The law of triviality is an argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Say for example, a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

I came across an interesting, mostly harmless, conspiracy for a possible attack on Bitcoin.
What if a VC firm or resourceful organization were to pay Bitcoin developers to basically code nothing - they would gain a platform, maybe go on the conference circuit/podcasts and talk about their projects and ideas, but it's just an endless cycle of discourse.
Don't get me wrong, I like that Bitcoin remains simple and doesn't change all that often, but there is the potential that this characteristic could be used against Bitcoin and could be a form of attack.
“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Robust development in Bitcoin

We should get back to The Bike Shed and solve the soft fork activation problem - permanently. I would like to see more of Bitcoin's ~antifragile qualities and it thriving in decentralized chaos.
Now I may be naive but with something like the 95% consensus signal, how many proposals would actually be activated except for those proposals that have real worth?
The cream will always rise to the top. Or would it just result in a mexican stand off, as no one wants to make a mistake?
108 sats \ 0 replies \ @jeff 3 Apr
Rhetorically...
What fraction would just ignorantly run the last version they deployed?
What fraction of voters are (even almost) properly informed in any poll/survey?
reply
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @pakovm 3 Apr
It's an interesting theory to say the least. It's, in fact, what BCHers say happend to Bitcoin, they say that Blockstream captured it and now they pay developers to do nothing because they want to pocket the fees via Liquid. While this theoory might have some truth behind it, I don't think it holds much water, after all, noone uses Liquid.
Now the problem is not that we have some grandiose company controlling everything and everyone, but that we developed a conservative culture where everything that's not part of the popular narrative is an attack on Bitcoin.
For me, the ossification camp is a bigger threat to Bitcoin than any single company or agency, the mempool is telling us that we need to scale, the market is telling us that we need to scale, and we can't scale Bitcoin without evolving the chain, if we don't we will end up with a husk of the real value that Bitcooin brings to the world, which is self sovereignty and censorship resistance, not "hard money" or "digital property".
"An ignorant population is a blind instrument of its own destruction; ambition, intrigue, abuse the credulity and inexperience of men devoid of all political, economic, or civil knowledge; they adopt as realities those which are pure illusions; they take license for liberty, treason for patriotism, revenge for justice."
  • Simón Bolivar, February 15th, 1819.
This is what I see when people start doing things like running Bitcoin Knots as if it would change anything in the network, advocating for filters, removing taproot and segwit altogether, etc...
Doing nothing and advocating for doing nothing is a lot worse than taking a wrong turn.
reply
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @freetx 3 Apr
I am personally on the line of ossification / conservative....that is believing that changes should only come once every few years if at all.
"All BIPs and change request should be seen as an attack on Bitcoin" -- John Carvahlo
Each change, whether or not it may "improve" one aspect or another, also introduces unseen potentials (see ordinals) or possibly outright attack vectors (see current xz situation unfolding in OSS).
I think that a true enemy of bitcoin would instead argue for change....the greatest threat to bitcoin comes from making changes that introduce unseen weaknesses, because as it stands now, Bitcoin is secure so the only real way to attack it is to change it.
reply