I listened to the What Bitcoin Did Saylor podcast, and I really want to respond, though that may be unwise. But I want thoughtful, fearless content in my feed, so I should start making some, right?
Firstly, while analogies can provide useful guide rails for understanding, listening to people *arguing* using analogies makes you stupider. Debate the thing itself, not the words about the thing: it hurts my head to even think about doing this, so I won't.
Let's set my priors first: I assume we're talking about technically solid, well-vetted, backward compatible protocol changes: this is the minimum bar.
I don't wholesale agree with Saylor's "don't threaten anyone's investment" hard limit. This has happened multiple times in the past, from the dust limit breaking SatoshiDice, enabling Lightning threatening miner fees (real or not), and segwit breaking stealth ASICBoost. These interests can, and will, stand up for themselves and will compete against other benefits of changes.
To be explicit: I consider any protocol change which makes block space usage more efficient to be a win!
Obviously Saylor is invested in Bitcoin the asset, and can afford to do all his business onchain in any conceivable scenario. His projection of a Bitcoin world in which there are 100,000 companies and governments who use Bitcoin as the base layer is interesting:
1. This does not need "smart contracts", just signatures. By this model, Bitcoin Script was a mistake.
2. It can work if Bitcoin does not scale and is incredibly expensive to spend and hold. By this model, the consumer hardware wallet industry is a dead-end and needs to pivot to something else (nostr keys, ecash?)
3. You could do this with gold, today? Bitcoin here is simply an incremental, not fundamental, improvement. I think this is suggestive, though: that such a network would not be long-term stable, and very much subject to capture.
4. In this view, Saylor is simply a gold bug with first mover advantage, shilling his bags. That's fine, but it's important to understand people's motivations.
5. This vision does not excite me. I wouldn't have left Linux development to work on making B2B commerce more efficient. I wouldn't get up at 5:30am for spec calls, and I sure as hell wouldn't be working this cheap.
I believe we can make people's UTXOs more powerful, and thus feel a moral responsibility to do so. This gives them more control over their own money, and allows more people to share that control. I assume that more people will do good things than stupid things, because assuming the other way implies that someone should be able to stop them, and that's usually worse.
I believe the result will be a more stable, thus useful, Bitcoin network. I am aware that this will certainly benefit people with very different motivations than me (Saylor).
Thanks for reading, and sorry for the length!
