Too much of this space, and the things being built around it, is essentially centered around emulating the old financial system. Not much is being built to conquer new territory. Micropayments, although something I have admittedly been very critical of because of the user experience of having to think about small transactions all day long, has seen almost no real experimentation or development in trying to solve that UX problem at scale.
I’m struggling to think of an application that is truly innovative. Yes, things like crowdfunding or micropayments in games take away a central point of control that can be used to censor use cases of these applications, but they are still reinventing the wheel. Numerous projects are aimed at providing collateral for fiat or stablecoin loans with Bitcoin, dollar payment rails on Bitcoin, etc. These are important applications that need to be built if Bitcoin is to be used in commerce, that is indisputable, but they are not things that are only possible on Bitcoin.
In some cases this will impact the overall network and protocol if taken to the extreme. For example, in the case of Bitcoin-backed dollar loans, it is inevitable that these things will be connected to the old system. This gives these systems a degree of control over those applications, and (relative to the amount of activity on Bitcoin they come up with) Bitcoin itself.
Consensus on Bitcoin is not determined by votes, but by participation. That is to say,. the actors who actually receive bitcoin in economic activities, and those who conduct transactions and generate revenue for miners. If you don’t do either of these two things, your node will have no impact on the network consensus, especially during the event of a chainsplit or controversial fork. That’s just the cold reality. Bitcoiners who focus on building applications that leverage or interface with the old system only give the system we are trying to escape a barrier that is wedged into Bitcoin and can use the old system to leverage against it.
It is foolish, short-sighted and a major tactical error.
The way forward is to focus on sustainable applications that don’t need that interface, that can function completely independently of the existing system, while still generating revenue for miners and application users and operators. This is the only way to encourage Bitcoin adoption without slowly ceding more and more influence over the network and protocol to the exact types of players we wanted to avoid in the first place.
To truly thrive outside the existing system, we need markets for digital goods, for services, for real products, for new types of applications that older players are unwilling or unable to clone and monopolize for Bitcoin.