I definitely agree with the philosophy of moving slow without breaking things. Also, I believe that establishing circular economies with what we have now will do a lot more to replace central banks than covenants potentially can. My problem here is that Saylor is part of a camp that is obstructing the conversation entirely. We won't get to those two critical questions when people are conflating software engineers with lawyers. I can't speak for what Rusty is advocating for, so I'll read that up in the meantime

If people can’t use it in a self sovereign way and hold their own UTXOs Bitcoin isn’t going to replace anything. That’s the point

Nodes run the network... I appreciated bitcoin mechanics recent video where he laments that it is getting more to difficult to run a node (from the recent spam and utxo bloat)

Core devs do not control core. Everyone can see it, open PRs, review changes, and there are no automatic updates. They only control one GitHub repository. They cannot make anyone do anything.

Can you pls send a link to the talk?

Thanks for posting, this is the kind of discussion we need to see more of.

Bitcoin has a social contract to its user base. 10s of millions of people view it as a form of money that is better than what they have today. That could grow to 100s of millions. Nobody expected this when bitcoin was created, but that is a sign of incredible success. Protecting those users that have put their trust in bitcoin is obviously something we should do.

There's not really a huge apetite in bitcoin for smart contracts. I have a layer 2 smart contract system MVP working, and there's not a lot of interest in the topic. There is a huge amount of (mind-blowing) potential in using the current (U)TXO system which is completely unexplored. I'm deprioritizing any public roll out of smart contracts over bitcoin taproot and nostr, due to lack of interest. I will use them personally though. I know that this works, and it has been relatively unexplored. This area will get better over time.

Moral responsibilities are tricky things. Everything is evil from someone's perspective, or something's perspective. UTXOs are already powerful, and under utilized. How would you envision making them more powerful when the surface of what they can do has only been scratched?

Be aware that in any project, there are always two groups. One that wants change and one that wants the status quo. Bitcoin is unusual in the fact that stability of the protocol makes it more valuable. Conserving that protocol to date has been done very well, and hard fought, we had to fight 3 civil wars to get where we are today, and the market has responded positively to that.

The biggest threat to bitcoin is not a 51% attack, it's a chain split due to a fork or civil war. We have yet to have a successful 51% attack, and that's not to say it cant happen, but we have had chain splits. Chain splits are potentially fatal to bitcoin, so any protocol changes need to take that into account. It is also easy for bitcoin's enemies to agitate on this front, as we have seen recently and turn or frustrate well meening engineers to be frustrated enough to attack the system.

We do need better ways of discussing the protocol without it becoming dramatic. I still didnt get from your post how you think UTXOs could be made more powerful. Conversations like this are a good start!

Well said. Jihan Wu could not capture bitcoin. Saylor can't either. Not everyone believes it yet.

I’m not technical at all but my perspective is that if almost nobody can hold their own UTXOs then I don’t see how it’s much better than gold. It’s still digital and divisible but if you can’t really own it then aren’t you back to banks storing gold for you? We’re probably all in a position where that won’t apply to us but it’s supposed to fix the money for everybody.

I listened to the What Bitcoin Did Saylor podcast, and I really want to respond, though that may be unwise. But I want thoughtful, fearless content in my feed, so I should start making some, right?

Firstly, while analogies can provide useful guide rails for understanding, listening to people *arguing* using analogies makes you stupider. Debate the thing itself, not the words about the thing: it hurts my head to even think about doing this, so I won't.

Let's set my priors first: I assume we're talking about technically solid, well-vetted, backward compatible protocol changes: this is the minimum bar.

I don't wholesale agree with Saylor's "don't threaten anyone's investment" hard limit. This has happened multiple times in the past, from the dust limit breaking SatoshiDice, enabling Lightning threatening miner fees (real or not), and segwit breaking stealth ASICBoost. These interests can, and will, stand up for themselves and will compete against other benefits of changes.

To be explicit: I consider any protocol change which makes block space usage more efficient to be a win!

Obviously Saylor is invested in Bitcoin the asset, and can afford to do all his business onchain in any conceivable scenario. His projection of a Bitcoin world in which there are 100,000 companies and governments who use Bitcoin as the base layer is interesting:

1. This does not need "smart contracts", just signatures. By this model, Bitcoin Script was a mistake.

2. It can work if Bitcoin does not scale and is incredibly expensive to spend and hold. By this model, the consumer hardware wallet industry is a dead-end and needs to pivot to something else (nostr keys, ecash?)

3. You could do this with gold, today? Bitcoin here is simply an incremental, not fundamental, improvement. I think this is suggestive, though: that such a network would not be long-term stable, and very much subject to capture.

4. In this view, Saylor is simply a gold bug with first mover advantage, shilling his bags. That's fine, but it's important to understand people's motivations.

5. This vision does not excite me. I wouldn't have left Linux development to work on making B2B commerce more efficient. I wouldn't get up at 5:30am for spec calls, and I sure as hell wouldn't be working this cheap.

I believe we can make people's UTXOs more powerful, and thus feel a moral responsibility to do so. This gives them more control over their own money, and allows more people to share that control. I assume that more people will do good things than stupid things, because assuming the other way implies that someone should be able to stop them, and that's usually worse.

I believe the result will be a more stable, thus useful, Bitcoin network. I am aware that this will certainly benefit people with very different motivations than me (Saylor).

Thanks for reading, and sorry for the length!

The two things that irked me was the misunderstanding around soft forks and the constant comparison of our engineering with aircraft engineering. Aircrafts have an intense maintenance schedule, last 30 years, and have a long supply chain. Things that don't translate well to what we do.

I also got the impression that the past soft forks were apparently in the disinterest of miners, when in truth miners were often fighting users over increasing the block size. The idea that past miner expectation has to be fulfilled at any cost seems bad too. There is no single expectation and it is not clear which point in time we should take to measure this expectation. I get the feeling that the whole argument seemingly caters to the big public mining companies. But we already have soft fork activation mechanisms for them to express their opinions, so the whole line of arguments feels like a straw man for what you already pointed out as a 'gold bug' vision.

Cash on the internet is my goal and this seems to be running against it a bit.

You’re making it sound like we don’t change the core protocol. We already did this with segwit and taproot. Taproot enables safer ways to soft fork script versions. script was gimped from its original version, we can leave that broken or we can continue to fix broken things so that we can make onchain more efficient for L2 protocols.

I never understood why people are against efficiency gains and fixing broken things. If you are against that you should try to run older versions and see if you can even sync the chain.

Rusty is not proposing anything crazy, it’s simply restoring the original opcodes that satoshi added, in a safe way.

The rush is to make it usable in a high fee environment, not to enable eth use cases. The risk of not changing it is high if L2s break and L1s are too expensive to use.

Just finished listening to the Saylor/WBD interview, and I find myself more compelled by his argument than I expected.