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Agree re: shitcoins. Most scams came with the ICOs and then with the tokens and supply/AMM manipulation. Before that there was mostly retardation. However, when a non-scam Somethingcoiner comes to you and is narrating how their coin > Bitcoin then they're either stupid or malicious predators. So they should still die silently and hup hup that process. I don't mind if they exist. I do mind predatory marketing.
As for liquid: its always been a custodial side chain. Its like holding your sats on an exchange as they're as much IOU as coinbase custodied coin or bitgo wrapped shit. BUT, APPARENTLY THEY FUCKED THE CONTROLS. I'm still more shocked about that than about the inflation bug. That's the real fuckup here, to me.
Problem with Liquid is they market it as an L2
They could have marketed as a risk-minimized exchange but even that would be dubious since the controls they fucked up still exist as a SPOF
I always expected it'd be an API/Sig coordination failure, ZK stuff is always hyped by crypto-theater kids so for things around that to be the root cause wasnt first on my list but not entirely out of left field either.
who is JWW?
I don't follow him or know what he's on about these days, but I lean anti-HWW myself.
I don't think they're all criminals, but HWW's inherently present new surface risk.
- No software is better reviewed than Core
- Any software you add beyond core to make a HWW work is more surface risk that's less reviewed than Core alone
- When you buy a HWW there's usually a paper trail
- HWW's are a painted target and the supply chain also has less eyes on than for example a Dell laptop. Dell/HP etc has to take supply chain seriously since so much of their business is government procurement.
- The #1 cause of lost coin is lost/stolen/phish'd seed phrases, and afaik every HWW relies on seed phrases
- If you're buying a HWW, you're either someone looking for a shortcut and/or don't have the knowledge to construct a system of your own. I'd guess 90% of HWW sales are to people that would honestly be better served by an ETF, very few people use them in a multi-vendor setup and have the know how to manage with that complexity.
That last point is to say they do have their uses so I'm not fully against them, but I don't think I've ever recommended one to anybody and can't imagine a scenario in which I would. Someone even asking for a recommendation precludes being able to recommend one to them specifically.
I've had large firms approach me for consulting on their custody infrastructure that would make Liquid look like peanuts, and when you map that out end-to-end you realize HWW's introduce more problems than they solve.
Many such cases, but I hope I'm clear when I talk about these things as principles.
I'm the last person to judge someone over bugs. I know better than anyone that shit happens.
I do judge on a lack of principles and first-order thinking, and there's plenty of that going around.
This is engineering, not magic. If you understand Bitcoin at all you must marvel at how it was engineered and how nothing can simply paper over the little UX nits that allow it to actually work. Same goes for Lightning.
This is a misnomer and gets to the heart of the matter. There were shitcoins before scams started shitcoining. The scammers had to get the launch a token idea from somewhere.
Litecoin? Not a scam, but a shitcoin never-the-less.
Doge? No scam, just shitcoin.
Monero? Arguably a scam, but mostly a shitcoiners wet dream.
So why are these shitcoins if they're not scams?
Simple: They're not Bitcoin.
Ok well what does that mean?
They lack Bitcoin's security properties (hash rate for one example), they are a different network (smaller network effect), they are a different unit (not the world reserve currency).
They make trade-offs to do things differently than Bitcoin does them. That's what ETrash does, Liquid, fake L2's in general... they take the thing that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin and undo it such that it is no longer Bitcoin for one reason: to appease lazy and/or stupid people.
If you think Bitcoin's properties are shit and refuse to adapt, you shitcoin with something like Liquid.