709 sats \ 4 replies \ @psztorc 29 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: Stacker News Roundtable #1 - Building on Bitcoin, Bitcoin Culture, and More bitcoin
I think it isn't the attraction -- its the repulsion.
A brilliant developer wants to build. They would love nothing more, than the ability to create something beautiful, from scratch. That's actually the problem with the best devs -- they insist on doing everything themselves. They hate working with code that they don't understand; and for them writing code takes about as long as reading it anyway (or so they think).
So, in order to attract the greatest builders to a project, they need nothing more or less than complete freedom to do whatever they like. This is exactly what Bip300 allows -- users can change anything about the blockchain that they like: the blocksize, the dependencies, even the programming language. All they need to do is follow the Bip300 rules, and coins will travel back and forth between their project and L1 Bitcoin.
To facilitate this, we have minimal sidechains released. They work perfectly but they don't do anything. The idea is a developer will fork them and add whatever they like.
I think it isn't the attraction -- its the repulsion.
Repulsion to the stasis of the bitcoin protocol?
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It is very unlikely that a new genius developer, would know how to navigate the political landscape.
They would probably come in and redo everything from scratch -- everyone would tell them to get lost, and they would. This is what happened to Vitalik for example https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=431513.0 even though he was a longtime writer for Bitcoin Magazine.
I am not a believer in Vitalik's idea -- but no one serious tried to help him implement it on Bitcoin. So it is with many Bitcoin ideas.
Building on Bitcoin, or even getting new Bitcoin merchant adoption, has fallen out of favor.
You will get support if you "build on lightning" but that is frankly part of the problem -- it reduces creativity by funneling people all into one narrow sub-field of Bitcoin.
It isn't True Creativity unless your invention will put dozens of other people out of a job.
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They would probably come in and redo everything from scratch -- everyone would tell them to get lost, and they would.
This rings so true! In this framing, bip300 is an outlet for those people and it would seem beneficial to provide an outlet for them.
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