The bitcoin internal fighting FUD du jour is how we care for bitcoin developers. The issue is causing most influencers to chime in with opinions, but I struggle to make sense of most of these opinions. It seems like more questions are being generated than answers.
Matt Odell reported that GigaChad used his influence to convince Cathie Wood to avoid contributing money to pay bitcoin developers.
Influencers like Odell and Jack Mallers expressed concern that the developers need to be supported because they are essential in developing and/or maintaining bitcoin code. They both used many more words than that, but I think that was essentially what was said.
I have a lot of questions. I would need to understand the topic better to have a strong opinion on this, but I think that this is the most important bitcoin topic now and in the future. There is an essential existential question at stake: “What is bitcoin?”.
Is bitcoin’s value proposition:
1. A set of rules that cannot be changed.
2. A set of rules that can change if the majority wants change / if the situation requires change.
I am biased towards preferring the former, because a set of rules that must constantly be changed to accommodate the situation is not really a set of rules. It is fiat.
I may or may not have been storing my life savings in bitcoin because of the belief that I can trust a set of rules which cannot be changed. If rules cannot be changed, then I can plan for the future and maintain a low time preference.
Rule by the majority concerns me. I read about Nazi Germans falling in line with propaganda. I lived through “the pandemic”. Democracy doesn’t work very well in the post-Covid gaslighting age. The majority cannot be trusted to remain rational. Even many bitcoiners are irrational. Bitcoin itself is very hard to understand and nobody understands it fully. We need rules rather than majority rulers.
Examples of sets of rules that can be changed and/or ignored are the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Rules that can be changed or ignored when the situation calls for it are not rules. At least, they are not rules that protect the plebs. Rules that can be changed tend to be rules that are selectively applied to protect the financial elite.
This is why it is especially concerning when the debate centers around whether the financial elite should be the ones paying the maintainers and/or developers of the rules. Of course, when it comes to financial power, the financial elite will have the most ability to exert influence.
I may have missed it, but I hope that GigaChad comes out with a statement addressing the issue and shares his thoughts.
Most of us- myself included- don’t understand what bitcoin developers do. It’s hard to have strong opinions when issues are presented in non-specific terms. It would really help if the influencers that have strong opinions about compensating the developers explained to us dummies in layman’s terms what developers specifically do.
I believe that the following questions need to be answered to try to understand this current debate:
Is the mission statement of a bitcoin developer to maintain bitcoin or upgrade bitcoin?
Why does bitcoin need to be maintained/supported?
What actively needs to happen to maintain bitcoin?
Does bitcoin already do what we need it to do or not?
Is it OK to just accept bitcoin’s current limitations?
Does bitcoin need to be upgraded/improved? If so, why?
Do improvements need to be on the bitcoin protocol layer itself, or can they be done on secondary layers?
Is hidden malicious code a product of old code that simply has not yet been exploited, or would it not be as prevalent if we stopped “upgrading” the code?
Doesn’t trying to upgrade bitcoin to something less simple create more angles of attack?
Should we accept more angles of attack when we are already winning?
Did we learn from the DAO, and if so, does that lesson apply to this current debate?
How many bitcoin devs are needed?
Are some bitcoin devs better than others?
Is it possible for a bitcoin dev to be an enemy of bitcoin?
How many hours do bitcoin devs work?
Do bitcoin devs also have day jobs?
Should bitcoin dev support be hourly wage, salary based, or productivity based?
Doesn’t the source of funding for a bitcoin dev influence how bitcoin develops?
Should we be concerned if funding originates from the plutocracy that bitcoin was designed to destroy?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. It just bothers me that they don’t seem to be asked by many bitcoiners. Instead, we get influencers saying “hey these influencers are really fucking important and we need to support the people that support bitcoin.” And that sounds logical. There’s just not enough substance there to form opinions.
What we would like to happen and what should happen are two different things. For bitcoin to win, it really can’t require anything that doesn’t naturally occur as a result of incentives deriving from its rule set (singular). It needs to leverage human greed to incentivize all participants.
IMHO, unless there is a critical issue that risks the immediate demise of bitcoin (and not some theoretical FUD such as “what happens when bitcoin rewards decrease in the future?”), we should not change bitcoin. Its value proposition is that it is a set of rules that cannot be changed and the current set of rules protects private property and allows for monetary fairness. Bitcoin appears to be our last shot at freedom. If the rule set can be changed and if money incentivizes the rule set, then the plutocracy will continue to rule.
Bitcoin at first glance has many flaws. It does not solve every problem (directly). I just bought some Toxic Maximalist hats (for the record, they were my idea and Samson consulted me on the design- but making them in the dark was all him) and it took a day to process the main chain payment. The first layer lacks privacy. It makes credit markets more challenging. It may on the surface use a lot of energy. A lot of bitcoiners are unrealistic larpers that have ridiculous opinions on other things. A lot of you bitcoiners are mean, and you assholes got in before everybody else and that’s just not fair.
We should accept that we can’t fix all of that. Bitcoin really doesn’t need to be better. We are lucky to have gotten as far as we have. Monetary layers and human layers ideally would be built on top of the bitcoin protocol layer to address issues. Tinkering with humanities last hope for freedom any more than is absolutely necessary is a mistake. It is hubris. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, he turned into an impotent eggplant and that sucked. Humans inevitably fuck everything up. This is one thing that I think we can mostly agree on. This is especially true when the financial elite from whom most of us are trying to escape have the most fiat gunpowder.
Bitcoin is hope. Stay humble and stack sats. There is no second option for freedom.