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It maybe has faded now, but I remember when Ark and BitVM were first proposed, they mostly required a covenants soft fork to really be functional. Since then, people have found interesting ways to work around those requirements and deliver live versions of these things without any soft forks -- but with trade-offs.
I think waxwing is talking about more of this: using novel techniques in cryptography to work around protocol limitations. Instead of seeing what happened with Coldcard and Liquid and working to soft fork in some sort of vault architecture, try doing weird things with cryptography that might achieve the same result.
The same for privacy or more complicated contracts or whatever. I think it's advocating for a don't ask permission sort of attitude -- or perhaps that waxwing thinks a lot of projects have gotten caught up in thinking they need some sort of permission (to change bitcoin core or change the bitcoin protocol), when that may not be the case.
I think the real revolutionary work is gonna be social and political, not technical.
You may be right. But there is a certain temptation to just keep making the tech better.
You may be right. But there is a certain temptation to just keep making the tech better.
Which is understandable given the background that most bitcoiners & cypherpunks come from.
But, yeah, we need more input from the theater kids and student council kids in bitcoin!
I tried reading the article, but I don't think I really understood it. He talks about how the revolutionary thing is to make bitcoin relevant for payments---agreed---, but then he says we can do that by "using cryptography". I didn't really understand what he means by that, nor his example. I don't really think inefficient cryptographic algorithms is what's holding back payments adoption. I think the real revolutionary work is gonna be social and political, not technical.