The true sign of BTC getting mainstream would be if a fork would be justified by CSAM. Like in real politics with their Hegelian dialect. If this BIP-444 goes through, I know that enough people value their security over their freedom in this community, too. Then I need to find a smaller circle again to live in 😃

I am with Andy Hunt when he says that software development is a social process. If you have two teams working on some code who seldom talk to each other, the software will have a rigid interface between two components, one by each team. And if you try to work alone, you limit yourself so much that you need a rubber duck to discuss your thoughts with. So all combined, I try to respect whomever I work with, and try to share all my knowledge with them, so I can go on a vacation without getting calls to fix things. But indeed, when I get to a review, I imagine him being interrupted by his mother-in-law every few minutes in his home office, or her being on her period and wanting to get off their chair as soon as possible. This leaves me a chance to love them as a person and be graceful for having their experience as a teammate, but makes me aware that we are just irrational monkeys hammering on keyboards, who could never get to the Moon working alone.

It is all about who do you trust. (Somewhat simplified) In the end you only need the unspent UTXOs and some reassurance that your list of those has all of them and not missing any. How you got there only matters if you want to index historical data, but you are not a tax authority to care about all that. Polkadot has a so-called warp sync mode, which achieves something like that. The method exists since Parity first wrote their own Ethereum node. Which became OpenEthereum.