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I respect that attitude of leaning conservative, and I suspect most Bitcoiners would agree with it.
I admit, prior to this recent debate, I'd never really considered what Bitcoin might do should a soft fork prove to be a choice the majority of the network regrets.
I think you are also right that most bitcoin users want self custody and to be able to pay for things. My experience of lightning is that most users aren't willing to set up a node and manage channels, and so then we very quickly are out of the world of self-custody and into things like Spark and Cashu (both may be great solutions). I can see how big upgrades to Bitcoin are alluring because they might finally allow self custody and payments to exist in one place.
This leads to another question: what do you think of some of the covenants proposals?
To be honest, I've been too caught up with 110, my book, and my conference to dig in detail to the covenants proposals. I don't understand why they're not further along. I'm pro in principle. I don't see a whole lot of issues with them.
Two things are true at the same time here: one shouldn't get a feature on Bitcoin just because you want it. And, I think the covenants proposals have done enough to be considered soon.
That said, overall, maybe we don't need covenants yet. UTXOs aren't difficult to come by, yet.
I'm definitely not sold on the temporariness being the right choice. I definitely have my issues with 110, I think it's suboptimal in a few ways.
With that said, there's a humility to the temporary approach. If there's some massive unforeseen issue with 110, at least it expires in a year. The rationale was more about thinking there should be something different as a permanent solution.
Again, not my BIP. It's a binary choice. Support the thing that exists, or don't. I'm supporting it.
Taproot and Segwit both provided ways to upgrade and make development exploration either. Segwit has upgrade hooks which I understand to be ways to do future upgrades as soft forks. Taproot has the annex.
The rationale I've heard for these things is that we don't know what Bitcoin will need, and so there was a bit of a guess that these features would be useful to make development easier.
My general pushback is that 99%+ people just want self custody and to be able to pay for things. A lot of development is developing for a hypothetical future without having real demand.
I'm not saying don't do development, just that making the base layer protocol more flexible has lead to some security issues, and could lead to more in the future. I lean conservative. Therefore: make new features prove their value.