1891 sats \ 16 replies \ @sn OP 29 Sep 2023 \ on: Stacker News Roundtable #1 - Building on Bitcoin, Bitcoin Culture, and More bitcoin
Question #1: Is Bitcoin's success inevitable? If not, what needs to be built to ensure success?
I think the concept of bitcoin being inevitable is relatively new. Sure, some people used to say that early on too, but that notion got much more popular and the last few years.
In reality, most generations of bitcoiners believed that some things need to be done in order for it to succeed. “Things” in all walks of life, but our topic here is building so I’ll focus on that.
Lightning for example, couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t soft forked bitcoin THREE times first in order to enable it (CLTV, CSV, SegWit). People forget that, but it was never the case that you don’t upgrade bitcoin to enable new things!
I don’t think anyone can tell us “what needs to be built”; the only way to find out is for people to build whatever crazy things they want, and see how the market reacts.
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the only way to find out is for people to build whatever crazy things they want, and see how the market reacts.
how do you square this idea with the concern that making changes to bitcoin could irreparably harm bitcoin?
do you have any frameworks for thinking about the trade-offs of enabling experimentation vs. preventing unforced errors on the base layer?
the two ideas seem to be at odds with each other
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I definitely prefer the type of experimentation that DOES NOT require changing bitcoin. Like ordinals. Personally I intend to focus most on my time on that type of experimentation, but not all of it. At some point I think that some potential changes reveal themselves as worthwhile and they should be pursued.
I think bitcoin itself should be changed slowly, carefully and meticulously, but that’s not the same as not being changed at all, or being afraid to change it, which I think it a more precise description of what’s going on recently.
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I've been doing more reading lately about the topic of "digital preservation" and one topic that comes up is how in any long running digital system, there is not point of "having preserved digital content", instead it's an endless task of "continuing to preserve" digital artifacts.
In the same way, I don't think you can say Bitcoin will ever "be a success". Rather, I'd say that it's "currently successful".
How can we ensure bitcoin's continued success?
Not to shill Base58 but to totally shill, I really think that if we're not taking the time to build good information about how bitcoin works, the protocols that it's built on, and making them really easy to access and find information about how the protocol works, we risk atrophying as an ecosystem over the next 10, 20, 50 years. It's important to me that people are able to really understand bitcoin, because without that understanding you lose some capacity to stay self-sovereign and decentralized.
I think all the work every bitcoin educator is doing of teaching people how to hold their own coins, how to run a node, how to look at mempool.space and understand what they're seeing -- this is all really important for bitcoin's continued success. :)
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thought it'd be fun to outline why i think bitcoin is successful:
- I can use it to transact with people and vendors anywhere in the world
- I sell people things using bitcoin
- At conferences, I can buy a coffee with bitcoin on lightning and it works
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I will like to wean my dependence off fiat and live the Bitcoin Standard. But bills and retirement funds are paid in fiat. How would you advise me to break the shackles of this fiat system?
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there is not point of "having preserved digital content", instead it's an endless task of "continuing to preserve" digital artifacts.
I'm reading this as "there's no point, but let's do it forever." I suspect it means digital artifacts need to be regularly re-preserved. Is that right?
One sadness programming brings me is that programs tend to "decay" because the environment they run in grows/changes so fast. Decay is relative in this way.
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there's no moment when you can declare "success" and consider the job done.
digital preservation is an ongoing, eternal process. I think that keeping bitcoin successful is similar, it's something that's worked on every day etc.
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Makes perfect sense.
Do you have any recommended reading on digital preservation?
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I'm currently reading this guy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1421426978?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
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No, Bitcoin's success is not inevitable.
But --more importantly-- imagine if it WERE inevitable. Well, then: things will go pretty well for us! There's no point in discussing anything on Stacker News. We've already won. Nothing can screw us up, apparently. So just kick back and relax! In particular, you should kick back and relax, and NOT worry about the naysayers who think that Bitcoin's success is in jeopardy. ... Therefore, whether you think Bitcoin's success is inevitable or not, you should behave as though it isn't. Or you should just kind of do nothing, or go for a walk. Or take up the violin.
