Oh I dont know if I have used it enough yet to say, but I will try to answer:

• It's okay to make the design nicer, I promise.
• It should use Slashtags and Reputation features more deeply
• The jobs page should be priced per day, not per minute, and should have a 1 sat minimum bid.
• it shouldnt be custodial balances
• it should have more leaderboard features for users and post-types and timeframes, etc

maybe it already does some of these things or these are bad ideas, just riffing!

1. Generally, most books suck, particularly Bitcoin and tech industry ones. There is only one good Bitcoin book, Cryptoeconomics, and even that one I would debate some aspects of, but at least it is intelligent, rational, and can be applied. Otherwise, books that have influenced me are The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, and metaphysical speeches by people like Alan Watts, Jordan Peterson, etc. The way I tackle a topic is to obsess about it and discard bullshit with extreme prejudice. I went into a very deep rabbit hole for a long time to design Synonym's vision and choices. What's important is to make new mistakes, so you have to make sure to shed old ones and focus on what is left and the dynamics involved. Primitives are all that matter, you can't design without identifying them and knowing where the edges of a system really are.
2. As I modeled a hyperbitcoinized world I came to the conclusion that there will always be multiple forms of money and the need for finance (using other peoples money to accelerate growth and cooperate on larger goals) and thus you need at least Bitcoin as decentralized abstracted value and "credit" as trusted issuer-defined value. We need tokens as credit and we need them to be as programmable as Bitcoin so we can leverage trust and abstract away the need for government fiat entirely.
3. I guess it isn't up to me to decide what is the most controversial take, but you could go through my Good Morning tweets and look at the ones with the most replies I guess :) https://twitter.com/i/events/1442133822724841472

Otherwise, I think maybe the most underappreciated take is that Bitcoin is not divisible. I am worried that Bitcoiners both misunderstand that Bitcoin is an enforced integer total, having no decimals, but also misunderstand that dividing and multiplying Bitcoin are the same thing, and that one day we may have to make a hard decision to add more Bitcoins, and it might even be a majority of people that want it and for rational reasons. I am just relieved that I will probably be dead before that debate arises :)

I wish we never had the "Bitcoin" denomination and always used sats only. (and also that we had named them bits or bitcoins instead!)

We chose Hypercore for several reasons:

• This video clip: https://youtu.be/BTCsSwCpGP8?t=931
• It offers a way to do blockchain-like things without using a blockchain because it uses append-only logs
• We are friends with one of the main teams that works on it (Holepunch, formerly Hyperdivision, incl Mathias, the guy in the video above) and thus able to help each other regularly with using it.
• IPFS is tied to a scamcoin, but even then we have actually used some tools from those devs within our work too.
• Our vision and design for the next web requires a design like Hypercore and the ability to have integrity yet flexibility. Hypercore will become the clear winner after you see the next round of tools being deployed this summer from Holepunch and Synonym.
• Yes, I think IPFS and ION are "wrong", yet we will all converge on certain aspects in our designs, because I believe there is actually only one optimal design we are all iterating towards. I firmly believe there is no need for a blockchain for any dweb/identity things, thus ION using Bitcoin feels forced and gimmicky. They make the argument that blockchain provides confident key-rolling through block broadcasting but this assumes master keys are not compromised, which is a bad assumption imo. Plus, Slashtags could use the blockchain anytime if we really wanted, we just think Hypercore makes a lot more sense.
• Regardless of team-size or community, we do not want technical debt or inferior designs. We believe that once our teams deploy our first products and platforms that utilize Slashtags & Hypercore, we will create plenty of gravity for our stack.

1. Xotika was a big learning experience for me in so many ways. It died because my partner was unreliable and kinda scammed me. Also because I wasn't quite as experienced as I needed to be, and was scared to try and raise money and do the startup thing. I mostly funded it myself and it pretty much bankrupted me. If I were to build it today it would be so much better, and I will probably revisit the use case in the coming years. Video stuff is hard, and needs to be extra secure, but I happen to know some great tech for it is coming out later this year from some friends (No, not Impervious!)
2. Pretty sure Bitrefill already does offer billpay services but it might be better in some countries than others, I know it is an area they are growing, but I have not followed it closely. You'd have to ask Sergej for a better answer!
3. Hampus is great, but I wish he would work on our projects instead ;) Just being honest! We have some similar views about what is important for wallets, but we have our own LSP solution that we will launch this month, which we will eventually fully opensource and add some really cool features to.
4. If LN channels couldn't be force-closed you would have situations where you were stuck, maybe forever, without being able to settle. Without confidence of settlement, LN would be kinda pointless. As for whether some force-closes could be prevented, take that up with your implementation devs :) We have some ideas about how to improve LN and we will be sharing those later in the year.

