* many risks to that strategy but if life forms don’t evolve they become extinct

I haven't listened to the podcast (but may give it a try). So this is only responding to your brief comment here, and playing Devil's advocate. 1. Bitcoin is not a life-form and thus does not need to evolve to avoid going extinct 2. Bitcoin is an intellectually created system of abstraction, with some technology incorporated to prevent it from (easily) being changed 3. Synthesizing points 1&2, Bitcoin can not change (or 'evolve') by itself. It needs collective (consensus) human agency to change. As its collective value and worldly 'weight' increases, the core features of Bitcoin are probably less likely to change, except when there is broad consensus that any change has become absolutely necessary. Indeed, I've seen it argued that after the first block had been mined in January 2009, the design of Bitcoin had been essentially 'set' for all time.

All logical - 3 is a strong point to my cocktail based rambling. My bias is to think of Bitcoin in biology terms because that’s when I first encountered game theory. Through that lens I had my first “oh sh**” moment when reading about Bitcoin. I think that software needs to improve and change to stay relevant but I need to distinguish protocol from regular software. Thanks for the reply.

Biology & ecology is a really rich field of study and some of its lessons have been brought across into machine learning, where solutions to a problem are allowed to 'mutate' and compete with each other and only the fittest 'live on' while the others are culled (and the cycle continues). So yes, a kind of evolution. But I don't think biological/ecological metaphors and language such as 'evolve' are of much use in discussing conventional software development. I can't think of a conventional software package that I've used that has evolved. Normally the function of the package is quite clearly defined at the start and the software only gets refined (hopefully) and extra useful features added. Plus bug fixes. But the core functionality almost invariably remains. And I expect this to be the case with Bitcoin, especially, as you point out, as it becomes a base layer protocol (that other layers depend and build upon). Finally, re game theory, Bitcoin itself is not subject to game theory. (This is one of the mistakes that altcoin developers made, that there would be a competitive 'game' between competing coins.) Bitcoin can not be outcompeted. Game theory only happens within the Bitcoin space, ie between miners, node runners, coin hodlers, etc