We should note, though, that a layered architecture was not envisioned by the inventor and early adopters of Bitcoin. They envisioned it more as a monolith: a s

We should note, though, that a layered architecture was not envisioned by the inventor and early adopters of Bitcoin. They envisioned it more as a monolith: a single piece of software that handles all the possible use-cases and features in itself. At least, that is how I read the whitepaper: no-where was there a mention of "Application layers" or even "layers". Many envisioned a layered system, including Satoshi himself: Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg28917 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... In this response (which revolves around the nascent Namecoin idea), he also describes cross-chain trades, something only now being implemented at scale. In another post, Satoshi describes "high frequency trades" in which intermediate transactions between parties are discarded. This feature was present in the original version of Bitcoin, but was later disabled. It is being brought back in a sense through Lightning Network.