Humans are prone to overconfidence. Consider the famous Fall of Rome and also the sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic. Personally, my favorite example is Star Wars Episode 1 -- if you watch behind-the-scenes footage, you see that people are afraid to contradict the great George Lucas, even though his ideas are terrible. During 2017 I noticed the same thing, particularly with taproot and Bech32 which were absolutely horrendous ideas that everyone in the community was terrified of speaking out against.
I am also fan of documentaries where people accidentally find themselves in cults, such as "behind the curve" which is about flat-earthers. They sincerely believe that flat earth will be taught alongside globe earth "any day now".
I can give you some hard examples, in fact, of the success faltering. One is the Lightning Network itself, which has become a sacred cow. It is possible to improve the LN over time, but only if experts are allowed to discuss problems -- so that we can work together to solve them. But that is exactly what is not happening (in my opinion). The brave souls working on LN have tried to discuss the "limitations" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjFjK-f9ts0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnG5H62I7Ko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCWTTY1eDoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EocWax43QgQ . I have many LN dev friends who complain to me in private how difficult it is to accomplish this very task -- believe me or not as you will. One is an ultra-famous LN dev who actually was disinvited from a Bitcoin conference because he wanted to speak "honestly" about LN. This is debt that must be repaid with interest.
The best way to ensure Bitcoin's success is --sorry to say-- my own idea of Bip300. If the underlying blockchain software can compete fairly --without the stigma of a new coin; nor the need to traverse the political L1 dev "process"-- then we would see more innovation and less politics. Devs would compete for users. We would have had BIP 118 and 119 on a drivechain many years ago, probably 2019 at least. Which would mean eltoo and ARK would probably already be in widespread use today. In fact we would probably already be moving on to the next thing. Instead, we have to wait for the bikeshedding around covenants to stop -- that is probably 3 years away. Big mistake, and all for no benefit.
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- Bitcoin has already succeeded at proving out a viable non-state money today.
- Bitcoin will face many new challenges ahead (tradfi manipulation, 2106), as well as old challenges that reemerge (fork wars, security budget, state aggression)-- so we'll see if success continues.
- Building better on/off ramps and putting bitcoin closer to people that need it and those that don't know they need it only harden/accelerate bitcoin's success.
- The idea that we 'need to build x' for bitcoin to succeed, whether that be ordinals (muh security budget!), on-ramps (muh mass adoption!), etc are typically marketing plays that overstate a problem or create a problem themselves.
- The only things that 'need' to be built are things that make trading, holding and mining bitcoin more anti-fragile such as mining decentralization, self custody and p2p exchange. These are the things that will enable bitcoin to survive the most bearish and antagonistic of times.
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The idea that we 'need to build x' for bitcoin to succeed, whether that be ordinals (muh security budget!)
fwiw, on my end i don’t recall seeing many people in ordinals claiming that ordinals “need to be built for bitcoin to succeed / for the security budget”.
we’ve certainly made the point many times that ordinals benefit the security budget, so they have a positive influence, but personally I’d never claim that that’s why they “need to be built”.
they’re being built because there’s MARKET DEMAND for them, people like them and enjoy using them. that’s the only reason.
i actually agree with you that there isn’t one thing that “needs to be built”, what we “need” is to encourage experimentation, so that eventually we can find more things like ordinals that have product-market fit and also happen to be beneficial to bitcoin systemically.
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they’re being built because there’s MARKET DEMAND
Of course, that's why you and I are both marketing towards different demands we see in the market. Yet, it's still just marketing and not related to what 'bitcoin needs.'
I think the difference is whether you think bitcoin needs either of us to market these demands to succeed. Marketing towards any and all demands may help accelerate bitcoin's success, but it could also accelerate it's failure.
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I think the difference is whether you think bitcoin needs either of us to market these demands to succeed.
I suspect we both agree that it doesn’t.
What I believe that bitcoin needs is people experimenting, so that they can reveal new usecases for it that may find product-market fit and help bitcoin grow. If that doesn’t happen, there won’t be new ways for it to grow, and I do believe that new avenues for growth are necessary.
Once those avenues are found, sure, marketers will pop up like mushrooms, and I don’t think marketers like us are particularly systematically important ;)
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The only things that 'need' to be built are things that make trading, holding and mining bitcoin more anti-fragile such as mining decentralization, self custody and p2p exchange.
Great list of feature fundamentals!
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