Issue #617: Is there an order of operations to all of this?

This is a question I've been thinking about a lot recently. Is there an order of operations on the road to Bitcoin becoming a successful system? And if there is, is this the number one thing that Bitcoin's "competitors" miss when they set out to fix a perceived flaw they believe Bitcoin has?

Do you need a fair proof of work launch? Does that PoW chain have to protect a ruleset that produces a token with a fixed supply? Do you need to ensure that upgrades are backwards compatible? Do you have to limit chain state growth as much as possible to ensure the common man can run a node to validate his incoming transactions? Do you have to build layers on top of the protocol to achieve certain use cases i.e., fast/near-instant transactions and tokenization? Do you have to have a stable enough protocol layer to enable the DeFi'd future some people are so horny over?

If we assume the answers to the above questions are all "yes", do you destroy any chance of long-term success by glossing over even just one of the questions above (and probably many others I am missing) as you attempt to usurp Bitcoin?

I don't know. What do you think?

Final thought...

Ready for a mid-week car ride.