[capsulecorp]

Really? Because Satoshi's whitepaper is literally titled “Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", not "Bitcoin a 'store of value'". It seems to me the real answer is Bitcoin was sequestered by Blockstream and purposely sabotaged in order to promote their offchain solutions. BCH had to hard fork away to maintain the original intention of the project. Thus BCH can be transferred quickly and for mere fractions of the fees in BTC. So bitcoin is a currency, but that currency is now BCH. Whereas BTC exists to serve Blockstream and its for-profit offchain solution, which conveniently solve the limits they fought to impose.

[splintercell]

Technically speaking a layer 2 based payment system would also do the job.

[capsulecorp]

Technically speaking, that still wouldn't be Bitcoin.

[splintercell]

Bitcoin's main purpose was to create an unattackable (by govt or private entities) decentralized consensus. It was best perceived to have been created by the a currency on it. This currency can still be used on layer 2 for smaller transactions.

If you and your buddy opened a tab between each other to have bitcoin settlement at the end of the day, that wouldn't be saying "But you aren't using bitcoin".

[capsulecorp]

I believe you are mistaken, the purpose of Bitcoin was very clear from the whitepaper title. It was to create "a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Bitcoin Cash is the real, continued implementation of bitcoin, as it was designed in its whitepaper. BTC is simply an attempt (rather good one at that) by bad actors, to purposely hamper the protocol and then sell offchain solutions to solve those issues they introduced.

[splintercell]

Imagine if for some reason the word "bitcoin" turns out to be problematic (maybe it means "Shit/fart/poop" in Spanish and Chinese, which means most people in these countries wouldn't wanna use it, so the bitcoin people decide to rename the project to "Cryptocoin", are you going to say that clearly this violates the fundamental principles of bitcoin because Satoshi called it "bitcoin"?

Because based on what I read on Satoshi's communication, he would take 2 mins to change the name to something else (look how easily he applied the block size limit when the need arrived).

Similarly, there are essential attributes to what bitcoin is, and there are accidental attributes to it. Clearly the name of bitcoin is not necessary for it to be bitcoin.

What about the 'cash system' part? Clearly you and I disagree on this. I believe that cash part doesn't mean that the basic token must be trasnferable on layer 1.

[danShumway]

Changing the name or updating implementation details is not the same thing as completely abandoning the technology.

You're talking about building a completely separate payment system that has nothing to do with Bitcoin, that suffers from all of the original privacy and centralization problems as regular cash, but just because the funds get converted to Bitcoin after some purchases we're still going to pretend it's using the same technology and that it still aligns with Satoshi's original goals?

If we're doing that, then I'm declaring that my credit card is a Bitcoin system, because I can buy Bitcoin from Coinbase using a credit card. I'm declaring that Visa is already just a layer 1 payment system on top of a Bitcoin backend.

[capsulecorp]

As another commenter mentioned to you: "Changing the name or updating implementation details is not the same thing as completely abandoning the technology.". I agree with them, your comparison doesn't make much sense in this context.