Oddbean

"Niche programmers" sounds a bit ad hominem. Not sure what you mean by changing the fundamental nature of Bitcoin; adding opcodes uses a foundational principle of the protocol to extend its functionality. Normal users can't be expected to understand the intricacies of protocol development; if that was a requirement then the protocol would have ossified long ago.

How will you know what you decide to run if you can't understand it first hand ? You'll potentially get targeted by psyops and it's probably why there is so many non-technical people that have an opinion on the matter at the moment. Being slow and thoughtful is a superpower when it comes to that level of engineering.

Basic critical thinking skills. Get info from different sources, compare, contrast, evaluate, try my best to understand. Humans have the capacity to reason about things without needing complete knowledge about every detail. Of course it's possible I could be led astray. This is always a risk. Blindly trusting the experts is also risky. All users should have strong opinions about changes to bitcoin. When someone tells me that my opinion isn't valid because I'm not a dev, that is a huge red flag. I have strong opinions about what software is running on my node. Devs need to accept this and sell me on upgrading, not dismiss it. Otherwise I will most certainly not be upgrading.

I'm not saying your opinion isn't valid. I was inviting people to step back and not react as if their lives were in danger. Opinions on the topic are mostly emotional at the moment. There is no need to rush, bitcoin will not cease to work suddenly lol Peace ✌️

From what I understand, smooth L2 (as in 1 tx to start, stop, revert vs several tx) can happen with one opcode. Optional. Without it, bitcoin l2 is very limited. My nodes will likely run new opcode,.assume futures are in favor.

A lot of people who propose changes to bitcoin script 1) disagree with each other on which changes to do and 2) have a different view than what they had a year ago. To me, this is indicative of a design space and risk/reward analysis that is not fully mapped out yet. As discussion and development continue, people rapidly change their view on what the best way to proceed is. People often point to recent events to support their view. So for example, the fee spikes associated with Ordinals/BRC-20, and then more recently Runes, are currently used as reasons to accelerate base layer change proposals. That's a way to drum up emotional support and create a sense of urgency. But for example, if you took a snapshot of which script changes were most popular a year ago vs today, you'd have a different set for the most part. That sense of emotional urgency tries to lock in whatever the current thing is, even if a year from now the current thing is different based on ongoing development and discussion. I don't mean niche programmers as an ad hominem. I mean developers of proposed scaling methods that are likely niche or at least not demonstrated yet to have broad demand, and want to change the base layer quickly with widespread agreement that a change is safe. And not everyone has to understand a change, but to get miners and node operators on board, it does take a pretty broad conviction.

None of the people pushing for changes, that I’ve seen, have adequately explained why systems like Liquid, Lightning, or even something like Stacks are incapable of scaling usage and permitting more smart contracts.