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.

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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.

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