Thread by @jgarzik

1/ Snowden notices part of what's wrong with #Bitcoin governance and development.

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1391076836734611457

2/ As I've observed over a decade of #Linux development and another decade in #blockchain, crypto and infosec folks often hyper focus on security to the point where people are turned off from the product, or simply stop waiting for a promised future and move on.

3/ #Bitcoin's lodestone is that it's difficult to build on, and it's developers are focusing on features unlikely to have a visible impact on most existing or future holders. Fancy, well engineered plumbing which does not really change user outcomes.

4/ The #Bitcoin crowd is gearing up to celebrate a feature which will be activated in November 2021, yet not fully integrated or absorbed into developer libraries or user-facing software for months or years after that.

5/ "Never let the MENSA people run the world."
For all the BTC wizards in the room, they miss basics that every community college MBA knows by heart:
- Time to market matters.
- Build things that people use.
- Look at what people do and don't use in what you built.

6/ #Bitcoin development expends an enormous amount of energy on tiny, incremental, esoteric technical features that are often entirely speculative as to whether they will actually reach production in end user-facing wallet deployment.

7/ Most of the practical world has moved on. Stablecoins, new crypto projects, new permissionless financial products happen elsewhere. Even bitcoiners turn to #Ethereum #DeFi, to create interest bearing #Bitcoin products.

8/ Like HTTPS everywhere, economic #privacy should be a fundamental default in Bitcoin.
Devs are pro-privacy, sure, but that's not translating into consumer facing privacy.
See also: well meaning anti-nuke environmentalists prolonged fossil fuel use and pollution for decades.