I'm John Carvalho, AKA BitcoinErrorLog, CEO at Synonym AMA
31.6k sats \ 10k boost \ 43 comments \ @BitcoinErrorLog 3 Apr 2022 bitcoin freebie
I'll answer on most topics, but don't troll me. I'll start answering at 7pm UTC and try to go for 1-3 hours.
Some topic ideas:
  • Slashtags / Slashpay
  • DIDs/identity
  • Lightning Tokens
  • Blocktank / LSP's
  • Hypercore
  • Lightning Network dynamics
  • Bitcoin dynamics/abstraction
  • Web of Trust
  • "Web 3"/dweb
  • Good Morning tweets
  • Xotika
  • Bitrefill
  • Hyperbitcoinization
  • Business development
  • Sidechains are a lie
Some things I'm not interested in discussing:
  • Tether truthing
  • shitcoins
  • ETFs
  • COVID
  • Ukraine/Russia
  • Politics
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66 sats \ 5 replies \ @kr 3 Apr 2022
If you were running Stacker News, what features would you add, remove, or change?
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1305 sats \ 4 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
Oh I dont know if I have used it enough yet to say, but I will try to answer:
  • It's okay to make the design nicer, I promise.
  • It should use Slashtags and Reputation features more deeply
  • The jobs page should be priced per day, not per minute, and should have a 1 sat minimum bid.
  • it shouldnt be custodial balances
  • it should have more leaderboard features for users and post-types and timeframes, etc
maybe it already does some of these things or these are bad ideas, just riffing!
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12 sats \ 1 reply \ @cliftonbride 3 Apr 2022
I think custodial balances are totally fine and jumping through hoops to remove the custodial nature of it has a real cost to speed of feature development. Also what most projects do to be “non-custodial” is ask for your node’s admin macaroon which is FAR worse than keeping a tiny balance with the site.
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41 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
Custodial wallet accounts bring compliance requirements, legal overhead, censorship, etc. The whole point of Bitcoin is to hold it yourself, and the more we respect this, the better the tools we need will evolve.
We need browsers, desktop wallets, and browser extensions that handle these needs, not more accounts.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 4 Apr 2022
It's okay to make the design nicer, I promise.
🤣 Not a fan of my flavor of brutalism john?
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 5 Apr 2022
It has admittedly grown on me after a few days of intensive usage.
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65 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 3 Apr 2022
  1. What are the main products/books/reading/experiences that have influenced your view of the web's future? I feel like you're thinking much further ahead than most and I'd love figure out where that came from.
  2. What made you decide to work on Lightning Tokens and how does it connect with Slashtags?
  3. You're a king of seemingly controversial yet well reasoned Bitcoin takes. Which take in particular you feel is the most controversial?
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10k sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
  1. Generally, most books suck, particularly Bitcoin and tech industry ones. There is only one good Bitcoin book, Cryptoeconomics, and even that one I would debate some aspects of, but at least it is intelligent, rational, and can be applied. Otherwise, books that have influenced me are The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, and metaphysical speeches by people like Alan Watts, Jordan Peterson, etc. The way I tackle a topic is to obsess about it and discard bullshit with extreme prejudice. I went into a very deep rabbit hole for a long time to design Synonym's vision and choices. What's important is to make new mistakes, so you have to make sure to shed old ones and focus on what is left and the dynamics involved. Primitives are all that matter, you can't design without identifying them and knowing where the edges of a system really are.
  2. As I modeled a hyperbitcoinized world I came to the conclusion that there will always be multiple forms of money and the need for finance (using other peoples money to accelerate growth and cooperate on larger goals) and thus you need at least Bitcoin as decentralized abstracted value and "credit" as trusted issuer-defined value. We need tokens as credit and we need them to be as programmable as Bitcoin so we can leverage trust and abstract away the need for government fiat entirely.
  3. I guess it isn't up to me to decide what is the most controversial take, but you could go through my Good Morning tweets and look at the ones with the most replies I guess :) https://twitter.com/i/events/1442133822724841472
Otherwise, I think maybe the most underappreciated take is that Bitcoin is not divisible. I am worried that Bitcoiners both misunderstand that Bitcoin is an enforced integer total, having no decimals, but also misunderstand that dividing and multiplying Bitcoin are the same thing, and that one day we may have to make a hard decision to add more Bitcoins, and it might even be a majority of people that want it and for rational reasons. I am just relieved that I will probably be dead before that debate arises :)
I wish we never had the "Bitcoin" denomination and always used sats only. (and also that we had named them bits or bitcoins instead!)
