There's no better explanation about shitcoin 2.0 than this one. What a wonderful term, there's nothing to argue against a thesis like this. While some are applauding and validating these shitcoins, I'm learning to use the Lightning Network in an even more useful way. LN Maxi is the way.
I do agree that we have a shitcoins 2.0 problem that we have to think about how to socially defend against and I think Ark is not the best solution to our problems, but the idea that covenants are useless and give us nothing is a bit outrageous.
I think I largely addressed this in the scaling section as its the same rationale used by fake L2's and covenants proponents today. If there's something you'd like addressed specifically let me know.
To reword and expand at a high level, the paper is flawed on it's premise because it makes the incorrect assumption that scaling limitations are a function of blockspace/throughput, and that if they are, that chain representation is the solution. It's self-contradicting and paradoxical.
The first reason that's flawed is that actual scaling limitation is that of ownership and distribution, there will never be more than 2.1 quadrillion sats, much of those sats already consolidated with institutions and whole coiners. Consolidation is also increasing, not decreasing, and will continue to over time as real-world wealth moves in at scale. As it does so, fees are at now at record lows, with recent changes to make them sub-sat per vbyte.
If sub-sat is not low enough, then only 0 will do. If you're dependent on 0, you're dependent on someone other than the fee market, and you cannot get the security of the chain because you are unable to unilaterally interact with the chain whether that's leaving a covenant or entering one.
Therefore, there is no script that can run on the chain that scales trustless-ness to people you claim cannot otherwise access the chain to enforce or escape it.
The next fallacy is one of throughput or efficiency, perhaps these users are not dependent on the chain but can only afford to use it in a worst-case scenario. Lightning already does this, you only need to interact with the chain on entrance and exit, no different than a covenant. Coordinated batching is where covenants can gain efficiency, but Lightning also has coordinated batching that reduces costs 80% yet no one uses it- because again cost at sub-sat fees is not the bottleneck.
To make the efficiency argument over lightning, you then have to make the assumption that users will never exit, while at the same time bemoaning lightning channel closures.
Another apple and oranges invocation regarding efficiency relative to Lightning is that there is no inbound cost to covenants, as you can receive a sunk-cost coins already in the covenant. This completely ignores that each covenant/coordinator is a closed network that still relies on Lightning or the underlying chain, open networks, to interoperate with each other, making cost and or trust inevitable.
The end result being, covenants or no covenants, trust and central coordination is inevitable. With that being the case, covenants offer nothing that can't be done already as trust and centrality are already pervasive.
But it's worse than capitulation to trust, what they actually scale is centralization to make the closed networks functional, as opposed to distributing that trust across an open network. There are ~200M businesses on the globe and less than a billion households with internet, a Lightning appliance in each could already be on-boarded today in little more than a year with existing batching capabilities and throughput, yet we don't even need close to that number.
The golden billion we refer to in fiat terms is more realistically like the orange 200 million.
Lightning for better or worse, what people like and dislike, is scaling that lives in reality.
Covenants scaloors live in effete intellectualism.
I addressed the other downsides of Ark in 2023 it seems: #358298
Great article btw, bitcoiners should call out these shitty project more often. Too bad one needs to put a lot of efforts investigating why they're shit every time. But the outcome is always the same.
The issue isn't to grind down fake L2s, the issue is for there to be enough organic use of clean lightning that no one takes them seriously or ideally has even heard of them.
Now there is no (or little) organic need for clean lightning, because onchain fees are just so gosh darned low. That will fix itself with time... or it won't. If it doesn't, the takeaway is that not enough people care about "money for enemies" and are fine using custodial kyc bitcoin that won't depreciate with purchasing and if they got rug pulled by the custodian, boo hoo. If this lack of demand persists over many halvings, the only technical fix that occurs to me is a softfork to reduce block size, and that may not be worth the effort.
Nice writeup though. You elicited many interesting responses.
