I was asked to talk about bitcoin’s “purpose” and “philosophy”.

From 1-10 how much do you agree with my answer?

I don’t believe that we can pinpoint or attach a specific philosophy or belief to bitcoin because there are way too many participants in this non hierarchical-ish system. I do think that there are distinct development cultures, conservative and liberal, but I tend to rely more on the POSIWID principle, The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. Which means that the system might evolve to uncouple from the intentions of its founders and advocates. I say that because bitcoin might deviate from the expectations of some of its participants at some point. Currently, bitcoin offers easily-auditable sound money that can be settled on an open immutable censorship-resistant ledger, and sovereign self-custodial accounts. However, as the network scales globally we might face real trade-offs. The liberal school says that bitcoin and lightning cannot currently accommodate the transactions of everyone everywhere in the world in a decentralized and self-sovereign manner without carefully thought out improvements to the protocol. And the conservative/Austrian school which does not prefer to make any upgrade in order to preserve bitcoin’s monetary ‏properties except in cases of emergency (i.e the discovery of a fatal bug that could inflate the supply), and they support the idea of centralisation on the second and third layers of Bitcoin (Bitcoin banking). In their view, Bitcoin banking networks (Lightning Network banks, Liquid, Fedements) do not compete with the Bitcoin mainnet rather they compete with the second layer solutions of inferior monies (fiat banks, Ethereum’s layer 2, SWIFT). But of course, in this case, many users will lose the ability to resist censorship and confiscation.