Reasoning from first principles is always a good thing. But we have to recognize our cognitive limitations as individuals. I’d love to review every line of open source code that I’ll ever use but that’s never going to happen. The vast vast majority of what I know about the world is stuff that I’ve learned from other people. Topics like bitcoin I reason from first principles to the best of my ability, but I’ll never stop relying on trusted people to guide my thinking.
I don’t have a strong opinion on core vs knots. And LukeJr can be kinda crazy. But he’ll always have my respect based on a few of the positions he’s taken in the past. Among them: the March 2013 unintentional chain split. Read the bitcoin-dev channel, he knew pretty much instantly what happened and what needed to be done, faster than most (including Gavin).
And how can I forget: personalized WoT turns the legacy monetization model on its head. No longer will you give your data away to big tech for free. You can give it away if you want, OR you can sell it for micropayments. I’ll be willing to pay you a few says for your restaurant review if my grapevine tells me with a high degree of confidence that you’re not a bot, if your previous restaurants have been helpful and in good faith, etc.
But I’m not going to pay anyone for anything unless I am ***VERY*** confident in the information my WoT is feeding to me. And I probably won’t have the requisite confidence without the features in my previous note: personalization of preferences, privacy, and provably inviolable control over the trust calculations. Brainstorm will provide all of these.