Bitcoin is computer software which enables people to trade random numbers with each other, assigning value to each string
No matter how you try to rationalize it as something else (money, gold, cash), it’s just an interesting homo sapiens experiment
Proof of work mining has no inherent value unless we believe it does. If there was any concept of valuable hashes, every other proof of work network would be proportionally valuable too. If energy expenditure would matter in determining price, we would be living in a Marxist lala land where digging up holes only to cover them back is valuable labor.
The scarcity is not set in stone, as every parameter can be changed if there is consensus among participants. Maybe the fact that you can fork Bitcoin indefinitely to create a new competing currency is a form of monetary inflation.
All of this is well known, but widely ignored by people who desperately want to get rich by making others buy in. Bitcoin’s competitive advantage as an internet currency is that you can send some of the letters and numbers to anyone running the same software.
Bitcoin is faster than bank settlements, usually cheaper than Western Union, more difficult to censor than bank transfers, very hard to confiscate from your wallet.
Everyone who is ostracized and discriminated by the banking system will find Bitcoin useful. That’s the target audience for users, not North Americans hustling their way to buy a Lambo.
But in spite of its qualities, Bitcoin is old tech that doesn’t accomplish its intended purpose in the best way. Zcash (Bitcoin codebase fork with privacy improvements) is much closer to the original vision. Monero now dominates marketplaces where Bitcoin first proved its usefulness. Litecoin is also a popular middle ground between Bitcoin and Zcash (not as secure, not as private, but cheap to use and fast). Heck, even Bitcoin Cash did a better job improving the network with OP codes that enable vaults, covenants, and trust minimized layer 2s.
If Bitcoin loses its appeal on markets and doesn’t keep up at the technical level either, it’s gonna get replaced. Because technology is meant to be useful, not the subject of worship. The window of opportunity to fight back against CBDCs is very short and Bitcoin is hardly eligible to compete in this category. Believing that CBDC users will swap into bitcoin to hedge against inflation is borderline delusional.
Thankfully, we have the hard forks that can correct the trajectory in which we are headed. This summer we’re gonna get a technology-oriented version of Bitcoin thanks to Paul’s Ecash.com fork. Builders will finally be able to prove what they’ve been working on using a live network with real incentives. Smart and creative people will finally have a place to flourish, while the midwits and the 80 IQ cult members will get free coins to sell. Everybody wins, as software development gets mixed with market development. As it should be.
Anyway, long rant. But it’s hard to feel optimistic about Bitcoin when you notice how much the community IQ has declined and how far the project has strayed from its original mission. Mother of psyops, be my MILF!
Replies (39)
Correct, but Zcash, Monero and BCH are all unscalable to billions too (like Bitcoin, although Bitcoin has made all the influencers believe it could do the scaling "in layers" for the last nine years).
I used to think there were two ways of scaling Bitcoin: one would be with trusted entities, i.e. banks, but deployed in a decentralized way that limited liability and government capture, and the other way was with Drivechain.
Given what we're seeing with all the Lightning custodial wallets being targeted, implementing full KYC and migrating to Spark (which is becoming almost the one world central bank) that first option is looking worse.
(To be fair my plan was never to have these companies be the custodians in the first place, but it was a bad plan anyway.)
What about Ark?
Every monetary system is an answer.
Progress sometimes begins by questioning the question rather than improving the answer.
the fundamental problem with bitcoin subhumans is they refuse to accept a simple fact that money is not an investment and the corollary to this is that if something is an investment then it isn't money
gold used to be money - then it became an investment - now it isn't money anymore
bitcoiners think bitcoin can be both while not having intrinsic value like gold which is necessary in everything from electronics to dentistry to you name it
bitcoin can not be an investment because it has no, and cannot have any intrinsic value
and it cannot be money either because it is being treated as an investment
all bitcoin is - is a black hole that converts useful energy into heat
and all bitcoiners are - is dogs that need to be shot
Subhuman activities 🤣
i used to think Lyn Alden is a Tranny so i pretended i didn't know that Bitcoin is trash
but now she's old and i am not attracted to her anymore so you get to know the truth about Bitcoin
Lmao at least I’m not a faggot 🤣. Have fun sucking tranny cock in Orlando!
Fiat's own value is a social experiment, backed by debt and inflation, e.g. the 1971 Nixon shock.
i trained myself to be a faggot out of sheer contempt for normies like you
@getgle - crypto zigger ♠️ :cob:Monero has active sidechains (p2pool) and merge mining (Tari, others soon to come). If drivechain scales Bitcoin, it can also scale Monero in virtually the exact same manner.
what you call normality i call mediocrity and conformity
i used to be straight but chose not live in fear of cock
Christianity is for Jew Worshipping cattle. Our civilization traces back to the Greeks who used to fuck boys and each other. That's my inspiration.
if Greeks had trannies i have zero doubt they would be fucking them.
honestly not sure what you're proud of. that you are no better than an average nobody ? LOL
@getgle - crypto zigger ♠️ :cob:Struck a nerve? Holy word salad. Just remember “pseudo philosopher” that at the end of the day you are nothing more than a faggot. Your bloodline will die with you.
ok i am a faggot.
and what are you ?
genuinely curious.
nothing ?