I actually kind of expect this to be the case forever, Lightning warrants a premium for speed and granularity
The fact we lowered the bound on dust and distribution still continues to consolidate implies that chain use will become more like Fedwire and not less, with institutions /HNWI's using it for settlement across platforms until hash rate either becomes a by-product of heat generation or stagnates while purchasing power increases.
At this point they do not deserve to be lumped in with Drivechains. It's an experiment that's doing a reasonable job exploring tech. The hate can wait.
Ark has HTLCs. As the person paying, that swap was not trusted for me. The service doing the swap is trusting the ASP to not collude with me to double spend until they fully confirm the coins. But that's not a deal breaker.
Not necessarily. I could have had gotten settled funds in other ways. At the moment due to low usage doing an on-chain payment (either sending or receiving) is the easiest way. But that's not a requirement for Ark. And even now the trade-offs for liquidity are different than lightning, which means it may be useful.
"Other ways" being from another Ark user that either A) got the sats themselves first through a trusted Lightning swap or B) used the chain when they could have instead opened a real Lightning channel
The chain payment method obviates the liquidity concern, you don't need any external liquidity to open a real Lightning channel, and as the receiver of said channel the amount received is the liquidity... not a pre-requirement
The cost of the channel was not saved by the user receiving via Ark, you as the payer paid it in both scenarios. The cost of a closure or exit was also not saved by the user, just deferred.
It's inherently a closed network unlike Lightning, but also not a one-way ratchet, so the presumption that users can trustlessly receive (ignoring the fact that relatively few people will ever be able to afford unilateral exit guarantees) depends on a specific Ark coordinator having a network effect that competes with an open network in Lightning and now other competing closed networks. I don't even have to say how implausible this is, since ArkLabs themselves has already narrative pivoted to this being DeFi trash, such as shitcoin exchanges with an inherent network of buyers and sellers
"Other ways" being from another Ark user that either A) got the sats themselves first through a trusted Lightning swap or B) used the chain when they could have instead opened a real Lightning channel
Nope. You clearly don't understand how Ark works.
As I said, in the current implementation you can get settled funds easily by doing any on-chain transaction. Either sending or receiving on chain funds.
Once more Ark rounds are common, you'll also be able to get settled funds by waiting until someone else needs to do an on-chain transaction and piggybacking on theirs. This option is much more efficient in terms of on-chain transactions, at the cost of tying up liquidity (in many, but not all, circumstances). For many use cases waiting N blocks for fully confirmed funds is perfectly fine.
Sorry, but Ark just isn't clearly bullshit like Drivechains is. It's worth investigating. It may not fully pan out, and probably will only ever be useful for a subset of applications. But hate at this stage simply isn't warranted.
Nope. You clearly don't understand how Ark works. As I said, in the current implementation you can get settled funds easily by doing any on-chain transaction. Either sending or receiving on chain funds.
I literally used the example of chain transactions IN, I assume by out your meaning an exit, which is obviously chain security. There's just no reason for these chain transactions not to be real Lightning channels since there's a similar chain cost in either case.
This option is much more efficient in terms of on-chain transactions
One input to multiple outputs, no different than existing Lightning batch opens + an inevitable exit.
Ark just isn't clearly bullshit like Drivechains is ... hate at this stage simply isn't warranted.
Maybe it could have been that way, but take that up with ArkLabs marketing geniuses that overstepped and have had to narrative pivot constantly.
I will concede that Paul is a clown of the highest order.
I haven't seen Second labs make such retarded claims, but they're flirting with it.
There's a clear intent to fud Lightning exactly as Paul does.
offtopic - downvoting on SN means almost nothing. It only make hidden a post if more stackers are downvoting. But your 10k downvote is not balancing too much the other upvotes. So your hate was useless. And saying loud that you "downvote with 10k sats" is just virtue signaling... It just redistribute your sats even to the same OP.
The entire premise of Ark scaling is the insinuation that people will defer these costs forever and do trusted receives forever.
The same as with lightning. In lightning you don't open/close channel every transaction.
