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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Not changing is nice conceptually but very bad in practice because the real world changes. It doesn’t map. It’s one of those software engineering tendencies to rewrite instead of understand and improve.

One side note though. Consider that inflation doesn’t affect the poor as the poor live paycheck to paycheck and wages in the US have kept pace with inflation. The wealthy don’t hold cash, they invest. Even cash tends to be held in a savings account with at least partially offsets inflationary pressure. Has it impacted anyone materially? I’d love to see some quantification.

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In practice, I'd say "selected" lower level standards aren't changed but built upon. Standard tools also tends to not change much. web protocols, C, C++, php, those are not getting away despite many attempts to reinvent the wheel. Maybe someone will make a better wheel one day, or maybe not, but for me it's nice to have a starting point in the domain of p2p "exchange" that may or may not be adopted as a standard.

As for inflation, it makes it harder for the poor workers to become wealthier, but the issue is more when it stops being sustainable. Inflationary fiat has proven that it could fail. I personally don't trust those persons handling it and I feel that such sentiment is growing among people. There's reasons behind that. That is terrible for a currency. Governments may or may not start having a better monetary policy. We don't have guarantees and much control over it, that's the issue for me. I'd rather avoid an economical disaster and keep a business running than having to deal with the failure of others.

Each of the languages you called out have changed dramatically to respond to the needs of users, which Bitcoin cannot, has not and will not do. You’re basically advocating for K&R C forever.

Re inflation again, has no impact on poor workers. The amount of value transferred to them in exchange for work is purely social policy and fiscal policy not monetary policy. You can improve workers mobility by supporting unions and minimum wage, not by changing the inflation characteristics of their medium of exchange they don’t get to hold on to anyways. None of your criticisms matter if you’ve invested your fiat.

Bitcoin can change depending on the need of the users, assuming it's something accepted by them, which sounds fair to me.

As for the inflation/fiat it just seems to me that you keep ignoring the possibility of a failure of such system. A failure of such system would for sure have terrible consequences and the poor unlike the wealthier will have harder times. Investing the fiat is a good idea, not something remotely popular in my country alas. Here, saving mostly means saving money at the bank (which devalues over time). No wonder why they feel they're losing purchasing power. People who work shall earn wealth simply put, not diminished wealth if they don't learn about financial tricks from someone they trust.

> Bitcoin can change depending on the need of the users, assuming it's something accepted by them, which sounds fair to me.

No? In what way.

> As for the inflation/fiat it just seems to me that you keep ignoring the possibility of a failure of such system. A failure of such system would for sure have terrible consequences and the poor unlike the wealthier will have harder times.

A collapse in finance would affect the people who have money and value, that'd be the rich who'd be affected. It would not affect those who don't have money. Like inflation.

The wealthier might lose more wealth overall (if we exclude the options they have to diversify and protect) but that doesn't mean it won't be harder for the poor. A poor by definition doesn't own much. They probably have no house, no easy way to eat, no way to transport if the system collapse and the merchants aren't interested in the little fiat they have. All in all I'm having a hard time to defend the idea that it would be harder for the wealthier to go through a collapse of the currency.

As for bitcoin, well, you can audit the commits on github if you want. There's plenty of things added lately. Miners or other entities like nodes can decide to fork the protocol into another chain (already happened, the protocol is then developed differently in those chains). Rules are subject to a consensus. Also if a user is not happy with a change, he's free to stop using it or to exchange his bitcoins for something else. All in all there's no reasons for participants to refuse modifying and improving the protocol over time.

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