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The market is never an answer. It's a reflection of sentiment.
But in this world of permissionless freedom money, isn't "sentiment" the answer?
I want to use a money that has certain properties (censorship resistance, security, privacy?) But I also want a money that will be accepted by other people. In order to discover the properties of a money I can look at the code, read reviews of others, ask my llm to evaluate. In order to determine how widely accepted it is, I look at the market -- how many people will trade goods for it, how much do they value it.
Why shouldn't I treat the market as an answer to the question: "how widely accepted is this change to Bitcoin?"
Answering my own question: there doesn't seem any reasonable way for a new coin to start because as you say, Satoshi was right. If wikileaks was too early, all coin launches (for the foreseeable future) are doomed to fail, because if they have any seriousness at all, they will receive far more than wikileaks levels of attention. I don't think we can ever get to the point where there the market can reveal general sentiment between Bitcoin and Bitcoin+covenants.
I have a sensation that I am rehashing something bitcoiners probably discussed exhaustively before the ICO boom. Possibly even before ETH heads split off.
In my world of permissionless freedom money, I do not wish to be enslaved to sentiment. We forget about merit easily. Because NgU and saylorbois and other Bitcoin Twitter retardation. Is it at all possible that I want to use Bitcoin because it has superior properties? Because it actually has merit? That's why I am here. It's also why, when it was hyped to me the first time, I didn't see the merit of the solution. I didn't see the elegance.
Why shouldn't I treat the market as an answer to the question: "how widely accepted is this change to Bitcoin?"
Because there is no correlation. Go check the price charts versus the things that happen in Bitcoin. Go check out shitcoins, they don't have correlation either. One has nothing to do with the other because the price is hype-driven.
If you think Bitcoin has merit, you will use it. If you don't then all the price chart may give you is a false sense of NgU, then you buy at ATH, lose faith, sell at 2x loss, and say that Bitcoin is shit.
there doesn't seem any reasonable way for a new coin to start
I don't think so either. Not right now. Or at least, not really... could get lucky but it's mostly hopium and value extraction from those foolish enough to follow you.
I don't fully agree with this p.o.v.. I don't remember many maxis that liked Tether on the Bitcoin blockchain through Mastercoin (Omni). I also don't remember many maxis that liked counterparty or colored coins. To me, maximalism has been about BTC as a store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account.
In fact, it was puritanism towards BTC and not the Bitcoin blockchain that made Vitalik leave and he kinda took Tether with him. Which, in my opinion, was a great outcome; win-win. It's why I am not really a "maxi" when it comes to that - I do see the value in systematically refusing to extend functionality beyond what is useful for Bitcoin (as in BTC-as-SoV/MoE/UoA) and that means people will leave and pursue shitcoins. Let them, good riddance. The thing that speaks against Ethereum was for me never that it exists, but more the things that went on as it came about: the marketing shift and that they ICO'd and then went to influence regulators that all ICOs except the Ethereum ICO were bad. They literally created a moat through regulatory capture like the AI bros are hoping to do today.
We have different levels of puritanism between different people. For example, I don't mind Peter's opentimestamps. It's impact-minimized, properly engineered, has hardly any impact. However, I also don't think that this should be the defacto way of doing everything, as block space is and will always be limited, and whenever data transactions stand in the way of p2p MoE transactions, we're doing a disservice to ourselves. So it is only acceptable because it is an exception.
Similarly, I do think that script restoration is an idea worth pursuing, but I also can guess how it will hurt Bitcoin MoE characteristics, because the temptation for someone to launch a shitcoin on a 300kB script and slurp up capacity, and make the tx cost back from their shitcoin issuance, will be greater than any resistance to do it. That's why I'm not out there truly advocating for any change.
The market is never an answer. It's a reflection of sentiment. Shitcoin exchange rates are never a function of merit at all. They're a function of hype. In fact, I often wonder why Bitcoin fx rates is often behaving like a shitcoin, but then I realize: we have more shitcoiners in Bitcoin than dogecoin and litecoin combined. More degens. More retards. The further we go into our timeline, the more I have to admit - and I hate doing this - that Satoshi was right about the wikileaks thing: too early, too rushed.
I lost allies to my opinion about what the best possible (utopian?) Bitcoin would look like, because these people were overvaluing short term outcomes and losing complete track of long term ones, drove themselves and their echo chambers to insanity, and forked off. What they were standing for (pre-insanity) wasn't bad from where I'm sitting. It was just a battle that can only be lost if you try to brute-force it. The complete retardation cycle killed an idea and the poor execution was even worse. But nonetheless, I've lost allies. Lost them the moment they went crazy though, not when they forked. It wasn't entertaining, it is the second worst outcome possible.