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116 sats \ 1 reply \ @fiatjaf 3 Apr 2022
Why did you pick Hypercore to build Slashtags upon instead of much better supported projects like IPFS/libp2p or ION/IdentityHub/DIF?
These two competitors offer similar set of functionalities and they're being actively being developed by big teams of experienced people and are supported by millions in funding. Do you think they are all wrong?
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54 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
We chose Hypercore for several reasons:
  • This video clip:
  • It offers a way to do blockchain-like things without using a blockchain because it uses append-only logs
  • We are friends with one of the main teams that works on it (Holepunch, formerly Hyperdivision, incl Mathias, the guy in the video above) and thus able to help each other regularly with using it.
  • IPFS is tied to a scamcoin, but even then we have actually used some tools from those devs within our work too.
  • Our vision and design for the next web requires a design like Hypercore and the ability to have integrity yet flexibility. Hypercore will become the clear winner after you see the next round of tools being deployed this summer from Holepunch and Synonym.
  • Yes, I think IPFS and ION are "wrong", yet we will all converge on certain aspects in our designs, because I believe there is actually only one optimal design we are all iterating towards. I firmly believe there is no need for a blockchain for any dweb/identity things, thus ION using Bitcoin feels forced and gimmicky. They make the argument that blockchain provides confident key-rolling through block broadcasting but this assumes master keys are not compromised, which is a bad assumption imo. Plus, Slashtags could use the blockchain anytime if we really wanted, we just think Hypercore makes a lot more sense.
  • Regardless of team-size or community, we do not want technical debt or inferior designs. We believe that once our teams deploy our first products and platforms that utilize Slashtags & Hypercore, we will create plenty of gravity for our stack.
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15 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 3 Apr 2022
  1. Xotika was a great project. I miss those times and Tiffany. Why is not available anymore? Are you building a new one with LN?
  2. Will Bitrefill add more features to pay regular fiat bills with sats?
  3. What do you think about Hampus (Blixt) LSP project ?
  4. Can I have your opinion to my SN question?
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71 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
  1. Xotika was a big learning experience for me in so many ways. It died because my partner was unreliable and kinda scammed me. Also because I wasn't quite as experienced as I needed to be, and was scared to try and raise money and do the startup thing. I mostly funded it myself and it pretty much bankrupted me. If I were to build it today it would be so much better, and I will probably revisit the use case in the coming years. Video stuff is hard, and needs to be extra secure, but I happen to know some great tech for it is coming out later this year from some friends (No, not Impervious!)
  2. Pretty sure Bitrefill already does offer billpay services but it might be better in some countries than others, I know it is an area they are growing, but I have not followed it closely. You'd have to ask Sergej for a better answer!
  3. Hampus is great, but I wish he would work on our projects instead ;) Just being honest! We have some similar views about what is important for wallets, but we have our own LSP solution that we will launch this month, which we will eventually fully opensource and add some really cool features to.
  4. If LN channels couldn't be force-closed you would have situations where you were stuck, maybe forever, without being able to settle. Without confidence of settlement, LN would be kinda pointless. As for whether some force-closes could be prevented, take that up with your implementation devs :) We have some ideas about how to improve LN and we will be sharing those later in the year.
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12 sats \ 1 reply \ @iampigman 3 Apr 2022 freebie
  • Do you think we've seen the last upgrade to Bitcoin L1?
  • Would Synonym make use of covenants if they were deployed?
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35 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
  • Depends what you mean by upgrade, I guess, but generally I think we will definitely have more soft forks, more feature additions, and more optimizations. However I think we need to more conservative about adding features and complexity to the base layer, and that we need better ways to measure when it might be the right time to increase some of the magic numbers.
