1-- Agreed. I usually get pretty excited in technical developments in Bitcoin, but mostly small ones that do get implemented. 2-- I thought the demand for scaling transactions was implicit. Layer 1 doesn't scale, and Lightning doesn't scale well enough. As for Liquid, if others are like me, the reason Liquid doesn't get used is because of the federation model with a single company being the single trusted entity for failure (Blockstream). 3-- Totally agree. 4-- I have never owned or used Ethereum, but I'm sure there are a ton of good devs there. Spiderchain doesn't at all use Eth, so I'm not sure what the real problem is. I know some people left Bitcoin for Ethereum; it would be super if some of them came back and could contribute to a project on Bitcoin using the skills they gained on "the dark side" ( no offense, @DarthCoin ).