I do think that Bitcoin does need to become more feature rich to compete with other cryptos, however, the pace of that development change needs to be sensible.
We saw a grand experiment in the year from BCH's launch in August 2017, which was a monumental arm-wrestle between two forces, two economic paradigms played out in the real-world. One side was
scalability, BCH allowed for up to 8MB sustained blocks, more if necessary, and dirt cheap transactions as low as 1 sat. The other side was BTC's 7 years of
network effect, all its merchants/users, brand name, image, a functioning ecosystem, supported by a shrill social media phenomenon, plus a dose of censorship in r/bitcoin and DCG-owned media.
What happened? Well, it proved that network effect won out. BTC was stronger, even when crippled with sky-high txn fees pushing users away. BCH's txn volume for a whole year was nearly static, (excepting during stress tests). By the time of its first anniversary it supported blocks up to 32MB which was 600x the level of organic usage.
Adoption: building merchant acceptance, remittances, users spending, is the challenge all along.
This was predictable, and those at the London meeting in November 2017 generally knew that encouraging adoption was necessary alongside scaling.
@theZerg deserves credit for being one of the few developers to actually bring some adoption-enhancing changes to the table earlier this year: op_datasigverify and op_group. Maybe they would have brought in a lot of usage if they went live, maybe not, maybe the protocol would be complex, but at least we would have tried. Struck while the iron was hot. Once that window was missed and development consensus broke down, then then a longer and slower process became necessary. Protocol changes by miner voting is a good alternative.
Further, what is the point of being fixated primarily on scalability when capacity is 600x demand? Would we suddenly get a flood of new users if capacity went to 6000x demand, or even more when capacity is 60,000x demand? Of course not. All this recent talk of terabyte blocks is about technology which is
millions of times the level of demand.
Instead, the very thing which hurts adoption most happened. The community split into two, dividing the network effect for BCH, which we have already seen is too small to compete with BTC.
....
@Norway, is there a doc on bignum, and how it permits DSV-type functionality?