TL;DR: Bitcoin's base layer is intentionally minimal because money must be predictable, reliable, and resistant to failure above all else. Adding features directly to Bitcoin's protocol increases the attack surface and the risk of breaking a system that secures hundreds of billions of dollars. Instead, Bitcoin uses a layered architecture: the base layer enforces consensus and final settlement, while layers like the Lightning Network and the Liquid Network handle speed, privacy, programmability, and other capabilities without changing the foundation.
Bitcoin's conservative development philosophy is the deliberate practice of keeping Bitcoin's base protocol minimal, stable, and extremely difficult to change. Rather than adding features to the base layer, Bitcoin extends its capabilities through independent layers that connect to the main protocol but operate with their own rules, trade-offs, and upgrade cycles. This mirrors how the internet itself works: TCP/IP handles packet delivery and nothing else, while HTTP, SMTP, and thousands of application protocols build richer functionality on top.Does Bitcoin Have Smart Contracts?
Yes. Bitcoin has supported smart contracts since launch, but they are deliberately limited compared to general-purpose platforms like Ethereum. A Bitcoin smart contract is a set of spending conditions written in Bitcoin Script, the network's built-in scripting language, that the network enforces before bitcoin can move. The common confusion comes from comparing Bitcoin to Turing-complete platforms: Bitcoin chooses a smaller, more predictable set of capabilities on purpose, not because smart contracts are impossible on it.
What Bitcoin Script already does on the base layer:
- Multisignature: Require m-of-n signatures (for example, 2-of-3) before funds can be spent, the foundation of shared custody and corporate treasuries.
- Timelocks: Lock funds until a specific block height or time, used for vaults, inheritance schemes, and payment channels.
- Hash locks: Release funds only when a secret value is revealed, the mechanism behind atomic swaps and Lightning Network routing.
- Taproot scripts: Since the 2021 Taproot upgrade, complex multi-branch conditions can be encoded efficiently and kept private until the branch that runs is revealed.
What Bitcoin deliberately does not do at the base layer is run unbounded, Turing-complete programs with shared global state. That capability is what produces the largest attack surface on other platforms, and it is the line Bitcoin draws on purpose. Richer programmability is added through layers instead. The rest of this article explains why that trade-off strengthens Bitcoin as money and how the layered architecture delivers the richer capabilities without putting the base layer at risk.
The Real Role of Money
To understand why Bitcoin resists adding features, you first need to understand what money actually requires. People often evaluate Bitcoin against the feature sets of other software platforms, asking whether it can run arbitrary smart contracts, process thousands of transactions per second, or natively support tokenized assets, decentralized exchanges, and complex financial instruments.
These questions treat money like an application, but money is infrastructure.
The most important properties of a monetary system are guarantees rather than features: that the supply schedule will not change, that valid transactions will always be processed, that the rules governing the system cannot be altered unilaterally, and that the system will continue functioning under adversarial conditions. Every feature added to a monetary protocol is a potential vector for violating one of those guarantees.
What Sound Money Demands
Money earns its value from stable properties rather than from capabilities. Gold has been the dominant monetary asset for thousands of years on the strength of five such properties: scarcity, durability, fungibility, divisibility, and resistance to counterfeiting. Gold does not do anything interesting: you cannot program it or build applications on it. Gold's value comes precisely from the fact that its properties are stable and predictable across centuries.
Bitcoin aims to be a better version of that same category. Its fixed supply of 21 million bitcoin, its decentralized consensus mechanism, and its transparent verification process are the digital equivalents of gold's physical properties. The question is not "what can Bitcoin do?" The question is "can you rely on Bitcoin to keep doing exactly what it promises, forever?"
Every feature added to the base protocol makes that question harder to answer.
The Cost of Complexity in Financial Systems
Traditional financial infrastructure offers a cautionary example. Modern banking systems are feature-rich: programmable payments, complex derivatives, cross-border settlement, credit creation, and automated compliance. These features serve real needs. They also create systemic fragility. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that complexity in financial systems produces failure modes that no one anticipated and no one fully understood, even after the fact.
Bitcoin was created in direct response to that fragility. Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in October 2008, weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The design philosophy was not "build a better financial platform." It was "build a monetary system so simple and transparent that it cannot be corrupted by the institutions that operate it."
