Much of this space, and the things being built around it, is essentially focused on imitating the legacy financial system. Not much is being built trying to break new ground. Micropayments, while it is true that it is something that I have been very critical of due to the user experience of having to think about small transactions all day, you've seen almost no real experimentation or development to try to solve that UX problem at scale.
I'm struggling to think of any apps that are truly innovative. Yes, things like crowdfunding or micropayments in games remove a central point of control that can be used to censor the use cases of these apps, but they are still reinventing the wheel. Numerous projects focus on securing fiat or stablecoin loans with bitcoin, dollar payment avenues in bitcoin, etc. These are important applications to build if you are going to use bitcoin in commerce, that is beyond a doubt, but they are not things that are only possible in bitcoin.
In some cases, this has implications for the overall network and protocol if followed to the extreme. In the case of dollar loans secured by bitcoin, for example, it is inevitable that these things interact with the legacy system. This gives those systems some degree of control over those applications and (proportionately to the amount of bitcoin activity they perform) over bitcoin itself.
The consensus on bitcoin is not governed by voting, it is governed by participation. That is,. those actors who actually receive bitcoins in economic activity and those who carry out transactions and generate income for the miners. If you are not doing one of these two things, your node has no influence on the network consensus, especially during the case of a chain split or contentious fork. That is simply the cold reality. Bitcoiners who focus on creating applications that leverage or interact with the legacy system are simply giving the system we are trying to escape a bar embedded in bitcoin that the legacy system can use to leverage it.
It is nonsense, short-sighted and a huge tactical error.
The way forward is to focus on sustainable applications that do not require such an interface, that can operate completely independently of the legacy system and at the same time generate revenue for miners and application users and operators. This is the only way forward in terms of encouraging bitcoin adoption without slowly ceding more and more influence over the network and protocol to the exact types of players we set out to escape in the first place.
To truly thrive outside the existing system, we need markets for digital goods, services, real products, new types of applications that traditional players will not or cannot clone and monopolize for bitcoin.
