According to @Excellion, on Oct 16, 2025 he asked which single direction Bitcoin development should prioritize, highlighting an active roadmap question for the Bitcoin community and market participants (source: X post by Samson Mow @Excellion on Oct 16, 2025). For traders, historical upgrades have materially shifted on-chain dynamics: SegWit in 2017 increased effective block capacity and fixed malleability, and Taproot activated in Nov 2021 expanded script flexibility and privacy characteristics relevant to transaction construction (source: BIP141 SegWit; BIP341/342 Taproot; Bitcoin Core release notes documenting activation). Post-Taproot, Ordinals inscriptions drove bursts of on-chain activity and higher median fees in 2023–2024, directly affecting execution costs and mempool congestion that influence BTC trade timing and on-chain settlement (source: Ordinals documentation by Casey Rodarmor; mempool.space historical fee charts 2023–2024). Layer-2 adoption remains a key variable: public Lightning Network capacity is widely used as a proxy for off-chain payment scaling that can alleviate on-chain fee pressure and shape BTC liquidity for payments (source: Bitcoin Visuals Lightning Network total capacity dataset; The Lightning Network whitepaper).