1001 sats \ 12 replies \ @mallardshead 31 Jul 2023 \ on: Foundational Narratives: Collapse of the Bitcoin Empire, A Polemic. bitcoin
This was great. Esoteric in the sense it's mostly the bitcoin Opus Dei who would understand the Drivechain/Sztorc drama. I enjoyed the parallels here using Foundation.
You said:
I've always believed that the innovation is decentralized money, and the radical idea is separating money from state. In bitcoin years, Drivechain is ancient (2014 or so), which predates most crypto, where we got to watch all the problems it doesn't solve, how it doesn't work, faux innovation, spectacular blowups, and MEV, while stablecoins and derivatives capitalized protocols with blinding speed. What does Drivechain solve? It's like an enormous naval port for Galactic Empire shitcoins to dock and party using the Foundation's (bitcoin's) liquidity. Drivechain merge mining isn't like the merge mining of Doge/Litecoin.
I see an increase in mining centralization, perverted mining incentives, and the costs of L1 transactions mooning, pricing the populace out of the bearer assurances of L1. The more successful it is, the faster the latter happen. It's like people are racing to get L1 fees to a 2050 level 30 years early. This is one of the reasons a state channel L2 (Lightning) was embraced, it's why there's so much hype around ARK.
I'm not sure what doom Cleon Sztorc and his Empire have sold you on the security budget, or promises about privacy, but Drivechain is really outdated.
They decorate it with new words that make it seem like Bitcoiners are fossils, but that's it, it's exactly the same garbage that was proposed back before there was hardly even one fork.
If any of this crap worked, it wouldn't need rhetoric and aspersions like "xenophobic" "fear of the future" and other straight up ad hominems like his screed contained.
The most laughable is comparing the bitcoin maxi die hards to an establishment with special privileges and a hierarchy.
Gimme a break.
And it's a conspiracy theory, by comparison, to ask "ok, what about Building Seven?" There is ZERO evidence that anyone in bitcoin has special privileges, or makes dirty deals, who isn't part of this campaign to "improve" bitcoin into little federations that these wannabe cult leaders get special privileges of dictating the emission rate.
None of these people even demonstrate an understanding of what a Distributed System actually is, or the CAP theorem and why you can't have all 3 features at once. Hell, even vitalik points out that you have to make engineering trade offs, and that decentralisation, and censorship resistance, and neutrality, all go out the window when the price of running a node goes too far beyond the reach of those who would want to.
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bitcoin maxi die hards to an establishment with special privileges and a hierarchy.
Less people than i trust to fix mainline leak, have commit keys. That's been fine and can continue to be fine, but that's a hierarchy. The emperor wears no clothes
who isn't part of this campaign to "improve" bitcoin into little federations that these wannabe cult leaders get special privileges of dictating the emission rate.
Serious question. Are you drunk on this Sunday evening ? If so, maybe come back in a few days ? I never talk about emission rates, and a DC soft fork would not imply one.
None of these people even demonstrate an understanding of what a Distributed System actually is, or the CAP theorem and why you can't have all 3 features at once.
DC does not change anything about the current dynamic of CAP as it is, wtf are you on ?
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You are conflating the lack of a consensus in your favour with you being excluded from a club. You are not considering what this group values and why they don't want another stupid shitcoin project.
I am proudly 1 month sober and never going back after starting to develop Wernicke-Korsakoff, severe B1 deficiency.
I doubt you really understand what CAP really means, or what Bitcoin is in terms of it. It's a strongly probabalistically consistent distributed system. After 6 blocks, basically immutable. 51% attack is its weak partition resistance. It solves this problem with proof of work, which makes Availability bitcoin's second stronger CAP parameter. It would be called "weak availability" in the literature, I'd be willing to bet searching that term will dig up systems that have this intermediate level of latency and transaction clearance latency.
Bigblockers and drivechains both are focusing on increasing availability, but in order to do this, the cost of running nodes has to go up, and the chances of that 51% attack becoming possible increases, because fewer hands control the replicas of the ledger, and the implementations that enforce the protocol.
Doesn't matter what magic fancy words you use, xenophobia, fear of the future.
You wouldn't say a person was xenophobic for hitting the brakes when a large object looms in the path of a car. Nether is it xenophobic for people who understand the engineering of distributed systems who are getting quite tired of hearing the same old crap, slathered with new hot button words intended to shut down debate.
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Congratulation on your one month. Every day is a win.
because fewer hands control the replicas of the ledger, and the implementations that enforce the protocol.
replica of what ledger ?
I'm going to assume the misunderstanding here is that you think drivechain wants to replicate the entire bitcoin network as a token. This is not the case.
If you mean the other possible use those words;
replication of a non-bitcoin ledger for a shitcoin such as ethereum, as a token on drivechain: than that is up to the participants in that token, user choice, they get to decide what they want to do and what trade offs they are looking for in a token project that is pegged 1:1 to Bitcoin and for which they can exit from at anytime or within months depending on the method used. The risk is their to take, is not a risk to the bitcoin network as a whole and is not yours or any dev choice to make.
