First -- fascinating essay, thanks for sharing.
Second -- top level point about Ethereum vs Bitcoin, I think part of the issue is, because Ethereum is designed as a Turing-complete protocol, you CAN take far more risks. Bitcoin at the protocol level is by design meant to be somewhat "conservative" -- a limited scripting language for things like multisig, etc, but nothing more complicated than that.
But, as I suspect you're arguing on a cultural level BItcoin has become less "deviant" -- I can see this, as we've discussed in the past, Bitcoin's current "center-Right" cultural and political alignment means that it tends to elevate a sort of pro-American, pro-natalist narrative....
But Bitcoin's still "dangerous." Keone Rodriguez was just jailed for writing Bitcoin code.
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Ad Bitcoin design - When you want to do something complex (like a decentralized financial system), it makes sense to start with a limited minimal design and then iterate to what you want to achieve. Bitcoin could have become turning-complete, or a turing-complete L2 could have emerged instead of Lightning. In my opinion, the bitcoin community gave up on this path too early and radically, and that opened the way for Ethereum.
But yeah, you are of course right, the fact that anyone can deploy any smart contract (or create a new market) is the basis of the deviance, these things are very difficult on Bitcoin.
btw, big things can be done at the protocol level too, the switch from PoW to PoS was one of the most fascinating things I have experienced in crypto :)
On the PoS switch -- yes, that kind of fundamental change terrifies Bitcoiners.
I'm OK with that because I like the idea of a world where BTC and ETH coexist, and these have different communities with different values.
So is ETH completely PoS now?
