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This is an older post of his that lopp shared on X today. It struck me as a great way think through the positive dimensions of bitcoin.
He came up with a ~20 properties, but I'd guess there are more we can find, or at least variations of his properties. I also wonder if some of these properties are aren't seen as "key" as they were almost five years ago. For instance, one of his properties is "race condition avoidance" where he says:
This is another reason why transactions should not have dependencies on the system’s state; it can create race conditions and complexity when state changes during a blockchain reorganization.
IIRC he's come out in support, vaguely, of some of the soft forks proposals which more often than not introduce this kind of introspection (which is a fancy way of saying dependency on the system state). I may misunderstand, but I also think it's healthy for our view of bitcoin to evolve over time.
Anyway, it might be easier for us to answer: which properties are key to your use of bitcoin?
Censorship resistant (all participants are treated equally without fear or favour and adoption/use is voluntary), p2p payments, strictly limited issuance = MoE + SoV = good money.
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  • Decentralized ledger
  • PoW consensus
  • Finite supply
The trifecta.
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16 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 12 Jan
Security
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @ch0k1 12 Jan
I love every aspect of Bitcoin but my top Bitcoin properties which are also the incentives to own Bitcoin on the first place are:
  1. Security;
  2. Verifiability;
  3. Permissionless usage;
  4. Durability;
  5. Decentralization;
  6. Censorship resistance.
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For me, verifiability is the first thing I think of as it is a kind of meta-property of bitcoin in addition to being a feature or property of bitcoin. Meaning, I can verify all the properties that Lopp enumerates by reading the code and understanding the system design in addition to more tangible things like block difficulty/order and transaction validity.
Lopp addresses this in the open source section and touches on the asymmetry of verifying vs computing (aka proving), but I don't think bitcoin would be bitcoin without this which is why it's "key" to me.
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