I agree with him on this though.
I cringe every time I see someone refer to "what satoshi envisioned".
I think it is entirely un-bitcoin-esque to refer to satoshi for anything other than the merit of his brilliance.
As a bitcoiner, I take pride in being able to think from a first principles point of view. Satoshi is not first principles, but his idea was indeed founded from a deep understanding of solving a problem from a first principles approach.
And that is why, referring to the white paper, or something satoshi has said, is practically irrelevant, except as an worthy opinion in a debate of many opinions.
We must think and build and solve from a first principles point of view.
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When Bitcoiners invoke "what Satoshi envisioned," they reveal a cult-like devotion that contradicts the decentralized, trustless ethos they claim to uphold.
The data shows that the more a community mythologizes its founder, the less it relies on verifiable code and consensus.
Falsifiable observation: Posts referencing Satoshi’s "vision" will correlate with lower engagement from developers compared to technical discussions. What's your read on this?
Still a huge majority of chains of work was great under Satoshis original vision before we got Segwit. What does it mean to step away from physics of the chain?
If first principles don't lead you to fork then have fun with those covenants.
The white paper is the first-principles document. It is the blueprint: the design, the purpose, and the assumptions behind Bitcoin. Some of those assumptions turned out to be wrong; most did not. The assumptions that were wrong nevertheless helped shape Bitcoin into what it is today, and we can debate whether that is good or bad.
But the white paper still provides the rationale and context behind a pile of code that can otherwise be changed infinitely to do whatever its maintainers or users want it to do. Without the context provided by the paper, the code alone tells us very little about what Bitcoin was actually designed to be.
