Diyana's avatar
Diyana 11 months ago
What are some of the main tradeoff for the future implications of the Bitcoin ecosystem? #asknostr
Mark Camper's avatar Mark Camper
The most spicy question in the hardware wallet space ๐Ÿ™ƒ - Trezor was the first hw wallet, kept the code open source (FOSS) - Coinkite (Coldcard) reused parts of the code to ship their own products, kept the code open source (FOSS) - Foundation came in, took parts of Coldcard code, shipped their own products -> Coinkite didn't like it (market competition, and sense of fairness) -> Coinkite switched their licenses to source-viewable only. Not FOSS anymore (not permitting unrestricted use for commercial purposes by others) -> Lots of discussion about the tradeoffs for the future implications to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
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Relative to the world where anyone could reuse anyone else's code even for commercial purposes, having just the "source-viewable" option is placing obstacles to the entrpreneurial incentives. Let's say you might have idea how to tweak Coldcard to make it a better product for some subset of the market, but it would take some time and money to achieve that. If you're not legally allowed to financially benefit from such new products, then you might as well just not do it, stick with your fiat job, or anything else. On the other hand, there's similar argument as with the IP laws, that if Coinkite wouldn't have a way to protect their market position, they might have not invested their time to develop a Coldcard in the first place. There's a ton of economic theory and real world case studies about these things, there's no chance anyone will ever settle the debates. Imo, ultimately, open source will eat the world. But we won't get there without making some money somewhere in the meantime.
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