  • Synonym would lobby against covenants being added to Bitcoin. If they were added anyway, we would wait until other major platforms deployed them within designs, and for at least 1-2 years after activation before reassessing.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 3 Apr 2022
Would lightning tokens require swapping services like DECs or would they simply be atomic swapped back into sats
I've also seen a lot of different implementations on how stablecoins could be added to LN, if they do go ahead like how would say USDT and a DLC stablecoin be interoperable?
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
  • LN tokens don't "require" any sort of exchange or swapping really, but there are obvious reasons supporting such things could be useful. I think the sophistication of such features will follow their practicality in real-world apps and commerce. If there is necessity, complex routing and swapping will be supported across assets and networks.
  • I think we should use new terms for new design types, as stablecoins used to mean fiat digitized and redeemable by an issuer. Now we have stablechannels, dlc cfd's, betcoins, AMM coins, bitcoin-backed dollarcoins, etc etc. Otherwise, to answer your question, see above. More transaction types, more assets, more networks... all leads to more complexity that will need to be abstracted away to have any hopes of interoperability. I do not thing it is reasonable to think that merchants will start accepting cfd's as payment, or supporting a dozen different stable constructions. What will win is what is practical and reliable.
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @thrown 3 Apr 2022
Does Lightning provide good-enough privacy today? (good enough to protect your mom, grandpa etc from having implicating metadata forever recorded.)
If not, could it ever? Or will there always be a need for a different kind of mixer service in addition to L1 and L2?
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45 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
LN does provide certain privacy benefits, but the culture of the spec attempts to make it a global network with complex routing and thus some privacy is lost. Generally, direct P2P is an optimal privacy model, but once you start routing and sharing route data and listening for requests etc, things get tricky.
LN could and will be better, Synonym actually has some ideas about ways to improve it that we will probably float to the community this year.
Mixing is mostly dumb, I believe privacy is lost not gained, and that creating extra metadata is bad. That said, LN route mixing is interesting, and even more so once we have tokens and multiple assets to swap ;)
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11 sats \ 5 replies \ @cliftonbride 3 Apr 2022
I think stablecoins on bitcoin are a terrible idea, and potentially an existential risk. If stablecoins become widely accepted the issuer has immense influence over forks. This is doubly so because the users of these stablecoins likely don’t value Bitcoin’s inherent use case ( censorship resistance) or they wouldn’t be using stablecoins. So that culminates in a bunch of people who don’t really care about bitcoin using it and paying mining fees to do so and the issuer of said stablecoin getting to point those users’ mining fees at whatever fork they want, causing a larger financial incentive to mine on their side of the fork. What are the problems with this argument?
I’m not making any claims about synonym or it’s stablecoin play, because idk how it works. I’m particularly taking about a stablecoin issued by a centralized entity.
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21 sats \ 4 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
Stablecoins started on Bitcoin and never left and never had any influence on its code/health or the code of any other blockchain afaik.
Understand that every Bitcoin transaction is an abstraction of unknown value that the traders can ascribe any value to they choose. This is just how BItcoin works, you don't get to decide how people use it, or even know for sure. You are worrying about things that cannot be controlled.
You think a bunch of traders trading Bitcoin on exchanges or BlockFi yield or GBTC is any better?
The real attacks are coming from nocoiners, Big Banks, PoS shitcoins, and people that do not use the Bitcoin blockchain.
If you'd like to learn more about why we think tokens are important, listen to our recent Spaces about it, or my recent interview with Stephan Livera or Lunaticoin.
  2. https://stephanlivera.com/episode/362/
  3. https://anchor.fm/lunaticoin/episodes/C21-e04---Synonym-and-Lightning-Tether-with-John-Carvalho-e1gbv49
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @cliftonbride 3 Apr 2022
Thank you for your response, John.
every Bitcoin transaction is an abstraction of unknown value
The only value that matters (as the block subsidy fades) as far as miners are concerned is transaction fees, which is why I’m not really worried about bitcoin in exchanges, etc.
You make an argument that bitcoin has always had stablecoins so it’s a non issue, but that totally neglects the dwindling block subsidy. Things that may not have seemed like a problem could very well become a problem when miners solely subsist off fees.
Lastly, I admit that i cannot decide how you use the blockchain.
People seem to think that bitcoin is immortal or “inevitable” and nothing they do can fuck it up.
