jimmysong on Nostr: On Ossification ============= *These were my prepared opening remarks on the ...

On Ossification
=============

*These were my prepared opening remarks on the Ossification Debate I had with @lopp at the Lugano Plan B Forum. It is published here for posterity.*

Thank you to Plan B, the city of Lugano and everyone here for this opportunity to speak about this very important topic. It's an honor to be here and I hope to do my side justice.

Since the beginning people have had two predominant and wrong views of Bitcoin. The first is economic, that Bitcoin is not money for one reason or another. This error is usually made by economists and their followers, some even of the Austrian school. They reject Bitcoin because it does not fit their conception of what money is supposed be. Bitcoin obviously is money, and the 15 years of history disproves their theories so we don't need to refute this error here.

The second is that of Bitcoin primarily being a technology. This error is usually made by technologists because the innovations that they've seen in their lifetime are generally technical in nature. They are the proverbial hammer wielder thinking everything is a nail. Like other technologies they've seen, say mobile phones or apps, they think that it's a race to build new features and to win is to beat the competition through changes.

But this is a serious error and indeed is the main argument given by altcoiners and their ignorant investors thinking that a better mousetrap is what will win. 13 years of altcoin history also dispels this myth. Faster block times, different proof-of-work algorithms, more expressive but more buggy smart contract languages, alternative consensus systems, and much more have been tried but none of these features have gained much long-term traction let alone threaten to dethrone Bitcoin. More features are not what make money better.

To illustrate, go through this thought experiment with me. Imagine that the Federal Reserve added technology features into the dollar, for example, faster settlement times, expressive smart contracts, and even privacy, would those features make it better than Bitcoin? Would you switch to it? Obviously not because they can and do change the monetary policy all the time. In other words, features are not what make Bitcoin better. Bitcoin is better money, not just better technology.

Bitcoin is money first and technology second and it neither needs centralized management nor new features for adoption. Indeed, it's better for money to *not* change. The reason why the classical gold standard worked so well was because gold didn't change. In fact the properties of gold are such that it's fairly hard to change it, either at a macro level, where its supply expands at around 2% per year, or at the micro level where it's non-reactive and extremely durable. Money that doesn't change is better because people who own it can plan more effectively for the future. Nobody likes a game where the rules keep changing, particularly if it's designed to pick winners and losers.

This principle that money is better when it doesn't change is the basis of my stance in this debate. We want money to be predictable, so that when the unpredictable happens, we can use the slack afforded by our savings to get us out of unpleasant situations. So my bias toward ossification is derived from this principle. Bitcoin's value proposition is that it is sound money and sound money works best when its properties are known and predictable.

That's not to say that I don't want anything to change or be built. Just do them on other layers. It's for this reason that I don't like the word ossification. Ossification is a weird word to be using because the mental picture you get is of a fossil, something old, worn and no longer living. I think a better picture is that of a house foundation. We are building a whole new monetary system, and for that it's important to have a trustworthy and stable foundation to build on. And indeed, that's how I view the layer 1 of the Bitcoin protocol. It's the monetary foundation. You can build other things on top like Lightning, eCash, Sidechains, Ark, Statechains and the rest. The foundation underneath all of these layers must be stable and predictable for those innovations to mature.

We don't want to be changing the foundation because at this point millions of people are depending on it. The threshold for changing a house's foundation should be fairly high because it is a very difficult process and you may be damaging things built on top. Similarly, Bitcoin's foundation needs to be set so that other layers can have a chance to be built, to mature and to refine.

That said, I will concede that there are some really cool things from a technological perspective that you can build if you add a new OP code, for example. But that's not enough for me. It's not enough for a feature to be interesting, I need to see why a feature is *imminent* and *necessary*. If some critical cryptographic primitive is broken, that would necessitate change because the compromise of the system is imminent and presumably there are no other ways to fix the problem. To further my analogy, such an event would be like a destabilizing crack in the house's foundation, and though it's an invasive and difficult task, a destabilizing crack would justify repairs. But as I said, that's a massive cost to the entire ecosystem and should only be considered in a situation where there's grave danger to the entire system.

What is not enough is something that's necessary but not imminent. For example, we will need something to take care of the timestamp block header problem, but that's not until 2106. We don't have to solve that problem right now. What's also not enough is something imminent but not necessary. Some regulation that bans exchanges from sending to certain addresses may be imminent, but unnecessary. For me, imminent and necessary are the criteria.

In conclusion, what I view as important are Bitcoin's properties as money and the bar for change at this point, given how much value the network has, is pretty high. And I get the developer's perspective. They want new toys to play with, new primitives to work with. But the design space of Bitcoin hasn't been close to explored yet with features we already have. Between Segwit and Taproot, we have a crazy array of possibilities, as is being shown through BitVM, Ark and FROST. Changing things to satisfy the developers is the wrong motive, just as changing things to satisfy the Bitcoin businesses during the blocksize wars of 2017 was the wrong motive. Our priority should be Bitcoin as money. Not Bitcoin as art gallery, or decentralized exchange or digital archive.

I mentioned earlier that the error of many people that approach Bitcoin from an economics angle is to dismiss Bitcoin because of loyalty to an economic belief. Such an attitude comes from not just wrong economic beliefs, but also technical ignorance. I would implore you to not make the opposite error, which is to dismiss the economic and monetary reality of Bitcoin in favor of perceived technical benefits.

Bitcoin belongs to the community of people that own Bitcoin, not the economists and not the technologists. It is this community, you in this audience that Bitcoin belongs to and it is your needs are what Bitcoin need to serve. Setting a firm foundation is the path to doing exactly that.