It's already changed the system.



Sure, bitcoin is a changing the system in progress - like the gradually and then suddenly kind of phenomenon in which it remains quite likely difficult as fuck to actually recognize or appreciate any kind of change that bitcoin has actually caused or contributed towards causing, except amongst a circle of computer nerds, like the demographic of the earlier stages of adopters, so yeah it could take years and years and years for regular people to take a stake in bitcoin or to find some kind of use case in which they actually believe that there is value, beyond speculation.  Nonetheless, adoption and use cases and even ease of use continues to expand, expand and expand, and pretty soon the neighbor finds out that he can process his gym membership and related activities through bitcoin's lightning network and get half off or some silly thing like that, and pretty soon he says what the fuck, and buys .05BTC so that he can have that available for his gym membership and even use that amount for a few years without even worrying about payment processing and various kinds of matters like that because each time he goes to the gym or participates in an otherwise related activity (a marathon or a MMA attendance or a concert or a movie, or when he eats at certain select restaurants that are in that system), he just scans payment from his phone and does not even think about it further.

So, yeah, it could take 10 years or even more for those various kinds of systems to develop or to be built upon bitcoin (or to be tethered or federated to bitcoin) but likely they are going to come with the passage of time and the multitude of developments, including lightning network, liquid and other affiliated bitcoin systems.



Why does it matter?  If there are systems that end up having value, then a way will be found.  It's a variation of the old saying, build a better mouse trap and they will come.  For sure, bitcoin is the best mouse trap, but not too many people realize that, yet... no need to rush.. the gravitation is likely to continue to happen because there is a system of decentralized computers all over the world that continue to back up bitcoin and no one has control over it... so even if there are a bunch of people who use a system (let's say defi) and they only put $2-$5 on such system, and if there start to become 10s of millions of people using such system, it becomes a kind of honeypot, and who the fuck is going to want to keep such value on ethereum or tethered to ethereum when they cannot even figure out what ethereum is.. It surely is not secure and it sure is a bunch of gobbledy-gook smoke and mirrors... Yeah, sure, now millions of snot-nosed 14 years olds might be willing to put their $2-$5 into various ethereum systems, but in the end, there remains a need for the kind of decentralized immutable security that bitcoin really offers rather than some bullshit imitation system that really does not have what it proclaims to have - which is the securing of the underlying value from various kinds of base-level chicanery, whether the mishaps are intentional or unintentional..


I am not negating the value of that.  It is just not sound money, but there surely remains value to having a variety of experiments as long as you recognize that they are not the real thing.  Personally, my main problems come from when they are making proclamations that they are the future blah blah blah and denigrating bitcoin along the way in order to pump their bullshit and using those projects as money printing machines... but sure, I don't have any problems with the facts that those systems are being worked on and attempting to be pushed out to the public in various kinds of attempting to find use cases ways.


You are not going to get any argument from me regarding your various points here...   We might not even really recognize some of the possible use cases that end up coming out of such experiments, and sure, it is possible that they might be built on other platforms for 20-30 years before they gravitate into bitcoin, and likely at that time several of us might be dead and we cannot even say whether we were correct or not.  We do not necessarily need to be correct in order to decide our own level and kind of participation that each of us chooses for today.  We might invest our time, psychology and money based on a 1-10 year timeline, and even if we are 5 years into our investment, we can choose to change our various investments based on our own circumstances, including changes in our views that might be (likely to be) somewhat different down the road. 

Bitcoin is a bit different for me now, as compared to 6 years ago, even if I have largely stayed invested financially, my understanding and my comfort has changed, and I have complete discretion whether I change my strategy or largely stick with a strategy that I had incrementally tweaked along the way in the last 6 years.  For me, it has not been "all or nothing" but some people prefer to think of bitcoin in that kind of way, and that may or may not work out too well for them.  I personally, don't feel hardly any need to hedge some of my bet into various shitcoin projects, but I am not going to totally denigrate someone else who does hedge into various side projects and tries to build those aspects of the ecosystem unless their practice is to denigrate/negate bitcoin while they are doing it and/or try to act like their project is a kind of bitcoin 2.0 or engage what I believe to be misrepresentations, when instead it might merely be some kind of interesting side-project in which it is o.k. to have a variety of people working on those kinds of side-projects (not like you can stop people from doing what they are going to do or that it is even desirable to attempt to stop them from working on what they do or even having various kinds of seemingly pie in the sky detached from reality visions regarding the speculative importance of their project(s)).