Adding features works against that founding purpose. Every additional capability is additional code, additional state, additional interaction surface, and additional opportunity for bugs, exploits, or unintended consequences in a system that secures real money with no recourse if something goes wrong.
Why Simplicity and Predictability Beat Features
Bitcoin's value rests on operational reliability. The network processes real economic value around the clock, every day of the year, with no downtime and no administrator who can pause the system, and it has maintained that record since January 3, 2009.
Stability Is Utility
A monetary network that changes frequently is a monetary network that cannot be trusted. If the rules governing your bitcoin can shift with the next software update, then your property rights depend on the decisions of developers rather than on an immutable protocol. That dependency is exactly what Bitcoin was designed to eliminate.
Bitcoin's resistance to change is a feature. The difficulty of changing Bitcoin is what makes Bitcoin trustworthy. If it were easy to add features, it would also be easy to change the supply cap, alter the issuance schedule, or modify the consensus rules in ways that benefit some participants at the expense of others.
The same mechanism that makes it hard to add a smart contract language to Bitcoin is the mechanism that makes it hard for any government, corporation, or coalition to debase bitcoin or confiscate it. You cannot have one without the other. The resistance to change is indivisible.
Every Line of Code Is a Liability
In security engineering, attack surface grows with code complexity. Every function, every branch, every edge case in the codebase is a potential vulnerability. Bitcoin's consensus code must be correct under all conditions, on every node, across the entire network, simultaneously. A single bug in consensus-critical code can cause chain splits (where different nodes disagree on which blocks are valid), double spends (where the same bitcoin is spent twice), or uncontrolled inflation (where new bitcoin is created outside the supply schedule).
These are not hypothetical risks. In 2010, a bug in Bitcoin (CVE-2010-5139) allowed a transaction that created 184 billion bitcoin out of thin air. The bug was caught and patched within hours, but the incident demonstrated the stakes. In 2018, a bug in Bitcoin Core (CVE-2018-17144) could have allowed miners to create bitcoin beyond the supply cap. It was discovered by an external developer after the bug had existed in production for a year and a half (introduced in Bitcoin Core 0.14, released March 2017; patched in September 2018), and was patched within hours of disclosure.
Both bugs existed in relatively simple code. Adding complex features like general-purpose smart contracts, advanced scripting, or stateful computation to the base layer would multiply the number of potential failure points by orders of magnitude.
"Move Fast and Break Things" Is the Wrong Approach for Money
Silicon Valley's default operating philosophy prizes speed, iteration, and rapid feature deployment. Ship fast, measure results, fix bugs in production. This approach works for social media platforms, e-commerce sites, and productivity tools. If Instagram ships a buggy feature, the worst case is a poor user experience for a few hours.
Money cannot work this way. A bug in a monetary protocol destroys wealth. And unlike a web application, Bitcoin has no rollback mechanism. There is no database administrator who can revert a bad transaction. There is no "undo" button.
Bitcoin's development culture reflects this reality. Changes to the protocol take months or years of review. Proposals are debated extensively before code is written. Code is reviewed by multiple independent developers before it is merged. And even after code is merged into Bitcoin Core, individual node operators decide whether to run the new version. No one can force an upgrade.
Under the Hood: Why Soft Forks Preserve Consensus Stability
The distinction between soft forks and hard forks is central to why Bitcoin can evolve without fracturing. A soft fork tightens validation rules: the set of valid blocks under the new rules is a strict subset of blocks valid under the old rules. Old nodes accept every block that new nodes accept (and some additional blocks that new nodes would reject), so the network keeps following a single chain. Both upgraded and non-upgraded nodes stay on that chain, because the chain that satisfies the stricter rules automatically satisfies the looser ones.
A hard fork loosens or changes rules: the new rules accept blocks that old rules reject. Old nodes see those blocks as invalid and refuse to follow that chain, causing a permanent split. This is why SegWit (BIP 141) used the "anyone-can-spend" pattern: old nodes saw SegWit outputs as spendable by anyone (valid under old rules), while new nodes enforced the actual witness spending conditions (stricter). The result was a single chain that both old and new nodes agreed on. The same soft fork pattern applied to Taproot (BIP 341): SegWit version 1 outputs were forward-compatible by design, so old SegWit-aware nodes treated them as valid without understanding Taproot's specific rules.
