Oddbean

I think the case could be made at that point, but I think the issue will be moot by then anyway. It’ll be like IPv6, everyone will say it’s needed, but we’ll never need it, and there will still be new and better ways to accomplish the same thing, and then we’ll probably have another paradigm shift in cryptography or who knows what with layers on top (like Nostr and pear are likely to remake the web), and then we will be so excited and busy with that, that a hard fork for higher tps just won’t be worth all the trouble. Thats at least how I picture it in my mind. We usually suck at predicting the future and people come up with bonkers stuff that seemed impossible in a shockingly short amount of time.

Largely agree. I think colored coins are going to grow in utility and popularity, because they create free markets on bitcoin base layer. We see in the real world that free markets are major use case. It's something that could be as big as bitcoin itself, just if you look at the dematerialization of what exists in the financial world. So an expanded middle section of the mempool would facilitate this, increase security budget, decrease fees for L2 and onboarding, and keep the network sufficiently decentralized. I agree alot will change in the next, say 4 years, simply because AI will mature and affect so many things. AI will also incrase demand for block space. Important to remember that one of the main reasons for decentralized node network is to ensure that the coins were emitted as a level playing field. After that is 99% accomplished, so much more is possible.