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> 1. Discussions in the early BTC community and forums, which is why I stepped beyond the debate as that’s not something easy to document now
All of Satoshi's public posts are archived online (e.g. https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/ and usually available in the original location), I had no difficulty providing several examples where statements supporting your position would have been expected if they had any basis.
> in changing a software in a way I think is dumb or leaves fewer features
But that isn't what you alleged, you alleged "the same people" change it to eliminate its source of intrinsic value and violate "Satoshi’s vision", resulting in "slowed adoption following that change". If that were true anyone who'd purchased Bitcoin on the basis of that intrinsic value offered by Satoshi would rightfully say they were harmed by it.
(Which is also why what you claim likely couldn't occur: Once Bitcoin was widely used why would people adopt a new version that reduced its capability?)
The comment about tortious acts isn't conjectural, two of the several lawsuits brought by the con artist Craig Wright alleges hundreds of billions of dollars in damages on the basis of objectively false claims about "removed opcodes" -- a false argument you appear to be advancing here.
> There’s no way I’ll be able to document to you something a decade ago, largely from in person discussions.
Can you clarify for me: You're now claiming that you personally were involved in Bitcoin a decade ago? And that you were having "in person" discussions with Satoshi?
In any case, I was there. I can't recall anything even close to what you're suggesting. and if they had occurred you could easily point to them on Bitcoin talk, the Bitcoin Wiki, Satoshi post archives, etc. I've been happy to cite my points to contemporary discussions, but I'm limited by the fact that your position demands that I prove a poorly specified negative.
> The removal of the math op codes was a poor choice of how to handle security — but drastically reduced the ability of the network.
Take it up with Satoshi. I don't agree that it actually had the drastic effect you imagine but if your post had said that Satoshi reduced the functionality I probably wouldn't have replied at all, since while debatable it would have lacked the objectively false and accusatory components.
> From looking through the link, your solution appears to require external programs and systems besides BTC,
Obviously you need to have an implementation that actually lets you specify the program and what not, but that is fundamentally unavoidable. If there were a lot of interest support could be included with Bitcoin wallet software.
> complete the whole exchange directly on chain in a single transaction
That isn't particularly interesting: With the approach you imagine any other participant on the network could see the solution, take it out of the transaction then stick it in their own transaction to claim the funds. With that reality there would be little to no incentive to actually solve the problem since it would just be stolen (as the auto theft would be automated just as people have done for transactions using insecure keys).
That approach would also be extraordinarily resource inefficient, since all nodes in the network now and forever in the future would need to directly process the entire problem (which is easily gigabytes in size for any SAT encoding of a problem interesting enough to pay someone else to solve). The approach described in the post eliminates both the theft problem and resource usage problem.
> You explicitly said it would be easy to document your objection in the post I replied to
I see how that may have been unclear.
It would be easy to falsify a positive claim. For example, you could specify your allegation: "The developers of Bitcoin Core disabled OP_BLAZ in 2016" and I would reply "There never was an OP_BLAZ [link to code as of Satoshi's last activity]" or "That was disabled, but it was disabled by Satoshi in 2010 [link to commit]", or "That's still there right now [link to code implementing it] or so on. Falsifying the less specific allegation of "stopped BTC from having smart contracts via a full featured VM, moving it away from Satoshi’s vision" requires proving a vague negative.
> Having a market where you can redeem a token for information/good you want is important to valuing money — and the whole principle of the former gold standard (and arguably what backs money now, in oil). BTC lacked such a good.
I'm not following you here: No special functionality is required to trade Bitcoin for goods or services for Bitcoin-- you can just use it like any other money and of course people do exchange Bitcoin for goods and services constantly and at significant scale today. I agree that trade is quite important, and yet also quite irrelevant to the discussion.
The particular snazzy trick of trading bitcoin for machine verifiable facts is cypherpunk sexy but of little interest to most of the world, and as a result unlikely to constitute any substantial basis for Bitcoin's value-- yet also perfectly functional in Bitcoin today.
The alternative you imagine wouldn't be useful due to solution theft and wouldn't have been practically possible in the system as Satoshi created it because script was limited to 10,000 bytes[1], and to whatever extent the opcodes were removed made script less useful those changes were made by Satoshi (as I showed), not anyone else. But it doesn't matter because there is a way to do it which doesn't run into those Satoshi created limitations and incentive compatibility problems for as much as anyone cares (turns out-- not much!).
In the aforelinked Bitcointalk post (583.msg11405) Satoshi pointed out outright that a good which was purely limited supply and transferable over a communications channel without any other utility would expect to be valued for its utility for exchange.
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/629e37dde1fa93f6ce31...