Oddbean

Listening to @ODELL and @MartyBent , and the argument for supporting Open Sats and bitcoin developers is too strong to ignore supporting the maintenance of the network that backs my #bitcoin . Why doesn’t @saylor and the “bitcoin development company” $mstr appreciate this ? Now there are ETFs, I think there is an argument for share holder activitism, even with the strong argument for mstr over an etf. Thoughts @DrJeff ?

I strongly agree. The only argument that I can think of from @saylor side is he might see any change on the base chain protocol is an danger ro the stability of it. So he might think it shouldn’t be “upgraded”. Do whatever you fancy on layer 2 but leave base-chain as it is. Which is not something I hear debated enough. There is this talk about ordinals and it’s related to this difference in approach. So I can understand if he thinks like this he probably don’t see the point supporting to the biggest threat he can think of. But just to contradict myself I can also see the point where this people actually do their best to keep the network protect against some vulnerabilities it might already possess. Maybe what opensats should do (I think @Gigi is the perfect asset for this) better communicate why BitcoinDevs are important and should be supported. Probably @ODELL and @MartyBent already discussed this but I may be ignorant. Maybe @petermccormack can suggest some good discussions about this.

He has been a huge player in bringing tradfi into bitcoin and showing people through his actions and the actions of his company how great a store of value bitcoin is. There is no doubt in my mind he is a pioneer and overall good for the bitcoin community. But aside from talking about bitcoin and buying and holding bitcoin on his company's balance sheet, how much development has $MSTR contributed to the bitcoin space? Outlook will get PGP with an orange checkmark so there's that win. I think $MSTR will be one of the greatest companies for the next 50 years and know they will do great things for bitcoin.

I asked this once in Saif's telegram group and this is one of the responses I agree with from an austrian economic perspective: "I think I'm with saylor on this. I don't like the culture of Bitcoin development running on donations. I find that to be a massive attack vector, and also a recipe failure. Nothing good gets built by charity. I prefer having professionals handle it. I also prefer if Bitcoin devs invest in Bitcoin and become wealthy and have an incentive to develop Bitcoin to make it better. If they need funding, I prefer if companies or individuals fund them for specific jobs. The culture of glorifying donating for Bitcoin devs is misplaced. This isn't a charity. This is serious business. Donations exert pressure over development and create centralization risks and also create a professional bureaucratic class that has an inordinate say in how Bitcoin is run. I know for example John Newberry has received tons of funding and it did get to his head and he did start acting like the boss of Bitcoin. If saylor were to give out a specific grant for open source devs it would be a risk, it would make him too influential and it could make the devs too powerful. If saylor wants something done, he'll hire a real engineer and not call it a donation.”

Very good points made, but rather than Bitcoin development being about tinkering, “getting one of your upgrades into core”, or implementing what your benefactor wants, how’s about viewing it as maintaining the skills, competences and capabilities to be able to make changes if particular issues arise in the future. If we ossify and developers disband, there will be no one left with the ability, if, in a particular scenario where “Bitcoin had to be saved”