they’re incredibly counter-intuitive for anyone who doesn’t intimately understand cryptography and security, and they make it way too easy for people to make a mistake

it’s a long discussion but there are other ways to handle key management and recovery that don’t require people to manually handle backups

Sound money doesn’t look very attractive when it loses 50% of its value :)

I think that narrative clearly attracted a lot of people in 2021-2022, and probably would again if/when we see another raging bull market. But when the markets are slow, new usecases tend to do more to ignite people’s imagination than just talking about stagnating prices

I think seed phrases are an abomination and no one should use them :)

I don’t have cold hard data but I’ve spent many many hours this year talking directly to hundreds of those people (there are many, many more of them that I didn’t have the time to chat with directly) and my impression is that some of them are OG bitcoiners, some of them are NFT people etc who did have some bitcoin already, but also many of them have never paid attention to bitcoin before at all.

There’s a cultural reason in the loud opposition to experimentation.

It’s actually just loud opposition, not strong opposition! Most bitcoiners don’t oppose experiments. But many builders confuse the loud voices for strong voices, and just give up.

Personally as people might’ve noticed, I don’t really mind opposition, and I’m happy to charge away anyways, but that’s not always the case for all builders. I think many of them were turned off because of the culture, even if that’s somewhat irrational, but thankfully I think the culture is starting to change in the last year.

Experimentation is important, because through experimentation you discover new successful usecases (and many failed usecases!), and each new successful usecase brings about a wave of adoption.

I think layer 2 designs that aren’t lightning have been ignored for way too long, but I also see this changing. By the time 2023 ends I expect alternative-L2s to raise more total funding than lightning companies this year, and I expect that’ll accelerate in the next few years.

There’s A LOT of work to be done on most of these ideas before they’re commercially viable, but I think that landscape will look very different very soon, and we’re going to see many new players in that arena.

Personally right now I’m more interested in attracting the larger crypto ecosystem beyond bitcoin, because I think it’s the lowest hanging fruit where I can make the most impact.

Those are people that inherently care about bitcoin and are bullish on it, but maybe don’t understand it well enough, or lost interest, or forgot. What we’ve found is that it’s actually relatively easy to get them to be excited about bitcoin again, and they have a lot to contribute once that happens. So we’re gonna double down on that.

I don’t have any special insight on how to reach complete newbies to bitcoin, and it’s generally more difficult to do that during bear markets anyway. But of course that’s a valuable activity and I salute those who do that well

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 ;)

I think those are explanations for why:

But they do not explain why upgrades aren’t needed!

I think easily ordinals and BRC-20s attracted the most new bitcoiners this year? We’ve seen A TON of attention from people in the greater crypto ecosystems who jumped onto bitcoin through ordinals, something that didn’t happen in bitcoin for quite a while.

But to be fair, the overall market has been slow this year, and I have no doubt that in previous years, many other efforts have attracted way more bitcoiners than ordinals did this year

Not really?.. :)

I think this argument is typically brought forward by newer entrants to Bitcoin (although not exclusively), and it might be because they’re simply impressed by bitcoin elegance and usefulness, and the impact it can have on their lives. As such they believe it already does all it would ever need to do. They’re also reinforced by tales about bitcoin’s codebase’s immutability, but of course those tales aren’t true, and bitcoin is upgrading all the time (just maybe not in the ways that would be most impactful).

There’s also another argument which is that upgrading bitcoin is risky and therefore shouldn’t be done. While I can understand that approach, it is not the same as saying that bitcoin doesn’t need new features… it might need them, but this cohort believes that even though they might be needed, we are too stupid to do them safely.

I definitely prefer the type of experimentation that DOES NOT require changing bitcoin. Like ordinals. Personally I intend to focus most on my time on that type of experimentation, but not all of it. At some point I think that some potential changes reveal themselves as worthwhile and they should be pursued.

I think bitcoin itself should be changed slowly, carefully and meticulously, but that’s not the same as not being changed at all, or being afraid to change it, which I think it a more precise description of what’s going on recently.

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.

I strongly believe that the ordinals movement (which we joined with Taproot Wizards, but in no way started) is the single movement that attracted the most new Bitcoin builders this year.

I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to new builders every single day who are making their first steps in the ecosystem, building new wallets, self-custodial marketplaces, new sidechains, zero-knowledge research, truly at the forefront of bitcoin innovation. I’m incredibly bullish on these guys.

I think that comes down to how you define ‘Bitcoin builders’. We’ve seen a ton of interest from developers and entrepreneurs who made their first steps in other ecosystems like ethereum/solana/etc, and decided to jump into ordinals. They had some catching up to do at first, but we’re 1 year into this at this point, and today I feel confident to say they’re some of the most skilled bitcoin builders I’ve ever met.

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.

hey everyone, my first post here

OP is clearly uninterested in discussions about altcoins, which is fine, just thought i’d present an alternative viewpoint

as someone who cares about bitcoin’s future a lot, i think conversations about what altcoins are doing differently are important in order to strengthen bitcoin.

and yes, there needs to be some discretion, since obviously much/most of what happens in altcoin-land is flat out scams, but that’s not everything. some experiments are honest and can inform future development in bitcoin and i think monero is a prime example of that

even if what monero teaches us is “we shouldn’t do what monero did”, that’s also useful

banning any discussion about anything altcoin-related will limit our ability to learn and have productive discussions about bitcoin