I think the concept of bitcoin being inevitable is relatively new. Sure, some people used to say that early on too, but that notion got much more popular and the last few years.

In reality, most generations of bitcoiners believed that some things need to be done in order for it to succeed. “Things” in all walks of life, but our topic here is building so I’ll focus on that.

Lightning for example, couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t soft forked bitcoin THREE times first in order to enable it (CLTV, CSV, SegWit). People forget that, but it was never the case that you don’t upgrade bitcoin to enable new things!

I don’t think anyone can tell us “what needs to be built”; the only way to find out is for people to build whatever crazy things they want, and see how the market reacts.

I've been doing more reading lately about the topic of "digital preservation" and one topic that comes up is how in any long running digital system, there is not point of "having preserved digital content", instead it's an endless task of "continuing to preserve" digital artifacts.

In the same way, I don't think you can say Bitcoin will ever "be a success". Rather, I'd say that it's "currently successful".

How can we ensure bitcoin's continued success?

Not to shill Base58 but to totally shill, I really think that if we're not taking the time to build good information about how bitcoin works, the protocols that it's built on, and making them really easy to access and find information about how the protocol works, we risk atrophying as an ecosystem over the next 10, 20, 50 years. It's important to me that people are able to really understand bitcoin, because without that understanding you lose some capacity to stay self-sovereign and decentralized.

I think all the work every bitcoin educator is doing of teaching people how to hold their own coins, how to run a node, how to look at mempool.space and understand what they're seeing -- this is all really important for bitcoin's continued success. :)

No, Bitcoin's success is not inevitable.

But --more importantly-- imagine if it WERE inevitable. Well, then: things will go pretty well for us! There's no point in discussing anything on Stacker News. We've already won. Nothing can screw us up, apparently. So just kick back and relax! In particular, you should kick back and relax, and NOT worry about the naysayers who think that Bitcoin's success is in jeopardy. ... Therefore, whether you think Bitcoin's success is inevitable or not, you should behave as though it isn't. Or you should just kind of do nothing, or go for a walk. Or take up the violin.

Humans are prone to overconfidence. Consider the famous Fall of Rome and also the sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic. Personally, my favorite example is Star Wars Episode 1 -- if you watch behind-the-scenes footage, you see that people are afraid to contradict the great George Lucas, even though his ideas are terrible. During 2017 I noticed the same thing, particularly with taproot and Bech32 which were absolutely horrendous ideas that everyone in the community was terrified of speaking out against.

I am also fan of documentaries where people accidentally find themselves in cults, such as "behind the curve" which is about flat-earthers. They sincerely believe that flat earth will be taught alongside globe earth "any day now".

I can give you some hard examples, in fact, of the success faltering. One is the Lightning Network itself, which has become a sacred cow. It is possible to improve the LN over time, but only if experts are allowed to discuss problems -- so that we can work together to solve them. But that is exactly what is not happening (in my opinion). The brave souls working on LN have tried to discuss the "limitations" . I have many LN dev friends who complain to me in private how difficult it is to accomplish this very task -- believe me or not as you will. One is an ultra-famous LN dev who actually was disinvited from a Bitcoin conference because he wanted to speak "honestly" about LN. This is debt that must be repaid with interest.

The best way to ensure Bitcoin's success is --sorry to say-- my own idea of Bip300. If the underlying blockchain software can compete fairly --without the stigma of a new coin; nor the need to traverse the political L1 dev "process"-- then we would see more innovation and less politics. Devs would compete for users. We would have had BIP 118 and 119 on a drivechain many years ago, probably 2019 at least. Which would mean eltoo and ARK would probably already be in widespread use today. In fact we would probably already be moving on to the next thing. Instead, we have to wait for the bikeshedding around covenants to stop -- that is probably 3 years away. Big mistake, and all for no benefit.