I don't get you FUD on ARK. It's a legitimate method of scaling that complements LN very elegantly.
Imagine social graph of users transacting. LN is good for creating highways in this graph - ideally between huge clusters/cliques of users. ARK is good for connecting users in those cliques. LN/Ark are scaling in different dimension and we need both for proper bitcoin scaling.
It's ultimately a trust-based solution, and Scamson referring to it as an L2 is the first trust violation. I can accept trusted solutions when they're honest and decentralizing, but Liquid has doubled-down on the opposite.
Federation is also a scam word, trustodial is trustodial. We have no idea how many signatories are actually in the federation in terms of how distributed those keys are, every Federation is Schrodinger's node.
The infrastructure still has a single point of trust in Blockstream, rendering any actually federated peg pointless.
It's another example of broken incentives, they generate swap fees and think they're cute by scamming regulator with technobabble to make it sound not like a money business. In so doing, they have to mislead to the unsophisticated user even if most of us know the truth.
Liquid was a good intention. It was coming up early in the block size wars as a proposal for exchanges, to have some kind of interoperable network to move funds between them, faster and cheaper than BTC onchain, but still using BTC.
I kinda agree with that use case. A federation that is moving funds privately between them.
But then LN was launched and come in force and Liquid kinda lost the use case. The block size war was also over, segwit in place and onchain mempool liberated, so even the exchanges that were excited about Liquid, they were still preferring to do it over onchain as usual.
LN got more and more grip and Liquid was slowly forgotten and became useless. Now Blockstream, want to push people into using it as it would be a "cheapest and fastest" way instead of LN, because they do not want to see it terminated (as nobody is using it). In the end they put a lot of effort and money to build it. IMHO they should go back to the original idea to be used for private entities and not pushed to large masses of users.
Now all those onchain maxis want to use Liquid instead of preparing in time, with calm new LN channels. That's why this crazy mania with Liquid. But as usual when the onchain fees are going down, Liquid use is going to meaningless until zero.
Your knowledge is top tier JS, I was unaware of the bolt12 stuff, until you explained it earlier, I innocently shilled phoenix thinking I was helping but in hindsight I should have recommended shockwallet.
The more you know about lightning, the more you don't know 🤷 look at when Nostr first appeared, the most used custodial lightning wallet, you know, they've gone down the self custody route using you know who, and any new nostriches are blissfully unaware.
Honestly Phoenix is probably the most turn-key wallet available right now, and they achieve that with centralization and trust.
Problem with phoenix is they went all in on the download and run path that leverages app stores for distribution, but in so doing lost sight of the goal of making Bitcoin (through Lightning) the default money of the internet.
I didn't get into it here but the reason Lightning is so stunted is most builders went down this path of the mobile node fantasy, and the incentives of earning sats off people who just want to tinker with it, not following the "jobs to be done" framework.
You don't run an email server on your phone, you shouldn't run a Lightning node on one either.
Bolt12 is the kind of nonsense that comes from not looking at the big picture. #1275941
Phoenix eventually started to figure this out after my trolling and launched phoenixd for servers last year.
I just recorded a pod today, when he publishes it I'll share, I get in a bit into Nostr's origins from the original ShockWallet that pre-dated it. Everyone that got into Nostr did so from the wrong angle, had they understood it's pre-history as an overlay network for Lightning to enhance self-custodial UX we'd be light years ahead.
Side quest: Do you have any recommended reads on that framework, particularly in the context of Lightning?
Trying to preserve some of my sanity by side-stepping the half quadrillion generically scraped, keyword optimized, polished-turd articles my search threw up (almost literally).
I don't recall exactly where I picked it up from, I know it originated from Clayton M. Christensen of The Innovators Dilemma and Competing Against Luck... I may have audiobooked one of those at some point
Christensen, Hall, Dillon, and Duncan contend that by understanding what causes customers to "hire" a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they'll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts.
