Set in Stone

Bitcoin was designed from the start to be a form of stable money, that is: it has a set amount, not that you can buy a set quantity of anything with it.

 

If you alter money, you always change the rules of the game.” You cannot change Bitcoin without subsidising one party and taking from another. Any change is less than a zero-sum game. The party seeking change (may) win, but only and always at the overall expense of the system and the majority of the people using it. This is the key problem with fiat as we have it now. This is what Bitcoin was designed to stop.

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime. Because of that, I wanted to design it to support every possible transaction type I could think of. The problem was, each thing required special support code and data fields whether it was used or not, and only covered one special case at a time. It would have been an explosion of special cases. The solution was script, which generalizes the problem so transacting parties can describe their transaction as a predicate that the node network evaluates. The nodes only need to understand the transaction to the extent of evaluating whether the sender’s conditions are met.

The purpose of Bitcoin was always to create sound money. It is not anonymous, and it is not designed to facilitate anarchy and destroy the state, it is simply and most critically a means to have a P2P electronic cash system that cannot be debased.

I don’t believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network.

The system is controlled by CPU (hash) power, and it is not a democracy. The original version of Bitcoin was designed with all that was needed, and:

This is a design where the majority version wins if there’s any disagreement, and that can be pretty ugly for the minority version and I’d rather not go into it, and I don’t have to as long as there’s only one version.

Bitcoin SV will return Bitcoin to what it was supposed to be, from the start and at 0.1.

Then, we scale to the world.



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