It is very unlikely that a new genius developer, would know how to navigate the political landscape.

They would probably come in and redo everything from scratch -- everyone would tell them to get lost, and they would. This is what happened to Vitalik for example https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=431513.0 even though he was a longtime writer for Bitcoin Magazine.

I am not a believer in Vitalik's idea -- but no one serious tried to help him implement it on Bitcoin. So it is with many Bitcoin ideas.

Building on Bitcoin, or even getting new Bitcoin merchant adoption, has fallen out of favor.

You will get support if you "build on lightning" but that is frankly part of the problem -- it reduces creativity by funneling people all into one narrow sub-field of Bitcoin.

It isn't True Creativity unless your invention will put dozens of other people out of a job.

Ironically, we are today making the same mistake the largeblockers did.

The problem with LargeBlockism was that, eventually, a node becomes too expensive, people don't run nodes, and then you are just left with Bitcoin as an inefficient version of VISA / WeChatPay.

Today, we have many users of "custodial" lightning. Custodial = infinite blocksize node. We also have non-cypherpunk leaders, who do not care about privacy. A non-private node = an infinite blocksize node.

We also have people who address the "node problem" via shame. That won't work.

What we should do is:

I have actually already done all these things, so we could do all of this tomorrow. Instead, however, we are focused on the opinion of tradfi , etf , various laws, etc.

We must be focused on the user experience, of course.

We are too reliant on shame / guilt / cancelling people. We should instead be like those churches, that go out of their way to welcome people.

Also we should focus on building things people use. Consider this --

https://github.com/LayerTwo-Labs/testchain https://github.com/LayerTwo-Labs/ddk https://github.com/nchashch/plain

Adoption is important, isn't it!

My answer is... Coinbase.

Sure we all love to hate Coinbase, But "the rich get richer" as they say. A big company, with a big brand, and a big twitter account -- they advertise, they lobby in Congress. While everyone is out there tawking about nothing. Coinbase is making money. So every year my answer would probably be Coinbase.

If it isn't Coinbase, it would be one of those companies I see when I land in the Swiss Airport. Anyone who advertises. Those people are serious about adoption, and the rest of us are just larping. This is the tragedy of losing BitPay during the blocksize war -- getting that little Sticker on every payment terminal would have been Bitcoin's #1 biggest win. Instead that plan lies in shambles.

Clearly, the ordinals people gave us a big bump in actual node-running users. So they deserve special mention since node-runners are the truest Users of Bitcoin.

My steelman would be:

And then just wait.

That's the steelman but I don't agree with it.

I think it isn't the attraction -- its the repulsion.

A brilliant developer wants to build. They would love nothing more, than the ability to create something beautiful, from scratch. That's actually the problem with the best devs -- they insist on doing everything themselves. They hate working with code that they don't understand; and for them writing code takes about as long as reading it anyway (or so they think).

So, in order to attract the greatest builders to a project, they need nothing more or less than complete freedom to do whatever they like. This is exactly what Bip300 allows -- users can change anything about the blockchain that they like: the blocksize, the dependencies, even the programming language. All they need to do is follow the Bip300 rules, and coins will travel back and forth between their project and L1 Bitcoin.

To facilitate this, we have minimal sidechains released. They work perfectly but they don't do anything. The idea is a developer will fork them and add whatever they like.

No, Bitcoin's success is not inevitable.

But --more importantly-- imagine if it WERE inevitable. Well, then: things will go pretty well for us! There's no point in discussing anything on Stacker News. We've already won. Nothing can screw us up, apparently. So just kick back and relax! In particular, you should kick back and relax, and NOT worry about the naysayers who think that Bitcoin's success is in jeopardy. ... Therefore, whether you think Bitcoin's success is inevitable or not, you should behave as though it isn't. Or you should just kind of do nothing, or go for a walk. Or take up the violin.

Humans are prone to overconfidence. Consider the famous Fall of Rome and also the sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic. Personally, my favorite example is Star Wars Episode 1 -- if you watch behind-the-scenes footage, you see that people are afraid to contradict the great George Lucas, even though his ideas are terrible. During 2017 I noticed the same thing, particularly with taproot and Bech32 which were absolutely horrendous ideas that everyone in the community was terrified of speaking out against.

I am also fan of documentaries where people accidentally find themselves in cults, such as "behind the curve" which is about flat-earthers. They sincerely believe that flat earth will be taught alongside globe earth "any day now".

I can give you some hard examples, in fact, of the success faltering. One is the Lightning Network itself, which has become a sacred cow. It is possible to improve the LN over time, but only if experts are allowed to discuss problems -- so that we can work together to solve them. But that is exactly what is not happening (in my opinion). The brave souls working on LN have tried to discuss the "limitations" . I have many LN dev friends who complain to me in private how difficult it is to accomplish this very task -- believe me or not as you will. One is an ultra-famous LN dev who actually was disinvited from a Bitcoin conference because he wanted to speak "honestly" about LN. This is debt that must be repaid with interest.

The best way to ensure Bitcoin's success is --sorry to say-- my own idea of Bip300. If the underlying blockchain software can compete fairly --without the stigma of a new coin; nor the need to traverse the political L1 dev "process"-- then we would see more innovation and less politics. Devs would compete for users. We would have had BIP 118 and 119 on a drivechain many years ago, probably 2019 at least. Which would mean eltoo and ARK would probably already be in widespread use today. In fact we would probably already be moving on to the next thing. Instead, we have to wait for the bikeshedding around covenants to stop -- that is probably 3 years away. Big mistake, and all for no benefit.