You do not understand DriveChain. This is not entirely your fault, the info about it is spread accross 10 years and about 5 different websites as it has improved.
DriveChain (also called a sidechain) is already deployed in one pseudo incarnation with the Liquid Network. With no ill effect on the network security or chaing its relationship with miners. Where Liquid is closed and custodial, DriveChain is open and "custodial". Custodial in the sense that you are buying in to a Drivechain token or project with the expectation and ability to buyout.
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replica of what ledger ?
If you don't even know what the word "replica" or the meaning of the word "ledger" is how did you come to the conclusion you knew anything about the CAP theorem?
Bitcoin, and all its would be copycats, use a global broadcast model, and a global state.
10 minute blocks was chosen because of the physical limitations of the internet.
Increasing throughput, and reducing latency, by necessity progressively exclude more and more possible nodes on the network due just to propagation delay. The tradeoff does not make a more useful network system.
If you want to do fiat finance protocols, go work for fiat finance. Global broadcast model is not something that any fiat money network does. They are all peer to peer, franchise based, small networks with very tight parameters.
Otherwise, if you understood the distinction between global and peer to peer state, then you would see that Lightning is the only way to solve the scalability problem, or something a lot like it. Something that gives you partition resistance, because the network is virtual (addresses are not tied to space or time, only a number) this means that Lightning does not have to be strong against partitioning, because it only operates with mostly fully 6 confirmations old transactions, for most of the lifespan of a channel.
And I have been studying this for some time, and my first instinct when I saw bitcoin was "this might be a way for making a monetised Tor style network". What you build on top of L2 like LN is applications and data transport systems, and you leverage the Consistent, and now also Partition Resistant milliSats to prevent the enemy of Availability - spam and sybil attacks, from shutting down the network. As well as reducing the intelligence gathering required for a 5$ wrench attack.
Drivechains, like all shitcoin ideas, ignores the fact that Bitcoin already is in the Goldilocks zone of distributed systems design for its express purpose: an immutable, and trustworthy monetary ledger that no entity, even States, cannot censor it, let alone craft false transactions that suit their purposes.
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NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH DRIVECHAIN
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Is drivechain based on a global state (ledger) or not?
How is that not relevant?
Drivechains aren't meant to be global state systems, they are marketplaces. They require throughput that can't be achieved in broadcast delay.
Why is it that so many projects talk about anchoring things to bitcoin UTXOs yet only one actually does it, LN. It's a total waste of time.
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They require throughput that can't be achieved in broadcast delay.
What throughput....
I know the meaning of these words, i want to know what you mean by them in this context related to DriveChain.
Anything ARK can do, DC can implement. That's why.
The only downside is that Ark require users to come online and "refresh" their coins every few weeks, otherwise the ASP can sweep the funds.
Custodial. A.K.A trust me bro
An improvement on lightning, by virtue of not needing liquidity to set up a channel. ARK is in early early development, meanwhile Monero is Live, now in a hostile environment making it stronger, private and non-custodial every day. We could have everything in monero, on bitcoin, without all the overhead needed to invest time in ARK and keep it running once it's live. Coming online every so often.
Bitcoiners keep reinventing the wheel.
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Nobody uses Monero, not even most criminals who require its privacy. Consider that over 90% of all darkweb marketplace volume is in BTC. Most ransomware ransoms are bitcoin. BTC is used as a leg in most crypto laundering schemes, and in most Monero swaps when an XMR holder needs to acquire fiat. BTC's various privacy tools are plenty good—for those that actually use them. Also, anonymity doesn't mean anything when you order from Amazon or Pizza Hut and have to provide a shipping address. It's meaningless when you pay car insurance, a utility, or medical bill.
Blockchain forensics grossly overestimate their abilities to "deanonymize" transactions so they can sell their forensic vaporware to governments. And if a person doesn't ultimately use a CEX, there's nothing to be done without expending enormous resources for discovery and a conviction. And as the protocol acquires more and more global users, the data set spikes, and the price and difficuty of the unmasking becomes almost unmanageable, unless you're hunting Bin Laden or El Chapo.
With the layered bitcoin network, the many DEXs servicing both layers, coinjoins, submarine swaps, etc, bitcoin doesn't need a cumbersome Drivechain fork for privacy.
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BTC's various privacy tools are plenty good—for those that actually use them.
They all require trusting in and giving your money to a third party. The succesful use of these is far more skill intensive and prone to error than base layer monero transaction.
cumbersome Drivechain fork for privacy.
Calling DC cumbersome and not coinjoins, submarine swaps, and lightning is silly
Lightning is abosolute shit. Stacker new is the best implementation i have seen, and that's only because it works with Tor, which many browser and wallets do not work with by default.
The need for initial liquidity to use lightning is an absolute dead end.
Once again your language and outlook are Authoritarian Empire. You and other maxi's get to decide what everyone must want, Vanilla icecream. This alone side steps the basic Austrian principals that Bitcoin has always been about. DC allows for market choice, for people who want other things. Are you even capable of acknowledging that people can have very good, logical and sound reasons for these other things.
As far as your other claims about market and ransomware, would love to see some data and lists. All i've seen are monero only for both.
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