Bitcoin's upgrade process is deliberately cautious. The speed of development is bounded by the cost of getting it wrong, and the cost of getting monetary software wrong is measured in billions of dollars and broken trust that takes decades to rebuild.
How the Internet Solved This Same Problem
Bitcoin's layered architecture is not a novel invention. It follows the same architectural pattern that made the internet itself possible.
TCP/IP Does Not Do Everything
The internet's base layer is TCP/IP: the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. TCP/IP does one thing. It moves packets of data from one computer to another, reliably, across any network topology. That is all it does.
TCP/IP has no concept of a web page, email, video streaming, file sharing, or online banking, and it does not support encryption, render images, or track a user account or shopping cart. Those concepts live entirely above it.
Every one of those capabilities exists on a higher layer: HTTP handles web pages, SMTP handles email, and TLS handles encryption. Each protocol builds on TCP/IP without modifying it, so the base layer stays simple and stable while the layers above it evolve rapidly.
Why This Architecture Works
The layered architecture works because it separates concerns. The base layer handles the one thing that everything else depends on: reliable data delivery. Higher layers handle specific applications. Each layer can evolve independently. HTTP/2 replaced HTTP/1.1 without changing TCP/IP. HTTPS added encryption without modifying the web protocol. New application protocols launch every year without anyone needing to "upgrade the internet."
If TCP/IP's designers had tried to build email, web browsing, and video streaming into the base protocol, the internet would have been fragile, difficult to upgrade, and impossible to extend with applications that did not exist when the protocol was designed. By keeping the base layer minimal, they created a foundation that has supported 40 years of applications that no one could have predicted.
Bitcoin's architecture follows the same logic. The base layer handles the one thing that everything else depends on: secure, final settlement of Bitcoin transactions. Faster payments, privacy features, smart contracts, and asset issuance happen on higher layers.
Why Bitcoin Works in Layers
Bitcoin's layered architecture allows different layers to optimize for different properties without compromising the base layer's guarantees. The base layer optimizes for security, decentralization, and finality. Layer-2 protocols optimize for speed, privacy, programmability, or other capabilities that specific use cases demand.
The Base Layer: Security and Final Settlement
Bitcoin's base layer produces a new block approximately every ten minutes. Each block has a maximum weight of 4 million weight units (4 MWU), with typical blocks containing 1.5 to 2.5 MB of serialized data. Transactions confirmed on the base layer benefit from the full security of Bitcoin's proof-of-work consensus: they become exponentially harder to reverse with each subsequent block.
Each of these parameters reflects a specific design constraint. The ten-minute block time gives the network enough time to propagate blocks globally before the next block is mined, which keeps the chain from forking frequently. The block size limit keeps node requirements low enough that individuals can run full nodes on consumer hardware, which preserves decentralization. The proof-of-work difficulty adjustment keeps block production steady regardless of how much mining power joins or leaves the network.
Changing any of these parameters to accommodate more features (larger blocks for more data, faster blocks for quicker confirmations, new opcodes for richer scripting) would alter the trade-offs that Bitcoin's security model depends on. Larger blocks increase the hardware requirements for running a node, which concentrates validation power among fewer participants. Faster blocks increase orphan rates, which advantages large miners with better network connectivity. Additional opcodes expand the attack surface of consensus-critical code.
The Lightning Network: Speed and Micropayments
The Lightning Network solves Bitcoin's throughput limitations without changing the base protocol. It is a network of bidirectional payment channels: two parties lock bitcoin into a shared on-chain transaction, then exchange an unlimited number of off-chain payments between themselves. Only the opening and closing transactions are recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain. Everything in between happens instantly and at near-zero cost.
Because Lightning operates as a separate protocol that anchors to Bitcoin, it can iterate independently. Lightning implementations can add features, fix bugs, and optimize performance on their own release cycles. Core Lightning (CLN), Blockstream's Lightning implementation, is one of the three major implementations alongside LND and Eclair. Each can evolve independently while remaining interoperable through the shared BOLT specification.
If Lightning's functionality had been built into Bitcoin's base layer, every Lightning upgrade would require a Bitcoin consensus change. The development velocity that makes Lightning useful would be impossible under Bitcoin's conservative upgrade process. The separation of layers is what allows Lightning to move fast without putting Bitcoin's security at risk.
