I suppose whether or not it deprecates the money function comes down to the exact nature of the change to the protocol.
"Devs gotta dev" means we should see more and more big projects doing amazing futuristic things that really end up going nowhere since they are way too advanced. It also presumably means VCs and other investors will "follow the shiny thing" until it burns them enough (too many investments in Bitcoin 2.0 that vaporize), and that could be what Austin Hill is doing now. However, it seems you're worried about the collateral damage in the meantime. Is that right?
yes.
and i think SC's deviate from Satoshi's original vision for Bitcoin as Money. a digital gold standard so to speak.
I'm still wondering why things like Counterparty don't mess up the mining incentives. If a huge amount of stock value is riding on Bitcoin doesn't that potentially make an attack more attractive than the miners can get paid to defend against (since they're only getting paid based on the bitcoin price, rather than all the stock value)?
Also, I can see that SCs could mean miners don't get paid enough in tx fees in the future, but couldn't the same problem arise from off-chain transaction mechanisms in general?
I adressed this notion here, not sure if you saw it.
From my point of view. SPVP Sidechains that enable merged-mining are in fact bringing balance to this issue of transaction fees emigrating to different, off-chain schemes.
So far the only option to accomodate transactions types that are not implementable in the mainchain had been these off-chain schemes that effectively present this very danger of moving transactions off-chain and out of reach of potentially underfunded miners.
SPVP Sidechains will not negate this aspect but they introduce an alternative for the market. The likely outcome is that any chain that gain significant adoption from the market and therefore require the "ultimate" security model will be picked up by miners and that way these transactions will not "escape" them.
This is why I argue that lost incentives to off-chain schemes might be potentially more dangerous than a change to the incentive model (Adrian's concern)