A lot of this space, and the things that are being built around it, are basically about emulating the old financial system. There’s not much being built trying to burn new foundations. Micropayments, although I was very critical of it because of the user experience I had to He thinks Around microtransactions all day long, there has been almost no real experience or development in trying to solve this user experience problem at scale.
I’m struggling to think of any truly innovative app. Yes, things like crowdfunding or micropayments in games remove a central point of control that could be used to censor the use cases of these apps, but they still reinvent the wheel. Many projects focus on collateralizing fiat loans or stablecoins with Bitcoin, dollar payment rails on Bitcoin, etc. These are important applications that need to be created if Bitcoin is to be used in commerce, that’s no doubt, but they’re not just things. Possible on Bitcoin.
In some cases, this has implications for the network and the protocol in general if followed to the extreme. In the case of dollar loans collateralized by Bitcoin, for example, it is inevitable that these things will interact with the legacy system. This gives these systems a certain degree of control over those applications, and (in proportion to the amount of activity they conduct on Bitcoin) Bitcoin itself.
Consensus on Bitcoin is not governed by voting, but by participation. that it,. Those actors who actually receive Bitcoin in economic activity, and those who transact and generate revenue for miners. If you’re not doing one of these two things, your node will have no impact on network consensus, especially during a contentious fork or chain fork. This is just the cold truth. Bitcoin users who focus on building applications that leverage or interact with the legacy system give the system we’re trying to escape from a tape installed in Bitcoin the legacy system it can use to take advantage of it.
It is foolish, short-sighted and a huge tactical error.
The way forward is to focus on sustainable applications that do not require that interface, and that can operate completely independently of the legacy system, while still generating revenue for miners and application users and operators. This is the only way forward in terms of encouraging Bitcoin adoption without slowly ceding more and more influence over the network and protocol to the specific types of players we set out to escape in the first place.
To truly thrive outside of the current system, we need markets for digital goods, services, real products, and new types of applications that legacy players will not or cannot replicate and monopolize Bitcoin.
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