DooMAD
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Leave no FUD unchallenged
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April 03, 2018, 03:23:14 PM
Last edit: April 03, 2018, 03:38:15 PM by DooMAD Merited by Mometaskers (2) |
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The first thing to consider is how many of these "features" actually provide tangible, real world applications and which ones are merely marketing gimmicks. The second consideration is what trade-offs or compromises had to be made to implement the "features" to begin with and whether any security risks were introduced in the process. The third and final point you need to consider is whether the coin itself actually has a future, since we've seen thousands of coins claiming all sorts of "features" that have subsequently vanished without a trace because the developers either lost interest or realised their seemingly bright idea didn't actually work in practice.
If there is something genuinely innovative and practical that works without sacrificing anything important, someone, given sufficient time and testing, will eventually find a way to incorporate it either in Bitcoin itself, or in a layer that works on top of Bitcoin. 'Smart Contracts', for example, won't be on layer 0. That's something you build on top. Generally, altcoins are a great testbed for trying out new features, but sadly not all of them will be worth implementing. It's also true that there will inevitably be some features that, while they might genuinely be useful in some circumstances, won't ever be implemented in Bitcoin due to being fundamentally incompatible with the general ethos of Bitcoin.
At this precise moment in time, I can't think of any features I'm looking for that aren't already in the pipeline and being actively developed. I'm certainly intrigued by other concepts like Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), Proof of Capacity (PoC), along with other such things and hold a few altcoins that are built around such innovations, but I don't expect Bitcoin to cater to those radically different concepts if they clearly don't fit. Too many sacrifices would need to be made and we'd never find consensus for it anyway, so there's little point in trying unless you want to end up on a fork with a very small (or possibly even non-existent) userbase.
Always remember that if you want to make any significant changes to the protocol, you have to get everyone who uses the protocol to agree. Also the foundations have to be solid and secure, so we can't screw about trying to add too many new features there. Hence why layers built on top is where most of the new features will be added. This way, users can simply opt in and use whichever layer has their desired features. It's all a work in progress and much more is yet to come. Believe it or not, we're still quite early in the overall development cycle.
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