Back on my bullshit

I am a fedi / fedimint fan, and do support the community use cases they discuss, but what is understated to a fault is the custodial nature of ecash. A bank is a group of people that jointly control other people’s money. Federated ecash is a technical way to put together a group of people that jointly control other people’s money. The idea of fully collateralized bitcoin banks is great, but fedimints do not do anything more to bring that future to light. They just simplify the process of giving your bitcoin to someone else and trusting them fully with it. It’s a useful abstraction layer for people who want to spin up their own banks.

You guys know everyone thinks crypto is max cringe right?

Ethereum has always been the best place for NFTs and that’s okay

The blockspace fee market will swing for any number of reasons. Stay steady, be wary of drawing straight lines from two points extremely close in time.

Proclaiming the death of lightning in the context of the fee market last month is getting caught up in a frame of mind I don’t think many subscribe to, it goes like this. 1) Fees are high 2) Opening / closing channels is expensive / difficult 3) lightning is broken because as bitcoin grows, blockspace demand increases This seems perfectly logical on the surface, but consider for a second what you’re accepting here. You’re accepting that blockspace demand from bitcoin’s success is driven by silly pictures, as this is what’s driving the current fee market. Is this the wild success and blockspace demand you’re thinking of? If you think bitcoins killer use case is NFTs (even the people who created these ordinals say they are a fad), then yes this is a logical conclusion, and lightning does not scale NFTs (tho I think taproot assets does fwiw). But, and I think this is the majority of people, if you think bitcoin block space demand is driven by payments and usage in the future, this is exactly what lightning was designed for. Lightning is a shunt for bitcoin payments. As payments increase, incentives to get off chain do as well. The entry fee is a Bitcoin transaction, from there you’re paying a fraction of the cost on lightning.

GARY

They’re the same song

There’s this archetype of engineer I have a lot of respect for, it’s not a permanent state for most but I’ve seen too many who’ve had this role and succeeded under appreciate how valuable they really are The fixer A group of fixers is a cleanup crew, and I think if you’re around any org long enough you find out who these people are— There are the engineers who blaze trails and make new things and when they’re successful it’s great, but when they muck it up a new opportunity appears for someone to prove themselves. The fixer gets pulled off their work and plunged into the middle of whatever disaster they’ve been volunteered for. Effective fixers learn new skills on the fly, stay cool under pressure, communicate well and avoid the blame game. A cleanup job is the ultimate engineering trial by fire, and at very least people who take up this duty come out better engineers. At best they show themselves to be exceptionally valuable.

View quoted note → Lightning is very much living, it is more alive than any mailing list or Twitter post about scaling bitcoin. It has 100k+ channels over 5 years of main net, btc-at-risk miles on it. We know the flaws of lightning intimately because we’ve been using it, and testing it and improving it. X miracle bitcoin scaling solution is in fantasy land and due to not existing at any scale is as good as dead. They’re fun to think about though.

It’s really easy to get on these marketplaces of ideas and weight an idea with many engineer years of development and miles on it the same as a new concept that someone just cooked up

Tabconf with ZmnSCPxj