now the fair pushback. Payment records do catch real crime. They have helped stop fraud, trafficking and sanctions dodging. Every privacy tool built so far has also been used heavily by the people those rules exist to stop. That cost is real.

What would change my mind? Two things together. Proof that watching every payment catches criminals at a rate that matches how much it watches. And proof that people cut off by a bank have a quick, fair way back in. I have not seen either yet.

Bitcoin gives a different starting point. You hold your own keys, the secret that controls your coins, and nobody has to approve a payment first. With careful habits, like a fresh address each time and Lightning, a faster layer for small payments, you decide more of what you show. Selective disclosure means you hand a tax office or an auditor the records they need and nothing else. That is the checkout I want. The cashier scans the bread and keeps the list to herself.

If this made you look at your own receipts differently, Zap ⚡