I know for a fact I had to listen to the The Lean Startup for a founders group, which talked about the same principles, iirc it was pretty boring in that it was mostly just common sense and crushed it on 1.5x
What do people think of Rootstock? Figured I may as well ask here. I read some Whitney Webb article a while ago that there are a lot of nefarious social programs being rolled out on Rootstock in South America, but it seems like a good way not to "pollute" the BTC chain while still being an L2 / bitcoin-adjacent?
I actually don't hate it, just seems to be an idea that's failed a few times already, its merge-mined approach isn't new.
I don't think I've ever seen them misrepresent it, being legitimately proof of work through merged-mining makes it automatically better than any fake L2.
Execution just seems to be terrible, I investigated it to see if it could do things fake L2's are claiming to do as far as bootstrapping Lightning wallets, but the swapping/pegging resources are a nightmare. If they could get their shit together on DX i'd give it another look.
Another issue is its a lot more expensive than Liquid, which if people are going to downgrade security to something pegged then they're going to do that because of cost efficacy.
lol, that's whats great about SN, it's a thunderdome
Fun fact about Citrea, it's the fake L2 that triggered the Knots/Core war by abusing the chain for arbitrary storage... yet Luke supports covenants, so he's literally inviting the exact thing he FUD's Core over.
Why fake L2, just different. We've spent a ton of efforts in Lightning. I do get why people could be pessimistic. It is not really a FUD but re adjustment of market sentiment.
There's no better explanation about shitcoin 2.0 than this one. What a wonderful term, there's nothing to argue against a thesis like this. While some are applauding and validating these shitcoins, I'm learning to use the Lightning Network in an even more useful way. LN Maxi is the way.
I do agree that we have a shitcoins 2.0 problem that we have to think about how to socially defend against and I think Ark is not the best solution to our problems, but the idea that covenants are useless and give us nothing is a bit outrageous.
https://github.com/JohnLaw2/ln-scaling-covenants
Dissect some of these neat proposals by JohnLaw2, and I'll reconsider.
I think I largely addressed this in the scaling section as its the same rationale used by fake L2's and covenants proponents today. If there's something you'd like addressed specifically let me know.
To reword and expand at a high level, the paper is flawed on it's premise because it makes the incorrect assumption that scaling limitations are a function of blockspace/throughput, and that if they are, that chain representation is the solution. It's self-contradicting and paradoxical.
The first reason that's flawed is that actual scaling limitation is that of ownership and distribution, there will never be more than 2.1 quadrillion sats, much of those sats already consolidated with institutions and whole coiners. Consolidation is also increasing, not decreasing, and will continue to over time as real-world wealth moves in at scale. As it does so, fees are at now at record lows, with recent changes to make them sub-sat per vbyte.
If sub-sat is not low enough, then only 0 will do. If you're dependent on 0, you're dependent on someone other than the fee market, and you cannot get the security of the chain because you are unable to unilaterally interact with the chain whether that's leaving a covenant or entering one.
Therefore, there is no script that can run on the chain that scales trustless-ness to people you claim cannot otherwise access the chain to enforce or escape it.
The next fallacy is one of throughput or efficiency, perhaps these users are not dependent on the chain but can only afford to use it in a worst-case scenario. Lightning already does this, you only need to interact with the chain on entrance and exit, no different than a covenant. Coordinated batching is where covenants can gain efficiency, but Lightning also has coordinated batching that reduces costs 80% yet no one uses it- because again cost at sub-sat fees is not the bottleneck.
To make the efficiency argument over lightning, you then have to make the assumption that users will never exit, while at the same time bemoaning lightning channel closures.
Another apple and oranges invocation regarding efficiency relative to Lightning is that there is no inbound cost to covenants, as you can receive a sunk-cost coins already in the covenant. This completely ignores that each covenant/coordinator is a closed network that still relies on Lightning or the underlying chain, open networks, to interoperate with each other, making cost and or trust inevitable.
