I don't think changing the global base layer of money in 14 years is a reasonable expectation. To the extent that it's successful, it was always going to be a multi-decade process.

As for the final statement on burden of proof, I disagree. The #1 variable that gives bitcoin its value is its resistance to change. It's like the U.S. Constitution in that regard. You want to change the U.S. Constitution? Get a supermajority of Congress and a supermajority of States to agree to it. It's not a perfect document, but it's a good base layer and the fact that it's hard to change is the main point. If someone were to try to change the U.S. Constitution in some way that I might even agree with but that tries to do so in such a way to somehow bypass that supermajority, then my kneejerk reaction becomes no. Full stop. Otherwise the U.S. Constitution doesn't matter.

And along those lines, this is what I wrote in the other thread:

Technical experts I respect disagree with each other a lot more on the incentive risk of drivechains than taproot. Even taproot had unintended consequences regarding ordinals (which I don't view as a threat, but the unintended usage of the witness space like that is not a great sign from a risk management perspective).

But I think more importantly, bitcoin is valuable specifically because it's hard to change. That's the killer feature. If it's easy to change, it's really not that important of a project in the long arc of history. So for that reason, to the extent that people want to make contentious changes, I would likely oppose them by default with whatever tools I have (my node, my voice, my money, etc) unless or until they are not very contentious (eg like taproot initially was). So from that perspective, I can go from neutral on a change to opposing a change, based on the method of trying to make that change a reality.

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And that hardness of Bitcoin to change is realized by its decentralization; i.e. the number of economical regular nodes and mining nodes.

The threat for Bitcoin in that regard is diminishing numbers of regular nodes being operated and centralization of mining entities.

Insertion of arbitrary data tends to increase the equipment and operation cost for regular nodes; cost increase -> centralization increase. That’s the reason why any exploit for arbitrary data insertion can be seen as a threat in the long term.

You guys should read the centralisation report by Trail of Bits, it’s already an issue.

What makes you think governments are going to allow their currencies to be subverted?

They're not, that's why favorable laws for Bitcoin are stupid. It is a black market money.

https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Value-Proposition

Hmm I’m not so sure about the ā€œfreedom from financial surveillanceā€ bit given the open ledger.

There is a 4 hour long Twitter space where Eric discusses Bitcoin, privacy, and Monero

Very well said.

I didn't say I expected to change the global base layer of money in 14 years, I only said we are far away from hyperbitcoinization because you were talking about how cheap onchain transactions are after 14 years. That is irrelevant, I'm only thinking about what we will do once more people come into the system.

About the "resistance to change" point, some comments:

- The thing that we can't change in Bitcoin is its primary properties, its fixed supply etc -- basically we can't do a hard fork. You're talking about "change" in general, but that doesn't make sense.

- If you're talking about change in the soft-fork sense then Bitcoin is easy to change, it has changed dozens of times, and it would change again tomorrow if Pieter Wuille and Greg Maxwell proposed a new cryptographic scheme, because everybody would immediately assume it is a good thing, like for example the immensely complicated "CISA" idea (which is not even a proposal because not even the brightest managed to arrange the pieces into an actual proposal) that would have to change some fundamental aspects of what constitutes a Bitcoin transaction -- that idea is already supported by 90% of Bitcoin users by default and would probably be activated with no contention whatsoever, like Taproot, which is another radical "change" that barely anyone understand even 2 years after. In any case, as long as these changes are opt-in and backwards-compatible they are harmless, and Drivechain fits the same category. It's a simple soft-fork that introduces a stupid counter that miners can change.

Do you think people are using some bad methods to try to make Drivechain a reality? All I see -- and I'm doing myself -- is trying to convince people that Drivechain is a good idea, nothing more.

But then every day I read these comments that say: "this is contentious, therefore I'm against". How can the thing stop being contentious if just talking about an idea causes some people to automatically be against it?

Zeitgeist is total war, no?

Lots of informational war, next economic?, then hot war in an increasing number of places

https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/drivechain/

Just read this. Written 8 years ago. Wow. Why not bring sidechains into L1 and let them run on it essentially. Deep stuff.

🤯

I must be missing something. I don’t understand why people are getting upset. I’ve heard this proposal referred to as an attack on bitcoin.

It seems to be a group of private actors using the blockchain to pass messages to each other.

I don’t see any change to network incentives, or risk of transactions being censored, increase in data storage, or any other harm to the base chain.

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Interesting viewpoint. Two way pegging to another chain and the associated mining creates an additional attack surface.

Bitcoins security comes from its simplicity and minimized attack surfaces.

Nothing is stopping anyone from running a sidechain now or hard forking bitcoin to do drivechain.

I found this helpful…

https://blog.bitmex.com/drivechains/

Love to see these discussions on nostr. Who needs bitcoin twitter?

bitcoin is like the US constitution yes, just bottom-up