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I've been trying to follow the discussion but its been pretty hard getting the pros and cons from each side because everyone is trying to 1 up one another.
I think DC is a cool idea, i just don't think its needed right now, what will that extra bandwidth help? There's still so much to do on LN and other improvements to make that seamless, fees aren't too bad on-chain and Liquid is a ghost town so where will dc find this extra demand for transactions from? Is my question
I just see so many hot takes and dunks on X, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people moaning about drivechains don't even run their own node and they're just siding with the opinions of who they like most and dog-piling
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What bothers me the most about DC is that it seems to be playing around too much with Bitcoin system equilibrium.
Very anecdotal, but as a (very small) miner, i am OK with just being a service provider to the bitcoin users and economic nodes. My machines have one job to do and a limited influence on what's happening with transactions (partially true when blocks are being built by mining pools ran by public companies, but that's a different story...)
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I totally get it, it just seems pretty premature to want to try and massage the fee market with DC, It's the same narrative pushed with ordinals and I don't buy it. BTC held up reasonably well last bull market with LN and Liquid around granted a lot of BTC was paper shit sitting on FTX and other rehyphotication exchanges but still the settlement wasn't too bad for users and miners were going balls to the wall scaling operations.
Some over-invested and got rekt, but that's not our problem some more efficient miner eventually takes over those assets
In a world where on-chain fees are 100, 200, 1000 sats per vbyte then DCs make a lot of sense but right now I just don't see the point of pushing something where I don't see demand, it's like those China ghost cities, some of them eventually do get filled but the majority are sitting empty
Can the requests be written and live on signet for messing around and pull the trigger later, sure! I just think LN has a lot more juice to squeeze before DCs is really something that requires an activation
but that's one nodes opinion
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What makes it a cool idea?
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The flexibility to test concepts and market demand in real-time let's say a zcash chain is spun up, you can peg in and start using that, it can support a community of apps that want privacy tech natively and they can happily live and trade in that world without diluting the bitcoin network effect and F'ing around with shitcoins.
Not to say there couldn't be rug pulls built here but that's what the user has to decide, leaving the base chain for any L2 requires accepting risk, LN has it Liquid has it, and statisticians have it, just the nature of the game.
If it fails and there's no market demand, people just peg out and move back on-chain or to the next drive chain idea but the base chain just soldiers on.
They can also be a response to bandwidth issues, if on-chain fees are high and slowing down LN, drivechains can come in and provide liquidity and reduce the competition for block space on main chain so fees even out quicker when demand spikes
I also see use for drivechains in being able to build custom chains, could be something simple like bigger blocks and you can I don't know stuff ordinals in there or run application-specific chains like a Bitnames DNS/namecoin thing.
Just see it as a place to F around and find out and let the BTC liquidity flow where the ideas captivate the audience, could be good ideas, could be bad ideas, but it attracts developers and VCs to experiment in Bitcoin. You bring the funding and the brain power into the ecosystem instead of them wasting time and resources building another solana or EOS etc
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Fruits of the bear market
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You have a good point there, I didn't think about that level of adversary, seriously still feel like we're in the begining stages, damn the fact that this thing is half a trillion dollars and is a legal tender in a country.
I don't think i'm ready for the big time yet, but I guess this next cycle is coming and if this thing sits over a trillion and keeps going you're starting to step on toes of a class that doesnt fight fair
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Without permissionless scaling the masses will adopt custodial solutions. Bring on drivechains and zk and everything we can to expand the network and allow use without intermediaries.
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The proponent of drive chains, once said decentralization was useless.
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#NotAllProponents
I support drivechain and I don't think decentralization is useless
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it depends on the network
networks like bitcoin and nostr get more decentralized as more people run fully validating nodes (or relays in the nostr-verse) and make conscious choices about which new proposals they will enforce
a network like lightning is a bit different because lightning nodes do not control user funds, so it can be decentralized in that respect even if few people run their own lightning node
but that's nuanced too because custodial solutions are so popular on lightning that it has a whole different kind of decentralization problem -- e.g. it's not decentralized in the way that matters if everyone's just using wallet of satoshi
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No means: No. ;)
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bitcoin is first and foremost a technical matter and discussions around its changes are of technical nature. only on that basis is added context from a political and economical standpoint relevant.
else it is irrelevant.
the issue with bitcoiners at large is that we changed this dynamic around. i think that is why some core devs left -- or at least part of it.
let's not put too much weight on people who write unoriginal austrian economic books with a bitcoin marketing twist, who not only have been late to the party but are preoccupied with being polemicists and could never even hold a technical debate.
it's a cool opinion bro, but why should we care about it?
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The drivechain development arc is exactly how development on btc should go wrt invasive features: it's been thoroughly discussed, elaborated, and built out over the course of years. Right now is probably not the right time for it, as there is still so much progress that can unfold with the current btc tech. But one day perhaps there will be an urgent unmet need, and when that day comes, a well-developed idea will have been percolating for a long time, and can be picked up again, and discussed in the more relevant context of the moment.
Contrast with the approach of trying to cancel discussions on important topics (e.g., what if the dwindling block reward can't support a reasonable level of security in the medium term future? What if evaporation of hashrate produces a death spiral?) as thought-crime, so that when the challenge presents itself, solutions and their implications have barely been talked about, explored, or refined.
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