sorry, but i don't agree with his assessment. precisely b/c it leaves out an understanding that the money function will get deprecated in deference to the speculative assets riding on the SC's which distract from the mechanism which has brought us to where we are today. the BTC price will drop if SC's are implemented, imo.
If by mechanism you mean mining I can see the possibility of harm and I've generally been on board with the trepidation on that front. But simply having stocks or whatever denominated in Bitcoin ledger units (whether actual bitcoins or perfect you-can-never-lose-the-2wp sidechain coins) seems fine since that's part of what money/ledger is supposed to do. I don't know that it's necessary for people to understand sound money in order to benefit from it, as long as it does take over. Anyway, if the pile on the right in the pic you've been posting (money, store of value, Forex) is way bigger than speculative assets, how can such distraction really happen?
is it what Bitcoins ledger was designed to do? this is why i put this post up earlier. granted, it doesn't say it WASN'T designed to do it either but my point is that we risk everything if we're wrong:
Are you mainly saying that the incentive structures for mining change in unpredictable ways if speculative assets are built straight into the money itself, rather than those assets simply being denominated in the money, like how the DOW is denominated in dollars? If that's what you're saying, I might agree. I'm not sure I see any problem with the incentives, but I also can't rule out a problem. The precautionary principle. This would extend to things like Counterparty, yes?
Wait, I'm pretty sure you said before that it's fine for things to be built on top of Bitcoin. So I'm confused about whether your argument here is just an extension of your "Bitcoin will only ever be used as money" thesis or whether it's specific to sidechains due to merge mining or for some other reason.