#bitcoin doesnt need a soft fork. The current feature set is barely used. Especially when combined with nostr. The bigger danger of a contentious fork, which some are pushing for, incluing some "celbrities", is another civil war, which leads to a chan split. Even the perception of a civil war will be bad for bitcoin.
bitcoin needs privacy
#bitcoin doesnt need a soft fork. Bitcoin has quite a lot of privacy built in. Much more than its fiat competitors. Privacy solutions can be explored without a soft fork. For example, with merge mining. Or privacy can be done at the nostr layer. But there is not much appetite for this, so far.
people usually don't value privacy until things get really really ugly in the real world. and by then its often too late because the panopticon has been built.
notice that essentially the only 'crypto' tools the state went after were privacy preserving ones (samurai and tornado cash) and monero has been banned from most exchanges.
they can see everything and fighting against that is a sin to the state.
Theres no privacy on a transparent ledger.
Bitcoin is in this position because Core has squatted on it for years.
the solution isnt to just do nothing.
Which is why Monero is being used.
To me a fork is just the most peaceful way of resolving a disagreement. If i want to split and create my own jeroencoin i can do so. I think you are right about the featureset for sure but there is no easier way to explain this to others by having them fork and fail. You do not learn to walk by somebody telling you how to do it.
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.
You mean Bitcoin forks right? There is some good (and longstanding) alternative currencies out there but yes, anything that has "Bitcoin" in it's name or worse, just exists as a smart contract, is crap.
Yep, 99.9% of altcoins are just premined scams, designed to enrich the founders. Bitcoin stands apart because it’s the most widely distributed, with no rigged distribution or insider advantage—just a free market for value.
If people want to build something new—markets, contracts, whatever—great! The tools exist. But don’t hijack Bitcoin’s name or brand to sell a scam. We’ve seen that play out time and time again.
That said, altcoins have done us a favor—by attracting most of the dishonest actors away from Bitcoin. Not all of them, but a good chunk. And honestly? That’s fine with me.
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.
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.
I would love seeing wall street ending up on a shorter chain.
Wall Street is the least likely to fork—their priority is preserving monetary value. The incentives naturally push them toward the longer chain, reinforcing Bitcoin’s security and stability—which, of course, is a good thing.
The bigger risk comes from disaffected developers—a reality in every FOSS project—who see an opportunity to make a name for themselves by adding their "must-have" feature to "save" Bitcoin. And the problem? It’s all too easy for them to be swayed, whether by ideology, incentives, or external influence.
