bitcoin is hard money. it's provably able to achieve this property as is, today.

any update to the protocol has to justify itself in terms of what it's bringing or adding to the existing system. some do this by using perceived problems ("security budget", "inability to use fancy new lightning channels", "ability to make bets on future outcomes (DLCs)", "running out of blockspace, how do we scale?")

each of these justifications is based on a core value, which is rarely "hard money", as that usecase has already been solved.

currently there's no pressing justification for making changes to the chain. until there is, i think it's difficult to build consensus for a change.

(notably, taproot was fairly uncontroversial imo because it spoke to a value all bitcoiners wanted more of: less blockspace usage and more privacy.)

it works just fine today.

Any update or feature that could jeopardize these things, jeopardizes everything. Don't break something that works today because you're responding to a theoretical problem of tomorrow.

My steelman would be:

And then just wait.

That's the steelman but I don't agree with it.

Not really?.. :)

I think this argument is typically brought forward by newer entrants to Bitcoin (although not exclusively), and it might be because they’re simply impressed by bitcoin elegance and usefulness, and the impact it can have on their lives. As such they believe it already does all it would ever need to do. They’re also reinforced by tales about bitcoin’s codebase’s immutability, but of course those tales aren’t true, and bitcoin is upgrading all the time (just maybe not in the ways that would be most impactful).

There’s also another argument which is that upgrading bitcoin is risky and therefore shouldn’t be done. While I can understand that approach, it is not the same as saying that bitcoin doesn’t need new features… it might need them, but this cohort believes that even though they might be needed, we are too stupid to do them safely.