Reply to – 

A u s t i n | Open Source Fitness

@_AustinHerbert

If #bitcoin fails, we’re fucked. But at this point, how does #bitcoin fail? one sentence ↓

My 1 sentence reply – 

Biggest threat to bitcoin is BIPs Messing with the btc code and making it not btc. BIPs should take min of 10 yrs to review/run on another chain first etc. Mostly I’m against BIPs  “Bitcoin Introduce Peril’s”

My longer reply – 

What is the point of a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Protocol)? It is to change the Bitcoin base code that is running on nodes to “improve” Bitcoin in the eyes of the people proposing the improvement. But what needs to be changed with Bitcoin?

The critical things to make Bitcoin Bitcoin are:

21 million coins which supply never increases – That already exists. 

Bitcoin needs to be able to be transferred – This is possible on the base layer. That is the whole point of bitcoin, to transfer value.

These are the only things that are important to bitcoin. Lightning network (allows very small transactions to buy a coffee, etc) is very nice and convenient. But you don’t need it for a currency or store of value. Gold has a market cap that is 10x bitcoin. No one is buying coffee with gold.

I think the Bitcoin community needs to be very skeptical of any BIPs and should really resist most BIPs aggressively. 

The necessary thing for bitcoin is adoption. From all the people I have talked to about bitcoin and money a total of 1 has really understood how money works or the value of a store of value that doesn’t have inflation as a possibility. I think people who are working on BIPs could serve bitcoin much better by teaching people about bitcoin and how it works than trying to change it and potentially destroying it.