• Depends what you mean by upgrade, I guess, but generally I think we will definitely have more soft forks, more feature additions, and more optimizations. However I think we need to more conservative about adding features and complexity to the base layer, and that we need better ways to measure when it might be the right time to increase some of the magic numbers.
• Synonym would lobby against covenants being added to Bitcoin. If they were added anyway, we would wait until other major platforms deployed them within designs, and for at least 1-2 years after activation before reassessing.

• LN tokens don't "require" any sort of exchange or swapping really, but there are obvious reasons supporting such things could be useful. I think the sophistication of such features will follow their practicality in real-world apps and commerce. If there is necessity, complex routing and swapping will be supported across assets and networks.
• I think we should use new terms for new design types, as stablecoins used to mean fiat digitized and redeemable by an issuer. Now we have stablechannels, dlc cfd's, betcoins, AMM coins, bitcoin-backed dollarcoins, etc etc. Otherwise, to answer your question, see above. More transaction types, more assets, more networks... all leads to more complexity that will need to be abstracted away to have any hopes of interoperability. I do not thing it is reasonable to think that merchants will start accepting cfd's as payment, or supporting a dozen different stable constructions. What will win is what is practical and reliable.

LN does provide certain privacy benefits, but the culture of the spec attempts to make it a global network with complex routing and thus some privacy is lost. Generally, direct P2P is an optimal privacy model, but once you start routing and sharing route data and listening for requests etc, things get tricky.

LN could and will be better, Synonym actually has some ideas about ways to improve it that we will probably float to the community this year.

Mixing is mostly dumb, I believe privacy is lost not gained, and that creating extra metadata is bad. That said, LN route mixing is interesting, and even more so once we have tokens and multiple assets to swap ;)

Stablecoins started on Bitcoin and never left and never had any influence on its code/health or the code of any other blockchain afaik.

Understand that every Bitcoin transaction is an abstraction of unknown value that the traders can ascribe any value to they choose. This is just how BItcoin works, you don't get to decide how people use it, or even know for sure. You are worrying about things that cannot be controlled.

You think a bunch of traders trading Bitcoin on exchanges or BlockFi yield or GBTC is any better?

The real attacks are coming from nocoiners, Big Banks, PoS shitcoins, and people that do not use the Bitcoin blockchain.

If you'd like to learn more about why we think tokens are important, listen to our recent Spaces about it, or my recent interview with Stephan Livera or Lunaticoin.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QflalrGaIvw
2. https://stephanlivera.com/episode/362/
3. https://anchor.fm/lunaticoin/episodes/C21-e04---Synonym-and-Lightning-Tether-with-John-Carvalho-e1gbv49

Bitcoin is a MMO game. It is an abstraction for natural selection and thus evolution for human DNA.

Sidechains started as an idea for creating 2-way peg from Bitcoin to an outside new chain. This design was never accomplished and so the "federated" sidechain was born. Unfortunately, in practice this functions very similarly to an altcoin in that the peg is a manual permissioned process enacted by central custodians.

Further, it is not a sound argument to call this a Bitcoin caling layer, as it does not scale itself and it does not deterministically settle to Bitcoin or use Bitcoin transactions to operate.

LBTC is not actually BTC, it is a token controlled by the federation which they currently offer a 1:1 exchange rate when entering and leaving their private network. This could change at any time if they choose.

We have discussed it. We will mature it further and reassess in the future. We are also shorthanded when it comes to people with the time and inclination to write specs and prepare this kind of thing, but interest is growing quickly and we keep coming up with new ways to improve Bitcoin and LN, so I think the time will come when we start making BIPs and BOLTs and more...

Oh I know this one, he's not actually a developer. He just has a good understanding of a lot of the technical topics of bitcoin.

I don't really know, maybe BitWage? There are also some tax reporting tool websites for traders and such.

I have passive interest in a Bitcoin-native accounting system for nonprofits and state agencies to allow radical transparency & accountability, but I don't know if I will ever work on such a thing, kinda boring compared to other options for now :)