"There's a world where Bitcoiners get rich and the protocol is totally neutered. We'll be telling our grandkids a tragic story where we fumbled the greatest opportunity to take money away from the sta...
Eh I get everyone's vigilance here, but the biggest risk is that instead of taking money from the state we just use bitcoin as collateral instead of money. All this lending to get more fiat to spend will ensure that the control remains firmly in the hands of those with control of the money printer(s). You don't kill fiat by continuing to put a bid under fiat. Even Mauricio has referred to taking loans as "your own money printer" -- you can't kill the money printer and use it too.
Bitcoin itself on the other hand is not particularly at risk of being co-opted as far as I see except with the one big risk being miner centralization. Even this doesn't leave it risking inflation or any of that nonsense, but it does risk censorship. Things like the Mined in America Act should be outright rejected as an attack to centralize mining further through government subsidization with a high likelihood of OFAC compliance strings attached.
Beyond that, stay vigilant about actual protocol changes. 110 isn't even quite important enough to be that worried about, though the default should be only make changes that are thoroughly thought through and that provide necessary functionality. We shouldn't seek to completely stop growing by any means as scaling is not a fully solved problem yet, but every upgrade should be viewed with a critical eye. Part of doing that of course requires understanding what we're criticizing -- the lack of understanding that's come up in the BIP-110 clusterfuck is concerning, but thankfully, at the end of the day, the network doesn't just do whatever the loudest people who decided to run bitcoind.exe say it should. Nonetheless, more capable guardians of the network is better than fewer, and cutting through the noise is increasingly important.
Bitcoin itself on the other hand is not particularly at risk of being co-opted as far as I see except with the one big risk being miner centralization. Even this doesn't leave it risking inflation or any of that nonsense, but it does risk censorship. Things like the Mined in America Act should be outright rejected as an attack to centralize mining further through government subsidization with a high likelihood of OFAC compliance strings attached.
Beyond that, stay vigilant about actual protocol changes. 110 isn't even quite important enough to be that worried about, though the default should be only make changes that are thoroughly thought through and that provide necessary functionality. We shouldn't seek to completely stop growing by any means as scaling is not a fully solved problem yet, but every upgrade should be viewed with a critical eye. Part of doing that of course requires understanding what we're criticizing -- the lack of understanding that's come up in the BIP-110 clusterfuck is concerning, but thankfully, at the end of the day, the network doesn't just do whatever the loudest people who decided to run bitcoind.exe say it should. Nonetheless, more capable guardians of the network is better than fewer, and cutting through the noise is increasingly important.