Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] ossification and misaligned incentive concerns

From: alicexbt <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2023 18:43:18 +0000

Hi Erik,

> currently, there are providers of anonymity services, scaling services, custody, and other services layered on top of bitcoin using trust-based and federated models.
> 
> as bitcoin becomes more popular, these service providers have increasingly had a louder "voice" in development and maintenance of the protocol

> is anyone else worried about this?

Yes. I share your concerns about the growing influence of centralized service providers on Bitcoin's development. Although there is nothing much we can do about it especially 
when trusted, centralized, custodial, federated etc. projects keep getting funded. Only solution is to build better things and be positive.

Example: Everyone is aware of the risks involved in a project that takes custody of funds, provide privacy without KYC. There are several examples from past in which similar 
projects with some volume ended up getting shutdown by governments. With [covenants and statechains][0], it is possible to use bitcoin (p2p ecash) with privacy and involves no custody.

There are other [benefits][1] of payment pools (w/ covenants) in terms of privacy. Hopefully we agree to do soft fork in next year or so.

[0]: https://github.com/AdamISZ/pathcoin-poc
[1]: https://gnusha.org/bitcoin-wizards/2019-05-21.log

/dev/fd0
floppy disk guy

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------- Original Message -------
On Friday, November 3rd, 2023 at 11:54 PM, Erik Aronesty via bitcoin-dev <[email-masked]> wrote:

> currently, there are providers of anonymity services, scaling services, custody, and other services layered on top of bitcoin using trust-based and federated models.
> 
> as bitcoin becomes more popular, these service providers have increasingly had a louder "voice" in development and maintenance of the protocol
> 
> holders generally want these features
> 
> but service providers have an incentive to maintain a "moat" around their services
> 
> in summary, making privacy, scaling and vaulting "hard" for regular users, keeping it off-chain and federated... is now incentivised among a vocal, but highly technical, minority
> 
> is anyone else worried about this?