More than ever, we can’t let Bitcoin drift into the control of a few big companies. Once Bitcoin development turns into huge orgs with oversized teams, engineers each owning some tiny slice of a giant internal subsystem, the whole thing loses what made it powerful in the first place. Bitcoin must stay something individuals can run, understand, build, and compete on. View quoted note →

Complexity and hardware requirements are the biggest obstacles for decentralized Bitcoin and its adoption. We have far better hardware today, especially on mobile than we did in 2009. We should be able to compress the complexity away. If all this progress still can’t make running Bitcoin more accessible, something is fundamentally wrong. THE BIGGEST GOAL of Bitcoin development should always be accessibility: lowering hardware requirements, lowering developer requirements, and making it easy for more people to build their own clients. If we keep prioritizing "doing 'cool' things on Bitcoin" over the fundamentals, running a node will keep getting harder. Building a Bitcoin client will become unrealistic for individual developers. That is unacceptable. And I’ll stand on this hill until the last fight against unnecessary complexity. WE CANNOT GIVE UP on Bitcoin being something individuals can run. WE CANNOT GIVE UP on Bitcoin clients being something individuals can build competitively. We cannot let Bitcoin drift into another academic experiment with no realworld accessibility. Everybody should be able to run a full Bitcoin node on their phone without thinking about it. Everybody should be able to build a full client without complexity crushing them. It should be as easy as building a web app. As easy as installing an app and actually using it meaningfully. Public APIs should not be the default.