How to ensure Bitcoin's future is bright? Bitcoin faces two opposing threats: ossification (not enough change) and the opposite -- too much change. How to ensure it manages these threats? Ossification means not enough is being built. - Bitcoin is software, and all software needs maintenance. - There's very limited functionality within Bitcoin itself: You can only use it for paying Bitcoin. And while you don't want to do everything directly on Bitcoin, you do want a Bitcoin economy and its supporting infrastructure (like Starknet) to have a Bitcoin-level security. - Anther threat from ossification is not being prepared well enough in case of a quantum computing breakthrough. - Another concern is ossification from having too much Bitcoin, or too much mining, in the hands of a very small number of actors. That will defeat the decentralization which is the only thing that makes Bitcoin truly censorship resistant and Free. If only one party runs a mining rig, or only one party holds most of the Bitcoin, it'll cease being Freedom Tech and Resistance money. Too much change is also bad -- things could break. - Security could be breached. Any change to Bitcoin and its $2T size economy will necessarily have winners and losers, and doing things quickly may lead to imbalance of power. - Worse, it could lead to fragmentation of consensus, with different teams fighting about Who's the Real Bitcoin. How to solve this tension? There's no simple answer. 1. We need just a wee bit more movement towards change, allowing long discussed soft forks like op_CTV, op_CSFH, op_CAT. 2. We need research, so that down the line we'll have op_QUANT and op_STARK, to ensure Bitcoin's security and post-quantum safety remain valid and support the safety of the Bitcoin Economy that'll be built on side chains. I'm optimistic we'll get there, even if recently (the past 4 years) we've leaned a bit too much towards ossification. We need to move a tad more in direction of change. THE END.