The end result being, covenants or no covenants, trust and central coordination is inevitable. With that being the case, covenants offer nothing that can't be done already as trust and centrality are already pervasive.
But it's worse than capitulation to trust, what they actually scale is centralization to make the closed networks functional, as opposed to distributing that trust across an open network. There are ~200M businesses on the globe and less than a billion households with internet, a Lightning appliance in each could already be on-boarded today in little more than a year with existing batching capabilities and throughput, yet we don't even need close to that number.
The golden billion we refer to in fiat terms is more realistically like the orange 200 million.
Lightning for better or worse, what people like and dislike, is scaling that lives in reality.
Covenants scaloors live in effete intellectualism.
I addressed the other downsides of Ark in 2023 it seems: #358298
Great article btw, bitcoiners should call out these shitty project more often. Too bad one needs to put a lot of efforts investigating why they're shit every time. But the outcome is always the same.
The issue isn't to grind down fake L2s, the issue is for there to be enough organic use of clean lightning that no one takes them seriously or ideally has even heard of them.
Now there is no (or little) organic need for clean lightning, because onchain fees are just so gosh darned low. That will fix itself with time... or it won't. If it doesn't, the takeaway is that not enough people care about "money for enemies" and are fine using custodial kyc bitcoin that won't depreciate with purchasing and if they got rug pulled by the custodian, boo hoo. If this lack of demand persists over many halvings, the only technical fix that occurs to me is a softfork to reduce block size, and that may not be worth the effort.
Nice writeup though. You elicited many interesting responses.
Indeed, doing my best
I actually kind of expect this to be the case forever, Lightning warrants a premium for speed and granularity
The fact we lowered the bound on dust and distribution still continues to consolidate implies that chain use will become more like Fedwire and not less, with institutions /HNWI's using it for settlement across platforms until hash rate either becomes a by-product of heat generation or stagnates while purchasing power increases.
If that's true, and it might well be, then there's not much to do about L2s other than resist more softforks and entryist softforks of course.
But beyond that, let a thousand stinky flowers bloom I suppose.
I did a 10k downzap on this post with Ark.
At this point they do not deserve to be lumped in with Drivechains. It's an experiment that's doing a reasonable job exploring tech. The hate can wait.
You did a trusted swap to lightning from a centralized shitcoin
Ark has HTLCs. As the person paying, that swap was not trusted for me. The service doing the swap is trusting the ASP to not collude with me to double spend until they fully confirm the coins. But that's not a deal breaker.
Unless you made a chain payment to the Ark, you trusted it (as the swap provider is the payer) to get the sats in in the first place...
If you did make a chain payment you could have just opened a real channel instead
Not necessarily. I could have had gotten settled funds in other ways. At the moment due to low usage doing an on-chain payment (either sending or receiving) is the easiest way. But that's not a requirement for Ark. And even now the trade-offs for liquidity are different than lightning, which means it may be useful.
"Other ways" being from another Ark user that either A) got the sats themselves first through a trusted Lightning swap or B) used the chain when they could have instead opened a real Lightning channel
The chain payment method obviates the liquidity concern, you don't need any external liquidity to open a real Lightning channel, and as the receiver of said channel the amount received is the liquidity... not a pre-requirement
The cost of the channel was not saved by the user receiving via Ark, you as the payer paid it in both scenarios. The cost of a closure or exit was also not saved by the user, just deferred.
It's inherently a closed network unlike Lightning, but also not a one-way ratchet, so the presumption that users can trustlessly receive (ignoring the fact that relatively few people will ever be able to afford unilateral exit guarantees) depends on a specific Ark coordinator having a network effect that competes with an open network in Lightning and now other competing closed networks. I don't even have to say how implausible this is, since ArkLabs themselves has already narrative pivoted to this being DeFi trash, such as shitcoin exchanges with an inherent network of buyers and sellers
Nope. You clearly don't understand how Ark works.
As I said, in the current implementation you can get settled funds easily by doing any on-chain transaction. Either sending or receiving on chain funds.