Imagine tether on bitcoin/lightning is so wildly successful that the majority of usd settles on bitcoin. Do you really think bitcoin (as a censorship resistant money) survives that?
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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
You have it backwards. More people using Bitcoin for more purposes supports the block rewards in fees. You can't use Bitcoin without paying fees, even if you use it for tokens. Tokens add txns.
If you want to be concerned about fees being taken offchain, why don't you hate Lightning itself?
Yes, I think Bitcoin would not only "survive" your scenario, but thrive in it.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cliftonbride 3 Apr 2022
Well I’m sorry you might be delusional then. Think on it more and I will as well. Thank you for your time.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
That is not an argument, it is an insult.
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7 sats \ 1 reply \ @NewNymWhoDis 3 Apr 2022 freebie
What is bitcoin today?
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46 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022 freebie
Bitcoin is a MMO game. It is an abstraction for natural selection and thus evolution for human DNA.
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2 sats \ 1 reply \ @Nostradamus 4 Apr 2022 freebie
Do you care to elaborate on your last topic idea: “Sidechains are a lie” ? Thanks!
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23 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 4 Apr 2022
Sidechains started as an idea for creating 2-way peg from Bitcoin to an outside new chain. This design was never accomplished and so the "federated" sidechain was born. Unfortunately, in practice this functions very similarly to an altcoin in that the peg is a manual permissioned process enacted by central custodians.
Further, it is not a sound argument to call this a Bitcoin caling layer, as it does not scale itself and it does not deterministically settle to Bitcoin or use Bitcoin transactions to operate.
LBTC is not actually BTC, it is a token controlled by the federation which they currently offer a 1:1 exchange rate when entering and leaving their private network. This could change at any time if they choose.
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2 sats \ 3 replies \ @BlokchainB 3 Apr 2022
How long have you been a developer and what programming languages do you know?
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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @02b66cc60f 3 Apr 2022 freebie
Oh I know this one, he's not actually a developer. He just has a good understanding of a lot of the technical topics of bitcoin.
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32 sats \ 1 reply \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022 freebie
This is mostly correct. I actually learned BASIC and some PASCAL in grade school, as well as HTML, a little actionscript, and a little javascript after high school, but the only language I ever actually programmed with outside of classes was HTML, and the last time I did that was when websites were still made out of tables, so like 20 years ago.
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32 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022 freebie
I'm also an incidental hacker in that I've actually discovered major money-printing bugs in multiple well-known Bitcoin web platforms. I have some intuition for seeing how things work... or how they don't ;)
Really, I consider myself a designer above all.
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2 sats \ 1 reply \ @Benc 3 Apr 2022 freebie
Do you plan on submitting a BIP for slashtags/pay? Or do you only see this as a 3rd party add on?
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022
We have discussed it. We will mature it further and reassess in the future. We are also shorthanded when it comes to people with the time and inclination to write specs and prepare this kind of thing, but interest is growing quickly and we keep coming up with new ways to improve Bitcoin and LN, so I think the time will come when we start making BIPs and BOLTs and more...
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2 sats \ 1 reply \ @avg 3 Apr 2022
Who's building tools for businesses to run on BTC/LN? Thinking invoicing/bookkeeping, payroll and the likes? Is that something you could see yourself exploring?
I know Zaprite already and think it's quite good.
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24 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinErrorLog OP 3 Apr 2022 freebie
I don't really know, maybe BitWage? There are also some tax reporting tool websites for traders and such.
I have passive interest in a Bitcoin-native accounting system for nonprofits and state agencies to allow radical transparency & accountability, but I don't know if I will ever work on such a thing, kinda boring compared to other options for now :)
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2 sats \ 1 reply \ @enzo 3 Apr 2022 freebie
Slashtags is quite interesting and exciting but I feel like there is a missing piece about notifications. All the passwordless logins are a bit redundant if the web app needs to collect emails in order to send notifications to the user. Any plans for the future on the matter?
Keep up the good work
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @hodlbod_fr 4 Apr 2022 freebie
I'm ready to use slashtags, but it doesn't seem ready/stable yet. When will it be ready for prime time? Is anyone using slashtags in production yet?
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @hellocrypto99 4 Apr 2022 freebie
Nicd
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @n0x 3 Apr 2022 freebie
Good Morning