Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

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.

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.

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