It makes you think, or at least it should. If btc is useful, it's bc of these sacrifices it made in its design; so then building something on top of something useful is hard, but if you can do it, that thing will also be useful.

Solana and other centralized chains are not useful in the same way that btc is useful -- they violate the principles around decentralization in service of the things that that's in service of, so if they're useful, it must be in some other way that is not clear to me. Even if you can build way more apps on top of it, you've built it on a foundation that may not have any real purpose to exist.

Except! If you build stuff that is so useful that it gives the underlying a reason to exist. In this case: exactly how decentralized, and in what aspects of decentralization, must the underlying be, to usefully support the app built on top of it? Btc goes as far as you can go. But do you always have to go that far? If the btc ecosystem is pure in a way that Solana is not, is it clear that such purity is required for all use cases?

I am very confused by many things in life, but one thing I don't think that I'm confused about is that there will be a gradient of these tradeoffs that prove useful, as demonstrated by their continuing existence in the real world. I know btc is useful and will stay useful. I don't know how true that is for other things, but I'm convinced there will be more than zero of them kicking around a decade from now.

If it was easy, it wouldn't be funny 🤠