Once more Ark rounds are common, you'll also be able to get settled funds by waiting until someone else needs to do an on-chain transaction and piggybacking on theirs. This option is much more efficient in terms of on-chain transactions, at the cost of tying up liquidity (in many, but not all, circumstances). For many use cases waiting N blocks for fully confirmed funds is perfectly fine.
Sorry, but Ark just isn't clearly bullshit like Drivechains is. It's worth investigating. It may not fully pan out, and probably will only ever be useful for a subset of applications. But hate at this stage simply isn't warranted.
I literally used the example of chain transactions IN, I assume by out your meaning an exit, which is obviously chain security. There's just no reason for these chain transactions not to be real Lightning channels since there's a similar chain cost in either case.
One input to multiple outputs, no different than existing Lightning batch opens + an inevitable exit.
Maybe it could have been that way, but take that up with ArkLabs marketing geniuses that overstepped and have had to narrative pivot constantly.
I will concede that Paul is a clown of the highest order.
I haven't seen Second labs make such retarded claims, but they're flirting with it.
There's a clear intent to fud Lightning exactly as Paul does.
https://m.stacker.news/116243
now you get it?
save the receipts.
offtopic - downvoting on SN means almost nothing. It only make hidden a post if more stackers are downvoting. But your 10k downvote is not balancing too much the other upvotes. So your hate was useless.
And saying loud that you "downvote with 10k sats" is just virtue signaling...
It just redistribute your sats even to the same OP.
The same as with lightning. In lightning you don't open/close channel every transaction.
I don't get you FUD on ARK. It's a legitimate method of scaling that complements LN very elegantly.
Imagine social graph of users transacting. LN is good for creating highways in this graph - ideally between huge clusters/cliques of users. ARK is good for connecting users in those cliques. LN/Ark are scaling in different dimension and we need both for proper bitcoin scaling.
Wrong, the main FUD against lightning is people can't afford or bitcoin to scale closing channels, and that Ark only has 1 output for many channels.
It doesn't scale anything, you apparently didn't read a thing.
What do you think of Liquid?
It's ultimately a trust-based solution, and Scamson referring to it as an L2 is the first trust violation. I can accept trusted solutions when they're honest and decentralizing, but Liquid has doubled-down on the opposite.
Federation is also a scam word, trustodial is trustodial. We have no idea how many signatories are actually in the federation in terms of how distributed those keys are, every Federation is Schrodinger's node.
The infrastructure still has a single point of trust in Blockstream, rendering any actually federated peg pointless.
It's another example of broken incentives, they generate swap fees and think they're cute by scamming regulator with technobabble to make it sound not like a money business. In so doing, they have to mislead to the unsophisticated user even if most of us know the truth.
💯
Liquid is not a L2... is a sidechain.
Liquid was a good intention. It was coming up early in the block size wars as a proposal for exchanges, to have some kind of interoperable network to move funds between them, faster and cheaper than BTC onchain, but still using BTC.
I kinda agree with that use case. A federation that is moving funds privately between them.
But then LN was launched and come in force and Liquid kinda lost the use case.
The block size war was also over, segwit in place and onchain mempool liberated, so even the exchanges that were excited about Liquid, they were still preferring to do it over onchain as usual.
LN got more and more grip and Liquid was slowly forgotten and became useless.
Now Blockstream, want to push people into using it as it would be a "cheapest and fastest" way instead of LN, because they do not want to see it terminated (as nobody is using it). In the end they put a lot of effort and money to build it.
IMHO they should go back to the original idea to be used for private entities and not pushed to large masses of users.
Now all those onchain maxis want to use Liquid instead of preparing in time, with calm new LN channels. That's why this crazy mania with Liquid. But as usual when the onchain fees are going down, Liquid use is going to meaningless until zero.
