An excessive amount of of this area, and issues being constructed round it, is centered round primarily mimicking the legacy monetary system. There may be not a lot being constructed attempting to blaze new grounds. Micropayments, whereas admittedly one thing I’ve been very important of as a result of person expertise of getting to consider tiny transactions all day, has seen nearly no actual experimentation or growth in attempting to unravel that UX drawback at scale.
I wrestle to think about any software that’s actually modern. Sure, issues like crowdfunding or micropayments in video games take away a central level of management that can be utilized to censor use instances of those functions, however they’re nonetheless reinventing the wheel. Quite a few tasks are targeted on collateralizing fiat or stablecoin loans with Bitcoin, greenback cost rails on Bitcoin, and many others. These are necessary functions to construct if Bitcoin is for use in commerce, that’s past a doubt, however they aren’t issues which might be solely potential on Bitcoin.
In some instances this has implications for the general community and protocol if adopted by to its excessive. Within the case of Bitcoin collateralized greenback loans, for instance, it’s inescapable that this stuff interface with the legacy system. This offers these techniques a point of management over these functions, and (proportional to how a lot exercise on Bitcoin they make up) Bitcoin itself.
Consensus on Bitcoin is just not ruled by voting, it’s ruled by participation. That’s,. these actors that really obtain bitcoin in financial exercise, and those that transact and generate income for miners. For those who aren’t doing one among these two issues, your node has no affect on community consensus, particularly throughout the occasion of a chainsplit or contentious fork. That’s simply the chilly actuality. Bitcoiners specializing in constructing functions that leverage or interface with the legacy system are simply giving the system we try to flee a bar wedged into Bitcoin the legacy system can use to leverage in opposition to it.
It’s silly, brief sighted, and a serious tactical error.
The trail ahead is to give attention to sustainable functions that don’t require that interface, that may operate completely independently of the legacy system, whereas nonetheless producing income for miners and software customers and operators. That is the one means ahead when it comes to encouraging Bitcoin adoption with out slowly ceding increasingly more affect over the community and protocol to the precise kinds of gamers we got down to escape within the first place.
To actually thrive exterior of the present system, we want markets for digital items, for providers, for actual merchandise, for brand new kinds of functions that legacy gamers received’t or can’t clone and monopolize for Bitcoin.
