Question for the "do not break Bitcoin" crowd: would you be in favor of fixing Bitcoin if it is half-broken or is that too dangerous? And what is the criteria for recognizing it is broken?
Discussion
I think the only two things that could break Bitcoin is to centralise it, or mess with the supply.
Once that happens, there's no going back.
Ordinals, side-chains, etc are all just distractions, farts in a teacup.
Is bitcoin on the path to defunding the state? Is the money printer destined for destruction? Everything flows from that imperative
Great Consensus Clean Up would be good. We also have to fix the UNIX timestamp 2106 bug. So those are at least two.
It is broken not when some guy somewhere says "it's broken"
It is broken when it is obvious. For example. Value overflow incident. Or if millions of wallets suddenly start magically moving and everyone is freaking out.
When bitcoin is broken you will know. It will be clear. It will not be debatable.
Except that few days agou fees were upwards of $70. That is the broken part.
Only if you’re new and uses Gmail
Alright. Let's say that you want to get into bitcoin. You just learnt about what it does an you wan to use it the proper way. So you go to the local Bitcoin ATM and put $100 in it thinking that you will get $100 (or at least $90 after the ATM's fees) in BTC. Later that day you check your self custodial wallet and you see that you only got $25. You are very confused. You look around and find that the fees are extremely high and most transactions are not worth it right now. What you also find is that "amazing" system called the Lightning network that is made for the sole purpose of making the Bitcoin transactions cheaper. Alright cool you still aren't discouraged by the fees so you decide to start a node. While researching on how a Lightning node works and how to start one you find that there are at least two transactions involved. That means that you'll need to lose at least $140 to not lose more. This is when you get mad and decide that Bitcoin isn't your thing so you quit.
Oh, but you'll use custodial wallet while waiting for the fees to get low. No, this breaks the purpose of Bitcoin.
Oh, but can't you just wait a week or twot to see that fees lower? No, the economy doesn't have a week or two.
Bu... But that only happens once every 4 years. No, fees were sky high (still not as much compared to a few days ago) at the beginning of last year.
TL;DR is don't make Bitcoin hard to get in for newbies if you want adoption.
PS: I self host my own email server, a Lightning node and a bunch of other things.
Fixing bitcoin is not dangerous although saying half-broken is not exact (to some degree, perhaps).
These are the magic questions. My layman's answers are (1) yes in favor, no, not too dangerous because half-broken is broken, and (2) when enough hash power decides it's broken so as to change it, then it's broken. My layman's thoughts are: test things like OP_CAT for years, then activate it. Maybe.
Merge PR 29778
Now censored by the fascist nazis at Bitcoin Core -- what are they afraid of!!??
Obviously, we need to take a conservative approach. If it is half broken I am only in favor of half fixes.
When people put their life-savings into Bitcoin, I will assume that they will react if it *is broken* and not react if it *isn't broken*. If you don't see a mass reaction, it probably isn't broke.
Modifying it is risky, but there's no reason to believe that not touching it is less risky - the world is changing, we can't just cross our fingers and hope that Bitcoin won't be affected.
let me check with Saylor... 😂
Not part of that crowd, but if you might indulge an answer, the second Question is the most interesting to me.
If the problem Bitcoin was created to fix, or at least provide an alternative to, still exists; what does that best ? One signal would be cypherpunks of the time that have not wavered, increasingly adopting and promoting something else, or pointing out where bitcoin is diverging, and they being ignored or silenced. Another is the freeist of markets with similar constraints doing so.
If Bitcoin follows other trends that emerge in the study of the rise and fall of organizations, things like leadership, culture, adaptability all have some contribution, despite the corporate jargon.
Does and is, Bitcoin continueing in the spirit of the culture that SURROUNDED the whitepaper, if not the technical aspects of the paper itself.
Satoshi was just one voice in a chorus trying to articulate physical freedom by digital means.
We need privacy on base layer..
#Sats are for private people
#Bitcoin is for public entities who you must track ..
If Bitcoin is a design for next 10 k years - fifteen years are for a prototype..
Every single developer will “discover” bitcoin and before understanding it’s fundamentals will start purposing solutions. Everybody want profit from bitcoin momentum but the previous momentum will fight back.
Calle is doing great because he’s using bitcoin as it’s without losing energy trying to change it. You want do something new? Start with a new layer after ossification it sure becomes a bip
Eric has some good insights on this regarding alternative implementations at 00:29:47
https://www.youtube.com/live/DRTw3sFlKqU?si=UWzmtvD2HKTsO6SE&t=1787
CUSF fixes this.
What's CUSF
re: upcoming Libbitcoin V4 release
This guy Eric Voskuil is writing correct things, but he misses the only available solution that is BIP-300.
I can't find this tweet. How did he do this? I don't believe that he did it. Did he? Using what software?
He's using Libbitcoin, it's an alt-implementation maintained since 2011.
https://twitter.com/evoskuil/status/1784765202078056528
Here's the dev slack:
I haven't personally verified the performance, but the devs regularly share perf. results on the slack
I joined the Slack, but I don't get the numbers.
Have you seen this? https://blog.lopp.net/2023-bitcoin-node-performance-tests/
The libbitcoin wiki is a wealth of knowledge