An excessive amount of of this area, and issues being constructed round it, is centered round basically mimicking the legacy monetary system. There’s not a lot being constructed making an attempt to blaze new grounds. Micropayments, whereas admittedly one thing I’ve been very crucial of because of the consumer expertise of getting to suppose about tiny transactions all day, has seen virtually no actual experimentation or growth in making an attempt to resolve that UX drawback at scale.
I battle to consider any software that’s actually revolutionary. 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 purposes, however they’re nonetheless reinventing the wheel. Quite a few initiatives are targeted on collateralizing fiat or stablecoin loans with Bitcoin, greenback cost rails on Bitcoin, and many others. These are vital purposes to construct if Bitcoin is for use in commerce, that’s past a doubt, however they don’t seem to be issues which can be solely doable on Bitcoin.
In some instances this has implications for the general community and protocol if adopted by way of to its excessive. Within the case of Bitcoin collateralized greenback loans, for instance, it’s inescapable that these items interface with the legacy system. This provides these techniques some extent of management over these purposes, 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 people who transact and generate income for miners. When you aren’t doing one in all 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 purposes that leverage or interface with the legacy system are simply giving the system we are attempting 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 significant tactical error.
The trail ahead is to deal with sustainable purposes that don’t require that interface, that may perform 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 really thrive exterior of the prevailing system, we’d like markets for digital items, for providers, for actual merchandise, for brand new kinds of purposes that legacy gamers received’t or can’t clone and monopolize for Bitcoin.