The Liquid Network: Privacy, Speed, and Programmability
The Liquid Network demonstrates how layers can add entire categories of functionality that the base layer deliberately excludes. Liquid is a Bitcoin layer-2 sidechain built on the open-source Elements platform. It provides:
- Faster settlement: Liquid produces blocks approximately every one minute, compared to Bitcoin's ten-minute average. Transactions reach final settlement in about one minute rather than waiting for multiple on-chain confirmations.
- Confidential Transactions: Liquid hides both transaction amounts and asset types from outside observers using cryptographic range proofs. On-chain Bitcoin transactions expose amounts to anyone with a block explorer. Liquid keeps this data private while still allowing each participant to verify the transaction's validity.
- Asset issuance: Liquid supports issuing new assets (security tokens, stablecoins, and other Liquid assets) directly on the network. Bitcoin's base layer has no native concept of additional assets.
- Smart contracts via Simplicity: Simplicity, Blockstream's smart contract language, launched on the Liquid Network in July 2025. Simplicity enables covenants, vaults, complex delegation schemes, and other programmable spending conditions that Bitcoin Script cannot express. The language was designed for formal verification: the ability to mathematically prove that a contract behaves exactly as specified.
Each of these capabilities involves trade-offs that would be unacceptable at the base layer. Liquid uses a Strong Federation consensus model (15 functionary operators sign blocks with an 11-of-15 threshold, within a broader federation of more than 85 member entities as of April 2026) rather than proof-of-work, which provides faster blocks but changes the trust model. Confidential Transactions add computational overhead, asset issuance adds protocol complexity, and Simplicity expands the scripting surface area. This is the layered architecture working as designed: Liquid and Simplicity give new features an experimental ground where they can be tested and refined in production without risking Bitcoin's consensus stability. If a capability proves safe and valuable on Liquid, it builds the case for potential future inclusion in Bitcoin itself through the standard BIP process.
On Liquid, these trade-offs are contained. Users who need privacy, speed, or programmability opt into Liquid and accept its specific trust model. Users who need the full security guarantees of proof-of-work keep their bitcoin on the base layer. Neither group forces its preferences on the other.
The Trade-Off Between Features and Security
Every design decision in Bitcoin involves a trade-off. The layered architecture makes these trade-offs explicit rather than hiding them inside a single protocol.
| Capability | Base Layer Approach | Layered Approach | Why Layers Win |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast payments | Shorter block times (reduces security) | Lightning Network (off-chain channels) | Base layer security preserved; Lightning handles speed independently |
| Transaction privacy | Add Confidential Transactions to Bitcoin (increases block size, computation) | Liquid Network (Confidential Transactions on a sidechain) | Users who need privacy opt in; base layer stays lean |
| Smart contracts | Add Turing-complete scripting (massive attack surface expansion) | Simplicity on Liquid (formally verifiable, contained risk) | Smart contract bugs affect Liquid, not Bitcoin consensus |
| Higher throughput | Larger blocks (centralizes node operation) | Off-chain and sidechain transactions | Node requirements stay accessible to individuals |
| Asset issuance | Add asset protocol to Bitcoin (protocol bloat) | Liquid asset issuance (native sidechain feature) | Base layer stays focused on bitcoin settlement |
In each case, the layered architecture preserves the base layer's core properties while still making the capability available to users who need it. Not every user needs every feature, and forcing all features into a single layer means every user bears the complexity cost of features they may never use.
Bitcoin's Conservative Development Philosophy
Bitcoin's reluctance to add features is not an accident or a failure of imagination. It is an explicitly held engineering philosophy enforced by the development culture, the governance structure, and the economic incentives of the network.
How Bitcoin Changes Are Evaluated
When a developer proposes a change to Bitcoin's protocol, the community evaluates it against a standard that no other software project applies: "Is this change worth the risk of breaking a system that secures hundreds of billions of dollars?"
Most proposed changes fail this test. Not because they are bad ideas, but because the potential benefit does not justify the risk of introducing bugs, vulnerabilities, or unintended interactions into consensus-critical code. A feature that would be an obvious improvement to a web application can be an unacceptable risk in a monetary protocol.
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) go through extensive public debate, formal specification, reference implementation, peer review by multiple independent developers, and gradual activation that gives the entire network time to evaluate the change. The Taproot upgrade (BIPs 340-342), which added Schnorr signatures and a more efficient scripting structure to Bitcoin, took years from initial proposal to activation in November 2021. SegWit, which fixed transaction malleability and increased effective block capacity, took even longer.
