Same problem with devs now as with politicians. Got to be seen to be doing something. Got to stamp their mark. Pointless braindead fuckers. The only changes bitcoin needed, pre taproom, were to security if anything arose and to reducing the technical debt of running a node. Nothing else.

That is probably our biggest mistake. Op_return was the straw that broke the camel's back, so that's what got most of the attention. But Taproot was the real Bitcoin killer.

We’d still be absolutely fine without Segwit and, by extension, Lightning network. We could’ve spent the last 9 years figuring out ways to make L2s without such a dramatic change to Bitcoin. 1MB blocks are still enough.

I did support Taproot, but I was very new in the space at the time. With the knowledge I had then it would have been very difficult for me to fact check any of the claims being made about it. The Bitcoin pods I was listening to only described it as a privacy and scalability upgrade to script. I didn't understand it was adding an entirely new cryptographic primitive besides ECDSA. And obviously nobody mentioned Inscriptions. So I'm sorry about that, but I'll qualify the apology by saying I had honest intentions and it was the best I was capable of at the time.

Plebs have the least to apologize for. Then influencers. Then devs and their funders.

thats the main reason none of this really matters... it was two degen chains figuring out who gets degen title... thebitcoin.foundation that IS the REAL #bitcoin but the whale, both intellectual and stack wise, who wielded the influence "drowned" in 2021-2... now its just all degens.

Segwit discount / witness field also left the door open to inscriptions 12 years after the Roger ver era when tons of merchants actually did accept Bitcoin payments, people still don't use it as money, but ETFs and mstr are growing, is that because of some technical property of bitcoin? There's basically no market demand for any of bitcoin's features, we've been at 1sat/vB for like 3 years now

the masses are here. and they are retarded. thebitcoin.foundation the real battle happened 12 years ago. the losers lost, so they just soft-forked segwit in... but then MP died and now there is just shadows and prayers.

I feel a lot of this has to do with the fact that most UTXOs are KYC'd, tracked, and taxed. How can anybody want to pay with Bitcoin given that then one needs to report it to fiscal authorities? Massive hurdle

Are you thinking about BIP300/BIP301 by any chance?

I supported taproot for the wrong reasons, to prove that bitcoin can respond to market-driven need for changes, and those reasons turned out to be co-opted by the mining cartel, so what drew me back into bitcoin turned out to be a puppet show.

If devs actually implemented UX enhancing features like Bolt 12, instead of giving people's coin to Diem, perhaps people would see utility in using it as money.

Yes, this. Funders centralized the incentives for devs and influencoors

You are correct. But I think they would have attacked in a different way. Spam attack works in a quite fabian way, gamifying spam, use peoples resources to attack the network and slowly introduce all kinds of non-monetrya use cases. Then make non-monetary case the standard. So we were the boiling frogs. But I do think that if it wasn't taproot it will be another attack vector. And we do see the other attack vectors - digital credit, attack on cold storage, attack on Bitcoin culture, attack on the definition of what Bitcoin is, attack on the Core devs who introduced Taproot and did not fix it ...

In Switzerland it's not taxed and nobody want to pay in Bitcoin. Even in Lugano were Tether and the city gave hundreds of Bitcoin PoS, making it one of the biggest concentration of Bitcoin accepting merchants and services, it's not really used.

This is a very good point, thanks for bringing it up. What's your idea on why this is the case?