Oddbean

More seriously now, while I love a lot of bitcoin's fundamentals (self sovereignty, fixed supply, decentralized, rules can't be changed by administrators at a whim), there are other things I dont like (infinitely increasing ledger, too much transparency, transaction rate is very slow, requirement of huge energy input to maintain, and now it is a political lever). As the first mover, it has first mover advantage. But after bitcoin came a thousand other blockchains, most of them tokens or currencies. Are really none of them better? Am I to believe nobody was able to improve on bitcoin? I admit ignorance, but I remain a skeptic and open minded about what you all call "shitcoins". Please don't hate me, I came here to fix censorship not money and fixing money is not my area of expertise. I'm just still not interested in joining this cult at this time, I'll keep watching from just ouside... and that conference made me even less interested.

Well, youre probably going to get at least one "Monero" but I figure I'll say it again. That's the only coin I'll shill because it's the only one worth shilling. I will add, Mimblewimble as an architecture/scheme is the only thing in existence today that comes close to truly solving scalability issues with bitcoin. You should look into it. I've said this a lot around here, to solve the issues with bitcoin you need to have the same security guarantees as bitcoin without the requirement of keeping any and/or all historical data. Mimblewimble *almost* achieves this. Actually, it does achieve it as originally specified, with the downside that you get absolutely no programmability, no multisig, no time locks, nothing. To get those a trade off was made, and tiny little proofs from each transaction must be kept, called kernels, that are present in all MW implementations to my knowledge and in the reference implementation, Grin. If this issue can be solved while keeping those programmability features, you've got bona fide space money.

MW is def underrated. Scalable and far more private. Bitcoin should've added it long ago. Litecoin already did all the work. Beam uses MW and has programmability/multigsig/timelocks etc I think (although I don't know much about it)

Yeah I know. So I've been following MW development since before Grin launched, and there's some interesting things about that. The original MW paper specified an interactive protocol with no programmability. It also required absolutely no historical data preservation whatsoever. Andrew Poelstra massaged the cryptography a bit and brought us the MW we know today, which does have programmability, at the cost of needing to preserve a range proof for every transaction forever, which in MW is called a transaction kernel. So you get multisig and all that good stuff (but no scripting, but there are ways to script with it nonetheless) but you lose that very powerful feature of needing only the UTXO set for full security. I think that feature is the killer feature of MW, it is the trait that allows it to scale to the limit of the trilemma, you don't even need a block size if the chain doesn't grow forever, the block size is limited by a function of block time and network latency and not by transaction size. But we have to have multisig and that kind of stuff to do anything more interesting than plain cash, so here we are. I hope we can figure out how to build something that has both and I can see no fundamental reason why it is not possible.

Bitcoin is not static. It represents power to the hodlr. Governments were destined to want it. RFL's proposal to use it as a backing for the dollar is only stating the inevitable. This changes nothing. Bitcoin is not defined by governmemts, its defined by who accepts it in commerce. Governments produce nothing, corporations produce nothing. Ultimately individuals determine what is a store of value, not banks and not a small group of billionaires. The present limitations of bitcoin are designed to make it the optimally valuable limited resource in today's world. Transparency and simplicity is paramount to this purpose. Shitcoins are the collective toiletbowl where baselayer features can be proved or discounted. Layer twos enable some of these features in the meantime, though with some compromises. A government deciding to try implementing a layer two or three is not necessarily a bad thing. The first to do it in a credible way will dominate the future. Yes, politicians are slimy and we don't like them because they're all about trying to fix a system that cannot be fixed. Your instinct to move on from bitcoin in reaction is not misplaced. Just remember; not today, and not in 10,000 years: nobody changes bitcoin, bitcoin changes everything.

"Your instinct to move on from bitcoin in reaction" ... I didn't mean this literally. I was expressing how cringe the conference was. Clearly a lot of people took it literally an explained to me how bitcoin isn't the cringe circus around bitcoin. But I have a few brain cells still. I knew that.

I always find it interesting when bitcoiners get angry when Bitcoin is used by people they don't like or in ways they don't like. That's the point. It's as though they don't understand this technology at all. Your enemies will use it in ways that you dislike. That's a feature not a bug. It's the equivalent of only supporting free speech for people you agree with. If that were the case we wouldn't need free speech. People who think like this about bitcoin need to go do more work.

Bitcoin improves every day. How? The layers that are built on top of it. You can pick your poison; do you want more privacy? faster transactions? there are other chains out there that are going different directions. some see themselves as a better alternative, some focus on other things. Bitcoin is bitcoin 🤷‍♂️

nah. bitcoin is good. 1. long ledger allows someone to verify the blockchain since the beginning. proof of stake does not have this property. 2. i would say it has just about the right amount of transparency. but your mileage may vary. 3. you can use lightning and cashu for faster tx. 4. huge energy is not a waste. the hodlers of bitcoin are paying mining companies to secure the blockchain. hodlers need 'flow' and flow is provided by mining companies. hodlers pay mining companies for this work thru inflation. nothing is wasted. 5. if mainstream is adopting it, why would this be a problem. that was "the dream". nostr:note13phqltvr9tzfl647rwjtaamjqvau3qxx0magp9sr8syezqh9hkusj24v7f

If you want a more learning and discussing new ideas vibe, you should checkout Baltic Honeybadger (next month). It's been around for ages, and the content is focusesd on technical and learning for newcomers, none of this cringy politics shit.