This pace frustrates developers accustomed to shipping code weekly. Bitcoin's development culture treats the protocol like critical infrastructure, not like a product with a feature roadmap.
The Burden of Proof Falls on Change
In most software development, the default is to ship. New features are assumed to be good unless proven harmful. In Bitcoin, the default is to do nothing. Proposed changes are assumed to be risky unless proven safe. This inversion of the burden of proof is one of the most important differences between Bitcoin and every other software project.
The reasoning is straightforward. If a proposed feature has a bug, the cost is borne by every bitcoin holder, not just by the people who wanted the feature. A smart contract vulnerability on a platform like Ethereum affects the users of that specific contract. A consensus bug in Bitcoin affects everyone who holds bitcoin. The asymmetry of risk justifies the asymmetry of caution.
Governance Through Independence
No single entity decides what goes into Bitcoin. Bitcoin Core maintainers can merge code into the reference implementation, but they cannot force anyone to run it. Node operators independently decide which software version to run. Miners independently decide which blocks to produce. Users independently decide which chain to follow.
This distributed governance structure naturally resists change because changing Bitcoin requires convincing thousands of independent actors, with different priorities and different risk tolerances, to voluntarily adopt the same update. Contentious changes fail not because someone vetoes them, but because the network cannot reach consensus on adopting them.
The 2017 block size debate illustrated this dynamic. A coalition of large companies and mining pools attempted to increase Bitcoin's block size limit through a hard fork (the SegWit2x proposal). Despite corporate support representing the majority of mining hashrate, the proposal failed because enough node operators and users refused to upgrade. The network's governance structure allowed a decentralized "no" to override a centralized "yes."
Lessons From Feature-Rich Platforms
Bitcoin's conservative development philosophy stands in contrast to platforms that prioritized feature velocity. The results of those alternative approaches show why that caution is warranted.
Feature-Rich Protocols and Their Costs
Ethereum launched with a philosophy opposite to Bitcoin's: maximal programmability at the base layer. A Turing-complete virtual machine, global mutable state, and a feature-rich scripting environment. The capabilities this enabled are real: decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, tokenized assets, and complex financial instruments all run on Ethereum.
The costs are also real. The DAO hack in 2016 exploited a reentrancy vulnerability in a smart contract and drained 3.6 million ether. The response was a hard fork that rolled back the blockchain to reverse the theft, splitting the network into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. This kind of intervention is only possible (and only necessary) in a system complex enough to produce catastrophic, unforeseen interactions between components.
Billions of dollars have been lost to smart contract exploits across various platforms: reentrancy attacks, flash loan exploits, oracle manipulation, integer overflows, and logic errors. Each exploit targeted application code running on a general-purpose, shared-state platform, where contract interactions created attack vectors no one anticipated during design.
Bitcoin has avoided this entire class of failures because its design philosophy prevents the conditions that produce them. Reentrancy attacks need reentrant calls, flash loan exploits need global state, and base-layer smart contract bugs need general-purpose smart contracts running on the base layer. Bitcoin has none of those prerequisites, so the corresponding failures have no foothold.
The Complexity Trap
Feature-rich base layers face a compounding problem. Each new feature interacts with every existing feature, creating an exponentially growing matrix of potential interactions. A protocol with ten features has 45 possible pairwise interactions. A protocol with 100 features has 4,950. Testing every interaction is impractical. Formally verifying every interaction is impossible in a Turing-complete system.
This means that complex base-layer protocols accumulate unknown risks over time. Each feature addition makes the system harder to reason about, harder to audit, and more likely to contain latent vulnerabilities that only manifest under specific, untested conditions. For software that controls real money with no recourse, this trajectory is unacceptable.
Bitcoin's layered architecture avoids the complexity trap by isolating feature interactions. A bug in a Lightning implementation does not affect Bitcoin's consensus. A vulnerability in a Liquid smart contract does not threaten the base layer. Each layer's risks are contained within that layer, and each layer can be audited and upgraded independently.
What the Base Layer Does Protect
Bitcoin's conservative development philosophy protects the properties that give bitcoin its value. These properties are not features to be traded against other features. They are the reason bitcoin functions as money.
