haha, good point that the way someone talks about Bitcoin tells you a lot about them

(works the other way too: if someone is a hardcore Keynesian, it's bonkers to listen to them talk about what Bitcoin is and why it has value)

re: Bitcoin Maximalism and "first to market"...

It's a different concept than how products and companies come to market.

I think of Bitcoin as "discovered" rather than built or created. Satoshi discovered a mathematical property that was natural to our world.

It's the property of how you can pass information in a way that's authentic and without 3rd party oversight.

Like the wheel or anything else, there isn't an improvement on that property.

The discovery itself is just perfect.

Then you name and pick the specs that the network will use. These are arbitrary to the creator and could have issues.

But the improved specs would have to have some material difference. (People won't switch networks because supply of 24 million has a prettier buzz to it or something. Only if the new spec caused a materially better outcome.)

So then it's a question of if there exists any issue like that where there's room for something like this to be a thing.

And then.. if some improvement or issue is clear enough to move a critical mass to a new network, it would be clear what Bitcoin needs. And hopefully then they'd soft fork it into Bitcoin rather than the migration happens.

The mechanics of it oddly seem to dictate that it's trenched in pretty good.

We do need to settle on one chain at some point. No one will trust it enough to build things on it and train their companies to accept it and store wealth in it if it seems like it will switch to whatever hawt new thing next week.

So I tend to think everyone should have a "maximalist" view of whatever network they're saying to use.