Not a faggot like you 🫵🤣
my bloodline might die with me but at least it is going to be a tragedy
your bloodline on the other hand is nothing but worthless peasantry and nobody cares what happens to it
nice to meet you nothing / nobody.
More like a comedy. We don’t need anymore troon fuckers creating absolutely no value to society. Thank god you can’t procreate 😂
How much tranny porn did you look at this morning? It’s only 10 am in Florida I’m sure you got a few hours of gooning in. Proud of you buddy great work.
i can't procreate ? LOL. professional escort BIOLOGICAL women PAY FOR ME in restaurants. any girl you have a crush on i can have in 60 seconds.
it's just too boring for me so i decided to be a pedophile and troon chaser because i am a Jew and i enjoy depravity and degeneracy.
i have also done every drug without getting addicted to them. i do fucked up things for fun because i can.
and you don't do anything interesting because you're so boring if you stopped existing nobody would even notice.
i'm actually jerking off to tranny porn right now ...
Ain’t reading all that. Have fun with your trannys and porn today! Gotta go add value to society! Jesus loves you.
Does your hoa know you are a sex offender? Also you need to learn how to ragebait better man you are too old game has changed bozo.
i told you i am a Jew.
laws are for Goyim like you.
No you are a fag. Nothing wrong with being a fag man it’s the big 26. The world is your oyster
Wtf
Look into Tachyon for Zcash
Ikr crazy
It depends on the definition of scaling, computational scaling is limited and favours sharding of contexts then maybe use zk proofs to settle between contexts. But data availability isn't doomed, it is actually possible to scale it with users, as long as the number of users is actually objective, which is the real challenge. If you KNOW that there are 10X more users now than last year, then you can tolerate 10X more data in a data availability sampling paradigm. Which is why Celestia needs to hardcode the number of clients the community believes there are around the world.
But I wonder if someone can use Proof Of Work as a proxy of how many users there are watching the chain and sampling chunks of the data.
I don't mean necessarily decentralised mining, but just using the hashrate as a proxy for demand, and demand as a proxy for the light clients taking data availability samples...
This is not something you can do in celestia without oracles of the token price, but we have hashrate and they don't.
Even if we assume away the problem of data availability it wouldn't be great to have the entirety of the world's monetary transactions depend on a single company building the blocks and publishing zk-proofs. I guess you can say this block generation can be made to be more open, but I think the incentives are that it would be very centralized regardless, no?
It's a similar problem of Spark: even if you could make it be totally trustless it would still be bad for it to be controlled by a single company.
This is true. If Monero adopted Drivechains I think it could become a real contender. Still, though, it would have to migrate most of its activity to the sidechain and make mainchain very small, in that sense it would be basically the same as eCash, only with a bigger initial user base and name recognition.
The bigger question to me is: can Monero scale to billions of people via Thunder-style sidechains but with Monero technology? If yes then those sidechains should probably be used in eCash instead, but I don't know.
I did, it is better, but also kinda sucks. In my understanding you have to rely on some big servers that keep the full history of all nullifiers forever so they can compute proofs on behalf of normal users. How much can that scale, if each person is making 3 transactions per day, and if each transaction will use more 2 nullifiers on average due to mixed inputs? That's over a petabyte per year just in storage.
Or maybe I misunderstood the requirements. Clarifications welcome.
Well, by the current implementation each side chain would have to do the FCMP within itself, but yes, with FCMP the membership set would include everyone within the side chain. There’s probably a way to expand the membership proofs to include sidechains — I can’t confidently say this is true, implementing this would be significantly beyond my pay grade — but I don’t think it is necessary, it won’t affect Monero’s fungibility. “This transaction came from anyone in the current chain” is large enough to be fungible.
In a way Monero’s aggressive delisting has done it a massive favor. Because every time Bitcoin (or any other chain’s) fees have been excessively high, it has been because of the mania of speculative investors and not actual use cases. And the entire actions of Bitcoiners these past few years have been trying to convince some investor of an unfalsifiable claim that villages in South America are using Bitcoin all the time, while keeping plausibly deniable. Bitcoin’s development has been subject to the near exclusive pressures of ideologues or transient hot money. Monero, with its lack of access to the major liquidity sources, has continued to simply address the needs of people actually using it. If eCash proves a market demand for drivechain Monero can adopt it at its leisure, but fees remain low throughout because it only has actual users and not a flood of deranged speculators.
That storage profile is exactly where agent payments get ugly too. If normal users need giant coordinators to prove basic activity, machine users will centralize around API landlords immediately. Open money cannot depend on a petabyte priesthood.
