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This is exactly what altcoins have tried—and failed at—time and time again. If they just forked, changed a few things, and gave it a new name, fine. No problem. Even better, they could build something compatible with Bitcoin, like merge-mining or sidechains, which actually strengthens security instead of undermining it.

But they don’t do that. Instead, they try to change Bitcoin itself and hijack the brand, like Bcash did with its whole "this is the real Bitcoin" nonsense. And when that fails, they get aggressive, stir up division, and use social attacks—hiring influencers, running PR campaigns, and gaming sentiment to push their narrative. Drivechains tried something similar, leveraging social pressure rather than real demand.

The reality? If people actually wanted these features, they'd already be using them. We already have sidechains and other tools, but nobody cares. Instead of forcing Bitcoin to change, maybe just build your thing and see if anyone actually wants it.

Bitcoin doesn’t need rescuing—it needs people to see through the noise.

Jeroen Ubbink 10mo ago

I do not disagree on principle with what you say, yes naming something also bitcoin or anything similar is confusing for (new) people, but this is just the nature of bitcoin. The source is free and if people really want feature X or Y they should feel free to do so.

We can only speculate as to what bitcoin should or should not have. We can also be wrong about it. Nobody is perfect.

If you want to prevent people from creating new featuresets and you could do so you would actually become the dictator of bitcoin and i think that this will not work to anybody's benefit.

Do not forget that what we call bitcoin now has also diverged from what it was 16 years ago. For that matter we could also call the current bitcoin a fork.

I say: may the best solution win. Do not let yourself get distracted by narratives of what other people claim is bitcoin, instead try to focus on how you can better teach people yourself what they should be looking for in bitcoin.

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Discussion

Melvin Carvalho 10mo ago

I see what you're saying, but this misses a key point—Bitcoin isn’t just code, it’s a social contract. Hundreds of millions trust it as a store of value, whether or not that was the original intent. That trust is Bitcoin, and developers can’t ignore it.

Bitcoin’s network is extremely hard to attack, so the real attack vector is consensus—and the method of choice is divide and conquer. We’ve seen this before with BCH, and we see it now with soft fork pushes. If there were real demand for these changes, they could merge mine—but they don’t, because there isn’t.

We need to get better at spotting such attacks before they can do damage. Bitcoin stays strong because it’s stable, hard to change, and takes a conservative approach. But keeping it that way takes a bit of work. The longer we hold off attacks the better the track record, and stronger bitcoin becomes.