977 sats \ 4 replies \ @wlrvs 29 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: Stacker News Roundtable #1 - Building on Bitcoin, Bitcoin Culture, and More bitcoin
- Bitcoin has already succeeded at proving out a viable non-state money today.
- Bitcoin will face many new challenges ahead (tradfi manipulation, 2106), as well as old challenges that reemerge (fork wars, security budget, state aggression)-- so we'll see if success continues.
- Building better on/off ramps and putting bitcoin closer to people that need it and those that don't know they need it only harden/accelerate bitcoin's success.
- The idea that we 'need to build x' for bitcoin to succeed, whether that be ordinals (muh security budget!), on-ramps (muh mass adoption!), etc are typically marketing plays that overstate a problem or create a problem themselves.
- The only things that 'need' to be built are things that make trading, holding and mining bitcoin more anti-fragile such as mining decentralization, self custody and p2p exchange. These are the things that will enable bitcoin to survive the most bearish and antagonistic of times.
The idea that we 'need to build x' for bitcoin to succeed, whether that be ordinals (muh security budget!)
fwiw, on my end i don’t recall seeing many people in ordinals claiming that ordinals “need to be built for bitcoin to succeed / for the security budget”.
we’ve certainly made the point many times that ordinals benefit the security budget, so they have a positive influence, but personally I’d never claim that that’s why they “need to be built”.
they’re being built because there’s MARKET DEMAND for them, people like them and enjoy using them. that’s the only reason.
i actually agree with you that there isn’t one thing that “needs to be built”, what we “need” is to encourage experimentation, so that eventually we can find more things like ordinals that have product-market fit and also happen to be beneficial to bitcoin systemically.
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they’re being built because there’s MARKET DEMAND
Of course, that's why you and I are both marketing towards different demands we see in the market. Yet, it's still just marketing and not related to what 'bitcoin needs.'
I think the difference is whether you think bitcoin needs either of us to market these demands to succeed. Marketing towards any and all demands may help accelerate bitcoin's success, but it could also accelerate it's failure.
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I think the difference is whether you think bitcoin needs either of us to market these demands to succeed.
I suspect we both agree that it doesn’t.
What I believe that bitcoin needs is people experimenting, so that they can reveal new usecases for it that may find product-market fit and help bitcoin grow. If that doesn’t happen, there won’t be new ways for it to grow, and I do believe that new avenues for growth are necessary.
Once those avenues are found, sure, marketers will pop up like mushrooms, and I don’t think marketers like us are particularly systematically important ;)
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The only things that 'need' to be built are things that make trading, holding and mining bitcoin more anti-fragile such as mining decentralization, self custody and p2p exchange.
Great list of feature fundamentals!
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