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In my perhaps simplistic view, I understood the approach to be: make it so you can do whatever it is that you want to do without waiting for the underlying protocol to change. Sure, you still need to use bitcoin script, but if you can do fancy dancy things with cryptography maybe you don't need to wait for new opcodes to do the things you want.
I'm not sure if this is a reasonable approach, but it sounds interesting.
Isn't that what Andrew Poelstra was aiming towards with cat+schorr tricks?
it looks like it, but requires op_cat. I took waxwing's meaning here to be "maybe you can figure out how to build the thing you want using weird math, rather than trying to change bitcoin -- stop waiting for permission."
I wouldn't be hung up about an experiment/demo requiring op_cat. It was showcasing a direction.
Its exactly that same direction, from where I am sitting. Maybe the next question on things like that ought to be: what can we do without op_cat. Not even a tradeoff, but rather a solution to something new.
I think I agree with all of that but not the "irrelevance". The thing that is hopefully becoming irrelevant are all these dreams of enhancing the protocol with features.
We didn't make TCP irrelevant tho? We built on top. If right now you configure your firewall on your laptop and your phone to block all TCP traffic, what still works?