An excessive amount of of this house, and issues being constructed round it, is centered round basically mimicking the legacy monetary system. There’s not a lot being constructed attempting to blaze new grounds. Micropayments, whereas admittedly one thing I’ve been very vital of as a result of consumer expertise of getting to consider tiny transactions all day, has seen nearly no actual experimentation or improvement in attempting to resolve that UX downside at scale.
I wrestle to consider any software that’s really modern. Sure, issues like crowdfunding or micropayments in video games take away a central level of management that can be utilized to censor use instances of those functions, however they’re nonetheless reinventing the wheel. Quite a few initiatives are centered on collateralizing fiat or stablecoin loans with Bitcoin, greenback fee rails on Bitcoin, and so on. These are essential functions to construct if Bitcoin is for use in commerce, that’s past a doubt, however they aren’t issues which are solely doable on Bitcoin.
In some instances this has implications for the general community and protocol if adopted via to its excessive. Within the case of Bitcoin collateralized greenback loans, for instance, it’s inescapable that these items interface with the legacy system. This provides these techniques some extent of management over these functions, and (proportional to how a lot exercise on Bitcoin they make up) Bitcoin itself.
Consensus on Bitcoin isn’t ruled by voting, it’s ruled by participation. That’s,. these actors that truly obtain bitcoin in financial exercise, and those that transact and generate income for miners. In the event you aren’t doing certainly one of these two issues, your node has no affect on community consensus, particularly in the course of the occasion of a chainsplit or contentious fork. That’s simply the chilly actuality. Bitcoiners specializing in constructing functions that leverage or interface with the legacy system are simply giving the system we try to flee a bar wedged into Bitcoin the legacy system can use to leverage towards it.
It’s silly, brief sighted, and a serious tactical error.
The trail ahead is to concentrate on sustainable functions that don’t require that interface, that may perform completely independently of the legacy system, whereas nonetheless producing income for miners and software customers and operators. That is the one approach ahead when it comes to encouraging Bitcoin adoption with out slowly ceding increasingly affect over the community and protocol to the precise sorts of gamers we got down to escape within the first place.
To actually thrive exterior of the prevailing system, we’d like markets for digital items, for providers, for actual merchandise, for brand new sorts of functions that legacy gamers received’t or can’t clone and monopolize for Bitcoin.
