It’s not about shitcoins.

How do you know why OP_CAT was removed?

As an engineer, do you think it’s a good idea to enable powerful technology IN THE BASE CHAIN that has few known limits so essentially nobody knows how it could be abused?

Satoshi’s design philosophy was clearly to limit functionality to keep the system simple and safe. He made the system robust by deliberately removing codes that might increase the attack surface of the network.

It’s not appropriate to apply start up thinking - move fast and break things - to the core system protecting the world’s money and our hope for the future.

If you’re wrong, and it somehow disrupts the underlying incentives that underpin everything … how easy is it to undo it? We can’t, can we?

How I see it:

+ Devs are humans. Even the smartest among us are not omniscient and make mistakes (eg witness discount).

+ All code has bugs. Even if the code is technically bug free, it can still change the complex incentives that make the network work.

+ We don’t have a scaling problem yet. When we do have one in the future, we should allow the pain of it to motivate innovation on upper layers so that we can avoid any unnecessary changes to the base protocol.

+ We should only allow changes to the base protocol that safely fix an existential problem that we know cannot be fixed in any other way.

+ The Bitcoin network is for many, many future generations. We need to think long term and not rush out changes to the core protocol. A decade or two to consider options is a blink of an eye in the life of the network.