I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been finding the zeitgeist in Bitcoin a bit incoherent: every second idea that’s brought up is treated as either essential or an imminent disaster, and yet a few weeks later everyone who was so excited/enraged has moved onto some different idea to be excited/enraged about. Personally, I like to be able to use popular opinion as something of a safety check that I’m not getting too caught up in the weeds on things I think are technically cool, but that don’t actually matter — problem is, that’s not very effective when everyone else is getting caught up in the weeds worrying about things that don’t actually matter.

So I guess that means going to my back up plan, and looking at things from first principles: what’s Bitcoin actually good for, why are we doing any of this, and what will actually help with that? I’ve thought about that previously in terms of monetary theory — money’s for saving (store of value), or money’s for paying for things (medium of exchange), or money’s for writing out values in contracts (unit of account). But while that’s a nice framework for many things, it’s also perhaps a bit abstract if you’re looking to figure out concrete priorities.