Next battle in the scaling wars? Push for ZKrollups an attack on Bitcoin? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

I've noticed shitcoiners posing as bitcoiners like Eric Wall and Nic Carter turning up on Bitcoin podcasts/ conferences and trying to promote a narrative that:

1: Lightning does not function in a high fee envorinment. Ordinals has shown this. Assumption about being able to settle on chain is the LN security model, but high fee market due to ordinals has broken this and broken LN.

2: LN has not had much adoption yet so it's failed. Even where it's adopted people are just using custodial solutions like WoS.

3: We need a alternative scaling solution. Ethereum has a great one called ZKrollups which works really well and allows almost unlimited scaling.

4: Ethereum tried to use a similar thing to LN 5 years ago but it didn't really work. It was a mistake for Bitcoiners to put their hope in LN.

Now, to be fair, we all know that LN has it's issues. But as far as I am aware solutions like splicing, dual funded channels are going to help with scaling LN. In addition (and complimentary to LN?) we have fedimint and Cashu as ideas as well as Burak's Ark. It's not like we are unaware of the issues and there are smart people actively thinking and building scaling technology on and adjacent to LN.

So it seems to me Eric and Nic are acting in bad faith and their talking about ZKrollups is an attempt to slow LN momentum. I wonder how much LN startups attracting venture capital recently is a threat to shitcoiners, and how much Eric and Nic are actively out there spreading fud about LN in response to this?

Am I just paranoid? I recently read "The Blocksize War" and this has me thinking about how events were described in that book. Can we expect the likes of Coinbase to come out with a "change the code" narrative pushing for ZKrollups? OK it's not a hard fork but anyway if shitcoin interests could influence Bitcoin roadmap and development this could be a very subtle attack to hurt bitcoin and promote and legitimize pre mine scam shitcoin projects like Ethereum.

Is there anyone here who has positive things to say about ZKrollups? I have to admit to knowing absolutely nothing about them. (funnily enough apparently neither does Nic Carter, not that that stops him from promoting them as a scaling solution superior to LN).

Also, there was some news recently about 70% of Ordinals transactions originating from one place. Putting the tin foil hat on, could the spamming of the mempool and the FUD attack on LN be a coordinated attack?

References:

What Bitcoin Did with Nic Carter:

https://youtu.be/_Ns7wFJa92M (42 mins in, about 5 mins long).

Quotes (paraphrased) :

" A Mistake Bitcoiners made was to hitch their horse to LN 5 years ago."

"LN is Good for a specific narrow set of transactions but there are not many use cases beyond this niche"

Everyone's favorite "Wizard" Eric Wall and some fresh faced smiley kid he dragged along to the Open Source Stage at the Bitcoin Conference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiLP79eJvqw (3 hours 1 min in).

Quotes (paraphrased):

"Lighting doesn't function in a high fee environment"

"In the Ethereum world we actually thought about state channels but we moved away from state channels as not a great solution".

"Let's look at Ethereum, let's look at Solana, and see what they're doing well".

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @2bithits 5 Jun 2023

I feel like there might be another fork in the next few years. Everyone will get what they want & we can see which BTC the market decides on.

I think Nic, Udi & Wall just like the attention they get by saying disagreeable BS. If they want rollups on BTC go build it, use it & STFU!

110 sats \ 1 reply \ @benthecarman 5 Jun 2023

i dont think they are try to attack lightning.

I think zk rollups would be great to have one day, but that is so far away, no one is really even researching that now afiak

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @dash OP 5 Jun 2023

Thanks Ben. Why do you think it's far away? Is it because the improvements proposed to LN, fedimit/cashu etc., is all more low hanging fruit in terms of scaling? Why would these shitcoiners come out of the woodwork now talking it up? Is it because they have fallen for the Ethereum bs and they are just parroting what they've heard shitcoin devs talking about?

One thing I took from "the Blocksize War" is that the big blockers were all high time preference who felt pressure from the noise shitcoiners were making and thought a desperate and immediate response was needed to get "mass adoption" and continue "bitcoin dominance".

The core devs on the other hand knew that looking out enough moves on the board bigger blocks would just cause more problems than they solved. I get similar vibes from shitcoiners pushing things like zkrollups. What you said about "good to have eventually" is interesting to me because it sounds again like a time preference thing. There is no need to rush for a complex solution when there are so many smaller, more well scoped, incremental improvements that can scale us to where we need to be for the next 5-10 years or so.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @dash OP 5 Jun 2023

By the way I might just be paranoid on this so very open if anyone has a link to a serious dev saying good things about zkrollups on bitcoin. Just that thus far have only seen shitcoiners say good things about it.