How Not To Critique Bitcoin

A quick defense of moving slow and not breaking things.

After publishing my latest article, I received some pushback about Bitcoin’s flexibility. This viewpoint is best expressed by Paddy’s tweetstorm here and parts of Daniel Goldman’s article here. This is a quick response, but it needs to be said.

More opcodes more problems.

Their view holds that Bitcoin’s simple and conservative baselayer is a major hinderance to developing smart contracts on layer two. It is an understandable view. There are many cool features in the pipeline for Bitcoin, and many of them are already written, but we still don’t have them! However, patience is a virtue. It may be tempting to add as many features as quickly as possible, but when dealing with an entirely new global monetary system, its important to be extremely cautious — this may be our only shot at changing the world! Recall that we’ve had a potential inflation bug from something as simple as a routine optimization. If Bitcoin fails, the dream of digital sound money may be dead for decades.

Returning to the contracts analogy, it might seem great to have a judge that can make decisions in a variety of fields, but only so long as they have sufficient expertise. After all, a judge is no good if their decisions can’t be relied upon…