- Fixed supply: The 21 million bitcoin cap is enforced by consensus code. Adding features that increase code complexity makes this code harder to audit and verify, increasing the risk that a bug could circumvent the supply limit.
- Censorship resistance: Anyone can submit a valid transaction, and miners are incentivized to include it. Protocol complexity could introduce conditions under which certain transactions are treated differently, creating vectors for censorship.
- Permissionless access: Anyone can run a node and verify the entire blockchain. Larger, more complex blocks increase the hardware requirements for running a node, which reduces the number of independent validators.
- Finality: Once confirmed, Bitcoin transactions are practically irreversible. Additional protocol features could introduce execution paths that complicate or undermine this finality guarantee.
- Auditability: Every bitcoin in existence can be traced to its coinbase transaction. Complex protocol features make the ledger harder to audit, reducing the transparency that makes Bitcoin trustworthy.
These properties compound over time. Each year that Bitcoin maintains its supply cap, processes transactions without censorship, and remains accessible to individual node operators, confidence in the system grows. That confidence is Bitcoin's most valuable asset, and it is built on the consistency and predictability that conservatism provides.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Bitcoin do smart contracts?
Yes. Bitcoin executes smart contracts through Bitcoin Script, its built-in scripting language. Script supports multisignature requirements, timelocks, hash locks, and, since the 2021 Taproot upgrade, efficient multi-branch spending conditions. These are deliberately limited compared to Turing-complete platforms like Ethereum: Bitcoin avoids unbounded programs and shared global state at the base layer to keep its attack surface small. More expressive contracts run on layers such as the Liquid Network, where Simplicity adds covenants, vaults, and complex delegation.
Does Bitcoin's lack of features make it inferior to other platforms?
Bitcoin's base layer is optimized for a specific purpose: secure, decentralized, censorship-resistant monetary settlement. Evaluating it against feature-rich platforms is like evaluating gold against a Swiss Army knife. Gold's value comes from its stability and simplicity, not from versatility. Bitcoin's base layer provides the same kind of reliability for digital value, while layers like Lightning and Liquid add the features that specific use cases require.
Can Bitcoin ever add new features to its base layer?
Yes, but the bar is extremely high. Bitcoin has added features through soft forks: SegWit in 2017 and Taproot in 2021 are the most recent examples. Each took years of review, debate, and testing before activation. Proposed changes must demonstrate that the benefit clearly outweighs the risk, and the network must reach broad consensus before any change activates.
What is the difference between a layer-2 protocol and a sidechain?
A layer-2 protocol like the Lightning Network operates directly on top of Bitcoin transactions. Lightning payment channels are opened and closed using standard Bitcoin transactions, and the security of Lightning ultimately depends on the ability to broadcast transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain. A sidechain like the Liquid Network is a separate blockchain with its own consensus mechanism that is pegged to Bitcoin through a two-way peg. Users move bitcoin between the mainchain and the sidechain through peg-in and peg-out transactions. Both approaches extend Bitcoin's capabilities without modifying the base protocol.
Why not just increase the block size to handle more transactions?
Larger blocks increase the bandwidth, storage, and computation required to run a full node. This raises the minimum hardware threshold for independent validation, which reduces the number of nodes on the network and concentrates validation power among fewer, more resourced participants. Since decentralization is what makes Bitcoin censorship-resistant and trustworthy, increasing the block size trades Bitcoin's core security property for throughput. Layer-2 solutions achieve higher throughput without this trade-off.
If features are added on layers, how are those layers secured?
Each layer has its own security model tailored to its trade-offs. The Lightning Network derives its security from the ability to settle disputes on the Bitcoin blockchain: if a counterparty misbehaves, the honest party can broadcast a penalty transaction to claim funds on-chain. The Liquid Network uses a federated consensus model with more than 85 globally distributed members (as of April 2026) who jointly manage the network. In both cases, the layers ultimately anchor to Bitcoin's base layer for final settlement.
Will Bitcoin always be this conservative about changes?
Almost certainly, and increasingly so. As the value secured by the Bitcoin network grows, the cost of a consensus failure grows with it. The higher the stakes, the more justified the caution. The layered architecture also means that most new functionality can be delivered without base-layer changes at all, so the base layer's role becomes more focused on settlement and security over time while layers handle everything else.