Lot's of people seem frustrated with Bitcoin most of the time. They want lots of changes and to add little nice features. At the moment I don't see any issues with how Bitcoin works, but there was a post recently saying how the spam has changed the incentives and therefore undermined the monetary use case. Sounds pretty fragile to me.
Bitcoin actively benefits from chaos or stress. It should be someone's full time job to attack it (someone better than the government).
This disorder has brought up conversations about changes to Bitcoin with Drivechains and Covenants. It has also brought about discovery of BitVM and ecash (permission-less developments), almost as if in retaliation to the drastic change proposals.
anyway, interested to know your thoughts...
Bitcoin can most definitely be broken by soft forks. Rigorous testing of use cases is required. Do we really need some of these features? Bitcoin is working fine as is, and new changes to the base layer will inevitably carry risks.
As you point out, we are still discovering new possibilities with the current base layer now. Imo, we should indeed try to find vulnerabilities (and possibly fix them) before a gov does. But the fix should not be worse than the problem.
E.g. Ordinals might not be exploited now, but they might become an issue later (gov subsidizing spam-only blocks). It's good that we are aware of these attack vectors.
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Are white hat efforts not typical in IT security circles?
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