How would it get turned into a shitcoin?
Discussion
If abuse of the blockchain continues to get worse and nodes become harder and more expensive to run, it becomes decentralised in name only, just like all the shitcoins.
If we allow scams to be run on bitcoin, ordinals, inscriptions, runes etc people in fiat land will continue to get rugged and people will rightly associate bitcoin as a scam, just like all the other shitcoins.
If a handful of people had this power all along, then it was never actually decentralized. What about people switching to knots? Are they just wasting their time?
This is a common question people have about bitcoin, it's essentially "What if the core team were corrupted" and the answer was always, "That's likely to happen one day, but the code is open source so we can switch to another implementation."
What's happening currently is essentially a test if that statement is true.
Agreed. The question is, do you believe that statement to be true? Have you sold any bitcoin as a result of this fear?
I hope it is true, but I think like all good things it has to be fought for and we can't just rest on our laurels.
I don’t know if that’s the case. Let’s say this bitcoin core update destroys a lot of people’s nodes because it just uses up too much data and it becomes too expensive to run a node. Would people continue using core or would they switch to something else that is using up less data like knots? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? As a Bitcoin holder, that’s an easy decision. And if this change pumps up the fees a lot, would it kill the network or would it incentivize development of second layer solutions like lightning? Fees are going to get crazy high eventually. This is inevitable. I’m not saying I’m for network spam. I don’t want ordinals and bullshit on the network. I will not update my node either. But the network fees will become astronomically higher and we still aren’t ready for that because the incentive to build it isn’t really here yet. In other words, lightning development might need a high fee environment to really become useful. Not saying this is exactly what will happen but I’m sure you can imagine this possibility. We simply don’t know the future.
This idea that we should collectively stand together against a threat isn’t practical. Otherwise, we would’ve guillotined these corrupt politicians a long time ago. Bitcoin is anti fragile which means we don’t need to stand together and bully or coerce Bitcoin core to do the right thing. People will just build alternative solutions and we can pick and choose what solutions to use. Incentives > collective action.