I learn a painful investment lesson, but my life won’t change or be negatively impacted. Still stacking to cold storage daily hoping adoption continues and it makes the world a better place!
Correct. If Bitcoin 1.0 fails, Bitcoin 2.0 will emerge from it's ashes stronger. Fortunes will be made and lost by those who bet correctly or incorrectly. But neutral money, separated from the state, is here forever.
It's an interesting question. Is there a better Proof of Work than SHA256?
Assuming these cryptographic mining functions are not REALLY one-way functions, bitcoins PoW is in the future potentially vulnerable to quantum cracking by Shors algorithm, and it is also vulnerable more generally to malicious-majority energy attack (like if mecha-elon musk bought all computers in the world).
Is there a more scarce resource than Work (energy) to use in proving you have done something and sacrificed for it? Maybe "Proof of randomness". True randomness (as opposed to pseudorandomness) is actually as close to perfect information you get. In fact, you can actually extract energy from a string of truly random bits, as was proven in Feynmans work on reversible computing (awesome read). Monte Carlo simulations, particle swarm optimizations, etc, work because even pseudorandomness is so informationally dense.
Or maybe "Proof of Intelligence/Attention/Sentience"? We certainly seem to be alone in the universe, so that seems more scarce than energy. Who knows.
Bitcoin has risks both known and unknown. Finding perfect consensus on the urgency and impact on any given risk is impossible. They can only be estimated. And some of them only emerge under certain conditions or specific contexts, each of those having their own probabilities that change over time.
Making protocol changes in a neutral and unbiased way has become increasingly difficult. We are approaching laissez-faire-by-default, via ossification.
The crown-joule of Bitcoin is the ticker and the immaculate conception of it's issuance. We can never get these back if we lose them. Laissez-faire could cost us both.
The Bitcoin community creates an indefinite series of hardforks at a planned frequency, under a certain set of safer conditions than testing on the main-chain, such that the new chain ("Satellite Chain") can serve as both a sandbox and undo-point, for the main chain. To achieve this safety to innovate, and remove the contentiousness, all the satellite chains get launched with an oracle from the main-chain that feed into difficulty bombs on the new chain. These difficulty bombs would be disarmed under only two conditions. Either an extended problem with the main-chain is detected (Eg. 52 sequential negative difficulty adjustments), or a community consensus to hard-fork the "satellite"-chain, to remove the difficulty bomb.
It would be like A/B testing in production, except we plan to destroy B, unless it proves that A has a material flaw, such that B is the next best logical choice. It's the backup plan.
It would take the contentious-ness out of planning/lobbying for new ideas. Instead of people screaming "YOUR DUMB! GFY and your drivechain.". People could calm down and say "I disagree with the idea, but put it on the next satellite that's scheduled to go out.". It's effectively a framework for innovating. And I don't think the entire community has to even support this framework, as it's permissionless in it's approach. Although it could likely be made stronger if the main-chain added features to help the oracle.
The satellite should not be seen as a threat to the ticker, nor attempt to "takeover" or become "the real bitcoin".
There would be pressure to hold more Bitcoin around those blocks.
There would be an infinite stream of dividend-like cashflows to holder, presuming there is demand for the features of the new chain.
Any new "risk", could be dismissed as "solvable in the next satellite".
Community could calm down.
Businesses could plan properly, and there would be no contention over the ticker. Eg. Coinbase might say, "We follow the satellite framework, the ticker for the chain with the difficulty bomb will be BTC-945. Here is how to claim your BTC-945... you can sell... or hold it... by electing..."
The immaculate conception is preserved for eternity.
Miners may or may not route hashing capacity to the new chain.
In the event of a problem on the main-chain, the hashing power would have an alternate use-case, that would be more valuable than selling out to attack the main chain.
Like a planet that is running out of resources (eg. time until it's own sun burns out), one solution would be to launch satellites to help look for a new inhabitable planet. The satellites likely don't come back. They send data, but that's likely it. They might be a total waste. But we'll learn something every time we launch one. And if we're lucky, one of them, might find a new inhabitable planet before the one we're on runs out.
I will never financially recover and be a wage slave for the rest of my life if im lucky or someone who has to rely on the state and somehow make it out to a country that has a fiat currency that works, but I'll likely still not be worse off than a lot of people so who knows?
This topic is not something any single person should think about. Bitcoin is decentralized, and these are out of our comprehension to even grok. While it might make someone feel better to think about it, the bitcoin network isn't possible to understand by ourselves. Relish in the fact that it's more powerful than we can imagine.
If Bitcoin fails we all fail (except maybe the fiat rich). We'll just enter an endless loop of pseudo long-term "stability" created using money we don't have, and deeply devastating crashes between generations until we get into a big enough crash we won't be able to recover from. This is assuming "failure" means the value of Bitcoin will crash relative to fiat for some currently unforeseen reason.
The only possible failure scenario is every government on the globe embraces hard money and stops printing, and somehow can credibly be trusted to stick to this indefinitely, thus making Bitcoin unnecessary.
I would still credit Bitcoin for forcing governments to become responsible, so even this "failure" would be an incredible win for humanity.
If bitcoin fails then I fucked up😂 All my life savings in bitcoin except my house and car. (YET)😂🙏
Let's not bring this energy here. Stack sats and spread adaption. That's the way plebs
Since you mentioned investment, I guess price-wise? But Bitcoin is not an investment; it is freedom money - if sovereign individuals are happy to exchange value with each other with Bitcoin, why would it fail?
Bitcoin Satellites
Problem Statement
Proposed Idea & Potential Technical Tactic
Examples
Block # 945K - Satellite Chain 1
Block # 1155K - Satellite Chain 2
Block # 1365K - Satellite Chain 3
Impact on Incentives
Why "Satellites"?