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we went from "Not your keys, not your coins", "remove your coins from all custodians immediately" and "never reuse an address" to "Wallet of Satoshi is great", "Pressure your exchange to accept Bitcoin on Liquid" and "Make all your UTXOs bigger than 1M sats, or even better, have all on a single UTXO because you might never be able to spend it" real quick, so now, the same people who were pitching self-custody, multiple keys and never resusing UTXOs, the same people who bashed cryptobros every time the federation who held the keys of their favorite layer 2 rug pulled everyone, and who said that Bitcoin would bank the unbanked, are now pivoting to recommending a trusted federation as the holder of their money until it becomes economically viable to move and are telling everyone that they'll never be able to use the trustless system, only trustees
This one resonates. I have a few concurrent thoughts:
  1. It's important that we don't get so attached to the name "Bitcoin" that we'll support anything related to Bitcoin even when it doesn't adhere to the principles of sound money and financial self sovereignty. In that sense, I am firmly against NFTs on bitcoin... bitcoin was not designed to be an arbitrary data storage system and shouldn't be used as such. There is an OP_RETURN size limit... so why can't we implement a limit on TX size if it looks clearly beyond that of a financial transaction, or simply eliminate the witness discount? I'm not so up to speed on all the technical details, so I'd love to hear some feedback on that thought.
  2. That being said, even if there were no ordinals, capacity is still going to be a problem in the long run. If the whole world is onboarded to bitcoin, it's going to be too expensive for the average person to use the base layer anyway, without some major change to bitcoin operating principles. Thus, L2 solutions are a requirement no matter what.
  3. I see two "optimistic" free market responses. For the ordinals, the optimistic free market response is that eventually these folks will run out bitcoin. Maybe they can use their fiat gains to buy more bitcoin, but they'll eventually run out of suckers to pawn their NFTs off to. For custodial L2 solutions, the free market response is that the base layer is still hard money. Thus, L2 providers will be like a competitive banking system with private issuance, as envisioned by hard money economist George Selgin. Yes, we will have to rely on trust, but the trust will be backed by verifiable reserves and competition from other issuers.
Food for thought. I have no idea how this all plays out.
The nuance for your #2 is that, in the long run, if the entire world was using it, and financial txns were filling up blocks alone, then Bitcoin would have enough users to sway popular opinion, and Bitcoin could grow.
But if a small number of people fill up blocks, the baby is at risk of being killed in its cradle.
I say we tune the software to handle one specific purpose and use case. Classic engineering fail is to try to solve to be everything to everyone.
Grep. Ls. Man. Cp. Rm. Mkdir. Cat. ...
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If we could improve fungibility without losing verifiability, Ordinals and Stamps would be done for. What enables them is the ability to track sats, all they need to do is to pretend the system uses a FIFO accounting system and that's it. Improving fungibility (we can copy the Monero guys) would solve most of this, a mempool war of trying to limit people to what they can or can't do with their money and the tools they have at their disposal is not the way, IMO.
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Monero-style privacy on L1 would trigger a big Operation Chokepoint. The reason governments are not targeting Monero is it's not nearly as big as Bitcoin.
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We don't need Monero style privacy per se, but we can copy some things.
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#1: this has always been my main criticism of maximalism, it doesn't matter if it all goes to shit, it doesn't matter if it destroys you financially, it doesn't matter if you have to trust a third party, all as ling as it's Bitcoin, it shouldn't be changed because Bitcoin is pristine, pure and perfect and everything going haywire is part of the plan, all banks are a scam except for the Bitcoin only banks. The problem with removing the segwit discount for any size of TX is that whenever you have a multiple ins TX, lets say, somebody has many small UTXOs and want's to spend them all in a single TX they would be astronomically fucked because of the size of their TX. Adding to that, if I'm not mistaken it's the discount itself what solves the transaction malleability bug, so I don't find it viable to remove the discount.
#2: L2s are a necessity, doesn't matter if the blocks are 1mb or 1 trillion yottabytes, but it's clear that either 1 mb doesn't cut it anymore, or that the way that the L2s have been developed is not the right way. If LN is rhe way forward, 1MB doesn't cut it anymore, and that's clear, I'm lucky that I opened my channels at less than 20 sats/vByte, but not everyone has had the same luck, and with those high fees, the people who would want to run their own nodes will to relay on LSPs with the ability to censor them while they, themselves pay for all the fees, or directly fall back into a bank, but a Bitcoin bank.
The other option is of course, the one that doesn't need a block increase to work, drivechains, but instead of people trying to improve the BIP to solve this issue once and for all, we've spent 7 years bashing it because it "bring shitcoins to Bitcoin", well, guess what, we already have them, we have had coloured coins since the beginning, we have BRC-20s, CBRC-20s, and lets not forget about Lightning Labs developing Taproot assets, or the fact that RGB has been on the works for a long time now, somehow, they get a free pass. But the trustless edition of shitcoinery, that needs to be 1:1 backed, doesn't, because it's better to have a grudge on the guy for listening to the BCash podcast than help improve the BIP and solve the issues that are there, middle ground can be found, but clearly, one side doesn't want to, and lamentably is that side the one hurting Bitcoin the most.
#3: I get it completely, Bitcoin is hard money, and I love it for that, but there are other emerging properties such as censorship resistance and actual ownership that are being priced out for most people. It started as an alternative to the banks but if we continue on this path of not letting it evolve, closing ourselv in an echo chamber and relegate decision making to "those who know better" who are actually doing nothing, we will have banks dominating it all over again, and it might not be hard money any longer.
Bitcoin is our tool to break the cycle of debt, there's more effort into making it easier to owe than to own.
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Thus, L2 providers will be like a competitive banking system with private issuance, as envisioned by hard money economist George Selgin
IIRC Hal Finney envisioned that too.
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He did! Maybe what the future holds is private or state issued currencies backed by Bitcoin.
Does anyone know what’s the problem with an elastic block size by the way? Was it that we wouldn’t have a large enough block anyway assuming the whole world was bitcoinized?
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