Picture a quiet corner with a stop sign. Someone at the town meeting wants a traffic light there instead. The light has advantages. It moves more cars and it looks modern. The town still has to ask whether the stop sign is failing. So the town asks a fair question. How many crashes happened at this corner? That question puts the weight on the person asking for change. It has a name, burden of proof. That is a courtroom phrase, and it means the side making the claim brings the evidence. I use that question a lot. I have also watched it get abused. Picture how it goes. Suppose the neighbor brings the crash count. Then somebody asks for a second year of data. Then a study of the next corner over. Each request sounds careful. Together they add up to a no. My claim is that a burden of proof is only fair when it comes with a finish line. Before anyone shows evidence, both sides say what would settle it. Three crashes in a year. A wait longer than 2 minutes at rush hour. Pick the number first, then go count. Bitcoin needs this more than most places. Bitcoin is a payment network with no company in charge. Thousands of computers each keep a copy of the same record of payments, and they all follow one set of rules. Changing a rule takes agreement across the people who run those computers, and no one can order it. The last 2 large rule changes took effect in August 2017 and November 2021. That slowness protects your money. A rule that is hard to change is a rule you can plan around. It also means every proposal meets the same wall of "prove it," and the wall rarely says how high it is. The pushback is fair. Some harms cannot be counted ahead of time. If the town waits for 3 crashes, somebody gets hurt before the light goes up. And the side defending the stop sign helps pick the number, so it can pick one too high to reach. What would show me wrong: a set of cases where both sides named the bar first, the evidence cleared it, and the argument carried on as before. If that list gets long, a finish line changes less than I think. I still ask what job the old thing fails at. I now ask a second question in the same breath. What would you need to see? If the answer is a number, we can go count it together. if a finish line sounds fairer than one more study, Zap ⚡