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?
back up a step. miners get paid to insert those CP records into satoshi tx's in the first place which incentivizes mining growth and thus more security and thus less chance for subsequent attack on those same satoshi tx's. now move all these CP tx fees off to a SC that can't be MM'd. this deprecates the MC. and there will be thousands of these insecure SC's as i think only a few SC's will be MM'd due to mining capacity constraints.
yes, offchain tx's take away from mining fees. but SC's will open up a whole new avenue of risk by not only competing at the mining level for tx fees but also competing for BTC units and competing for new investment fiat that now suddenly has a whole menu of assets from which to choose from when contemplating investing into the "Bitcoin trading platform".