Thread by @HillebrandMax

Oh #Satoshi, I just found a new #RabbitHole! 🤯
tl;dr: #OpenSource #Bitcoin Wallets are like privately minted #gold coins.

[thread]

In a free economy with gold as the one sound money, the global consensus are the 79 protons of the gold atom. There are different shapes and forms of collections of atoms, but fundamentally, as long as there are 79 protons, it is the base money.

The raw resource of gold is mixed with lots of dirt, stone and other lesser metals, and extracting gold ore is an entrepreneurial task. Human ingenuity and labor has to be intermingled with these natural resources so to increase the production stage of this good.

Raw ore can further be refined into gold dust and nuggets with high purity. Users no longer have to discount the "worthless" dirt mixed into the "valuable" atoms with 79 protons, making scales usable to measuring the quantity of base money.

Free individuals might again increase the production stage of this good by casting the gold into bars or coins, so to increase the usability as a unit of account in economic calculation. Again, the important attribute is not the shape, but quantity of the base money: gold atoms.

All these different shapes of gold atoms are simply "user interfaces" that increase the usability of the base money. Each individual will choose a specific form of gold in the task that he needs solved. All these products are created voluntarily and w/o government intervention.

In Bitcoin, the base layer money is defined in consensus as units of Satoshis in the set of UTXOs on the blockchain. Unlike gold however, the base layer Satoshis are in a sense always pure, as soon as they are generated in the coinbase transaction.

Access to this base money is possible with a valid signature, and there are several user interfaces to generate and manage the corresponding private keys. E.g. rather primitively with 256 coin flips and pen & paper calculation of the corresponding address and signature.

Skilled and dedicated entrepreneurs have produced software that increases the ease of use in key management and they focus on unique edge cases to solve individual user problems. The ultimate choice of which software to run is by the end user.

Some wallets specialize in programmability [@ElectrumWallet], privacy [@WasabiWallet & @SamouraiWallet], or cross platform access [@GreenAddress]. Which software is being used is secondary, important is that they all manage the base money, bitcoin.

There are further hardware wallet solutions, that solve the problem of secure private key generation and signing. Here again are individual preferences, like support of several currencies [@Trezor & @LedgerHQ], or balls out amazingess with @COLDCARDwallet.

To utilize this programmable magic internet money to its fullest extend, wallets can specialize in delegating control of base money to several independent private keys. Cutting edge multi-signature wallets like @Misthosio and @Coinkite are incredibly useful tools.

Just like gold is defined as 79 protons in an atom, bitcoin is defined as units of satoshis on the blockchain. This is the shelling point of what the base money actually is, but how it can be used differs greatly upon the individual problems that users need solved.

Just like entrepreneurs manipulate the base money gold by purifying and shaping it, software and hardware developers increase the usability of bitcoin by improving and specializing on how to control the UTXOs on the blockchain.

Bitcoin is Anarchy, there are no aggressive interventions dictating how to access these UTXOs, individual entrepreneurs can innovate without permission, producing the best solution for any user. There is no "official" bitcoin wallet, as there is no authority that could make it so