I believe Tether was the biggest stakeholder, which since Tether is custodial anyway it's fine for that, keeps that garbage off the chain
Your knowledge is top tier JS, I was unaware of the bolt12 stuff, until you explained it earlier, I innocently shilled phoenix thinking I was helping but in hindsight I should have recommended shockwallet.
The more you know about lightning, the more you don't know 🤷 look at when Nostr first appeared, the most used custodial lightning wallet, you know, they've gone down the self custody route using you know who, and any new nostriches are blissfully unaware.
Honestly Phoenix is probably the most turn-key wallet available right now, and they achieve that with centralization and trust.
Problem with phoenix is they went all in on the download and run path that leverages app stores for distribution, but in so doing lost sight of the goal of making Bitcoin (through Lightning) the default money of the internet.
I didn't get into it here but the reason Lightning is so stunted is most builders went down this path of the mobile node fantasy, and the incentives of earning sats off people who just want to tinker with it, not following the "jobs to be done" framework.
You don't run an email server on your phone, you shouldn't run a Lightning node on one either.
Bolt12 is the kind of nonsense that comes from not looking at the big picture. #1275941
Phoenix eventually started to figure this out after my trolling and launched phoenixd for servers last year.
I just recorded a pod today, when he publishes it I'll share, I get in a bit into Nostr's origins from the original ShockWallet that pre-dated it. Everyone that got into Nostr did so from the wrong angle, had they understood it's pre-history as an overlay network for Lightning to enhance self-custodial UX we'd be light years ahead.
Side quest: Do you have any recommended reads on that framework, particularly in the context of Lightning?
Trying to preserve some of my sanity by side-stepping the half quadrillion generically scraped, keyword optimized, polished-turd articles my search threw up (almost literally).
I don't recall exactly where I picked it up from, I know it originated from Clayton M. Christensen of The Innovators Dilemma and Competing Against Luck... I may have audiobooked one of those at some point
I know for a fact I had to listen to the The Lean Startup for a founders group, which talked about the same principles, iirc it was pretty boring in that it was mostly just common sense and crushed it on 1.5x
Looking forward to an interesting pod, all the ngu inflooencers are rekt rn 🤣🤣
#1278299
What do people think of Rootstock? Figured I may as well ask here. I read some Whitney Webb article a while ago that there are a lot of nefarious social programs being rolled out on Rootstock in South America, but it seems like a good way not to "pollute" the BTC chain while still being an L2 / bitcoin-adjacent?
First mistake
I actually don't hate it, just seems to be an idea that's failed a few times already, its merge-mined approach isn't new.
I don't think I've ever seen them misrepresent it, being legitimately proof of work through merged-mining makes it automatically better than any fake L2.
Execution just seems to be terrible, I investigated it to see if it could do things fake L2's are claiming to do as far as bootstrapping Lightning wallets, but the swapping/pegging resources are a nightmare. If they could get their shit together on DX i'd give it another look.
Another issue is its a lot more expensive than Liquid, which if people are going to downgrade security to something pegged then they're going to do that because of cost efficacy.
Thank you for your reply
I shared a Citrea link because it seemed like cool tech, didn't realize these things were that hated. :|
lol, that's whats great about SN, it's a thunderdome
Fun fact about Citrea, it's the fake L2 that triggered the Knots/Core war by abusing the chain for arbitrary storage... yet Luke supports covenants, so he's literally inviting the exact thing he FUD's Core over.
God save us from this insane asylum.
Why fake L2, just different.
We've spent a ton of efforts in Lightning. I do get why people could be pessimistic. It is not really a FUD but re adjustment of market sentiment.
Centralized and trusted isn't an L2, effort went into lightning because it's neither of those things.
If the market wants centralization and trust that's fine, but if so that would imply not having to lie about it.
Some of mentioned projects have better trust assumptions than liquid for example so it is a spectrum.
Bradcasting signal...
Thanks for addressing this problem. All these scammy "new L2s" are popping like mushrooms
Well clarified. Thanks.
Thanks bookmarked. Will be needed later...
Good publication
Lol