I mean it depends on what are you trying to achieve, humans seem to be ok with few seconds latency for anything except very hectic metro lines, in which case you are better off with prepaid cards. But for everything else, if Rootstock has 15s blocks, I believe that is enough, and requires no centralized block producers, just publish your transaction, and IF you want to move from one context to another then you have to generate the ZK proof, but that is just the cost of business, you can obviously atomic swap with someone who generates these proofs and provide the liquidity... But note all of that is no different from paying a miner to include a transaction, that is to say it is so open and so competitive you can hardly do any better.
Now when you need instant payments, as in subsecond confirmations, then your options are;
1. Proof of stake sidechains (Stakechain) on top of Rootstock, which is not actually a single company. But while one confirmation is super fast, the more decentralised these get the longer it takes for finality ... But if you want such fast txns, you might be more happy to risk losing some with reorgs. But you still get more confidence than zeroconf.
2. Centralized payment pools, this one gives you the fastest finality possible, but you have the risk of withholding proofs that are necessary to withdraw or the business going down.. here I believe the absolute best you can do is just use small amounts that you are willing to lose, just like your pocket money, and maybe use many providers at once... That basically boils down to something like Ark, but with more programmability of the contract with the server.
So in conclusion, I think we can scale and indeed solve DA, AND have synchronicity which makes interop between contexts much safer than sidechains that go out of sync, but as soon as you require faster confirmations and faster finality, you must start accepting tradeoffs for different amounts ... But worst case scenario (waiting until Rootstock can't be reorged practically) is still orders of magnitudes faster than finality in any fiat system that merchants are used to, hell even cash notes are only finalised when you take them to a bank and see if they are counterfeit or not.
You don't think that is insanely good outcome? I personally played enough with Rootstock and I think their latency is acceptable, and I don't think that LN or Ark give me much better latency for payments I need to be careful about anyways, and for payments that I don't need to be careful about, I am ok just risking it with a temporary cosigner just like I am ok losing the money in my pocket once or twice in my lifetime
Note also; it doesn't Have to be ZK proofs, you can still demand that miners do the computing and finalize the state, but you can demand that with latency, so they get to do that in the background and take their time, not while accepting txn to put in the block... Then they can vote on the state commitment of previous epoch.
The downside of that is that you don't get to invent custom vms and don't save miners the effort. The upside is that you trust miners majority, instead of math and possibly buggy code.
I don't know which is better, but I wanted to say this is possible
I guess you can call that hashrate escrow... But a merge mined sidechain with BitVM bridge is very much a hashrate escrow already.
The difference here is that if you don't want faster blocks than Rootstock, you don't create Sidechains and worry about the consequences of that, instead you just accept transactions as they come without any computations, and update the state later... Separating DA from Compute.
The obvious upside is synchronicity which makes the entire system safer and easier to reason about. Things all happen at the same time including their side effects in parallel contexts, and as long as majority of miners are honest (or ZK verifier is valid) you reach the same conclusion globally as you calculated locally.
> IF you want to move from one context to another then you have to generate the ZK proof
I don't understand. What is this ZK proof you're talking about and what are these "contexts"?
I am taking about something like Celestia, basically the Blockchain (in this case Rootstock) doesn't verify anything, all transactions are pure data carrying, the only difference between OP_RETURN or Eth Blobs and what Celestia does, is that in Celestia you can add something equivalent to Nostr "kind"... This way people can query only transactions they are interested in.
A simpler way to do this on Rootstock is just contracts and associated Events they emit.
So let's say you want to make a Monero on Rootstock, you create a new contract, every time you make a transaction to that contract, it is only data carrying, thus miners don't validate anything except transaction fees.
On the client side, you can see all these data, and you can run them as transactions against the smart contract state, deriving the new state, at the client side.
But then when you want to take money outside of that contract to move it to another contract that says mimics ZCash instead, or if you have multiple Monero contracts each contain a shard, to keep things manageable on client side validation, then when you want to exit from one shard to the other, you need to provide a ZK proof to Rootstock that you did all the computation over that data carrying committed to that contract, and that the state after that computation contains a withdrawal request, not from one sidechain to another but from one contract to another...
Does that make sense?
This basically allows you to do 2/3 of what Drivechains does;
1. Freedom of innovation.
2. Sharding to limit the cost of validation
As for #3; DA scaling, we keep it on Rootstock with Blobs and data availability sampling, not only because we can, but because the synchronicity between all these shards is super valuable for interop and atomic swaps, because you remove a major risk in cross chain transactions which is that some chains may reorg independently from others... But if you do DA on the same chain, then reorg is atomic, every shard is reorged at the same time. Also you don't have to keep bootstrapping merge mining (a new BMM has higher risk of reorgs, but in DAS, there is no reorg independently from Rootstock).
