Ask SN: Have you used a sidechain? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

6129 sats \ 53 comments \ @patrick1 22 Sep 2023 bitcoin

There's a lot of interesting development going on right now in the world of bitcoin sidechains (not referring to the drivechain "debate", just actual development on either existing sidechains or new sidechain ideas like Spiderchains).

However, I feel like most bitcoiners have never used a sidechain, and I wonder why that is.

Have you used a sidechain? If so, which one, and if not, why not?

If you prefer Liquid over Rootstock, why? If you prefer Rootstock over Liquid, why?

(I did not include Stacks here because it's not a proper sidechain, but if you want to discuss why you use it, feel free).

Yes, Rootstock10.4%

Yes, Liquid27.1%

No, but I would like to35.4%

No, and I never will27.1%

48 votes \ poll ended

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270 sats \ 0 replies \ @jamesviggy 22 Sep 2023

I've used liquid for the security tokens from stokr (e.g. Blockstream Mining Note) and other tokens like when Blockstream presold the Jade as a token or that film premiere sold tickets as a token. I've also supported artists at raretoshi (e.g. Scam Artist). I accidentally misclicked the poll and voted no.

Art:

Scammyboos:

231 sats \ 3 replies \ @supertestnet 22 Sep 2023

No because I don't see anything compelling yet. Liquid has a cool design but I don't need its confidential transactions because I am satisfied by bitcoin's privacy tools (especially payjoin, which conceals the amount sent, which is the main trick that confidential transactions do)

Rootstock has an even cooler design imo but I don't need its eth-based scripting engine because I am satisfied by the expressivity of bitcoin script

I do think sidechains may be useful for poor people if bitcoin's fees get too high but I prefer working to ensure bitcoin can still be used by poor people even in that situation

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Why would you say rootstock's design is cooler? The permissionless peg system?

4 sats \ 1 reply \ @supertestnet 22 Sep 2023

It is merge mined with bitcoin and something like 65% of miners run their software. Meaning rollbacks and doublespends on rootstock cost a lot more than rollbacks and doublespends on other chains, including liquid.

I think rootstock is about 90% as good as a drivechain would be -- except it's a clone of eth, which is silly. It would be better if it was a clone of liquid but merge mined with bitcoin.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Apparently plenty of Bitcoin holders are willing to use eth contracts on eth itself. Over 162,000 BTC are on Ethereum alone via wrapped BTC. Lightning network has less than 5,000.

Wouldn't it be better if we could get the people using Bitcoin that way to actually pay the miners and secure the main chain? If there's demand for people to use Bitcoin this way, why wouldn't we do it?

21 sats \ 2 replies \ @TheL0wner 22 Sep 2023

I have no use for any of them, that could potentially change but I'm doubtful.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

If you could take out a loan against your BTC to get USD liquidity, would that be useful?

Would private transactions be useful?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheL0wner 22 Sep 2023

not to me.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk 22 Sep 2023

Have used USDT and L-BTC on Liquid.

12 sats \ 4 replies \ @TheBTCManual 22 Sep 2023

I use Liquid, because its part of Green wallet and when fees were high I could still stack L-BTC on the cheap, if I get Lightning sats, I just swap them to L-BTC super cheap and then when those values are big enough i take it on chain

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @0fje0 22 Sep 2023

Noted, thanks.

Think I should try that too,

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @nemo 22 Sep 2023

deleted by author

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @0fje0 22 Sep 2023

Hmmm.... OK.

And replying on this thread instead of the original is goofing around with side chains, right? :)

Or am I the nutcase?

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 22 Sep 2023

deleted by author

12 sats \ 0 replies \ @huluvublue 22 Sep 2023

Yes Rootstock is pretty awesome, I use it for BTC backed loans.

12 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 22 Sep 2023

Liquid. Once SideSwap came out and made it easy to get and use liquid I use it a lot.

I use it for trading (I go degen from time to time) Buying art (my SN profile pic is from raretoshi) Buying security tokens Making loans in USDT

12 sats \ 2 replies \ @ama 22 Sep 2023

Of course, Rootstock. I use Money-on-Chain and Sovryn on RSK often.

I tried Liquid on testnet, but I never got any faucet to send me any test coins to start learning. RSK faucets on testnet work very nicely and there is tons of information and a very helpful community.

If anyone here could toss a few testnet L-BTC satoshis or any other asset on Liquid, please drop me a line here or a note on nostr. I'd appreciate it. :-)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Yes, it seems like rootstock has the most developed ecosystem at the moment.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ama 22 Sep 2023

Indeed, it does. But curiously enough Liquid is much better known, I guess because they make much more publicity and noise.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @ladyluck 23 Sep 2023

I haven't tried any but would love to try the staking on Rootstock

2 sats \ 1 reply \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Very interested to learn why someone would never use a sidechain but they're fine with using a website like stacker news (where you essentially "peg-in" to @k00b's database).

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @netstatic 22 Sep 2023

I would say people are okay with putting some sats into SN because there's a use-case and the amount needed to transact is pretty low. Sidechains are cool and would probably be a better mechanism for larger amounts of money, but many can't find a big use-case for them yet

2 sats \ 1 reply \ @Ksjznxnxkxksn 22 Sep 2023

Never tried any other second layers because i don't see the need for those (yet?) LN is enough for me

Curious for Ark & Fedi tho

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Yeah, I'm psyched to try out Ark when it's on testnet.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @2bithits 22 Sep 2023

I've used liquid & recently messed around with some cashu mints.

I think liquid has a use case for consolidating small UTXO's & to use when fees are super high. Would never keep too much of my stack in liquid though

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @janetyellen 22 Sep 2023

Naw I'm not gay

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @justBrian 22 Sep 2023

I've used liquid, i like it a lot actually but no one uses it so not really a use case for it unless I'm buying something from the blockstream store. I have used it to buy btc on robosats using l-usdt, which i could see being very useful if you dont have easy access to US dollars.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @orthwyrm 22 Sep 2023

At the moment I have no need for one, but I could see the utility of a sidechain in a high fee environment.

Liquid sounds cool but it doesn't seem to be supported in many places.

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

It's also useful for privacy. All transactions are confidential by default.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @orthwyrm 22 Sep 2023

That does sound good.

Are you a Liquid user? What is your workflow? I'd like to give it a spin.

152 sats \ 0 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Yes. It's fairly simple. Use SideSwap to peg-in and then using Green to hold it/use it.

You can also use https://boltz.exchange/ to swap in from either on-chain or lightning.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheWildHustle 22 Sep 2023

I have a couple of un-used liquid wallets.....

0 sats \ 7 replies \ @mallardshead 22 Sep 2023

Liquid is fantastically designed with the best wallet UI/UX in not just bitcoin but perhaps all of "crypto". That's my opinion at least. But that said, I see no utility. Liquid will have the Volcano tokens listed, so perhaps that will drive marginal interest. But in the end, I've realized what most eventually do: the highest value use case for a coin or token is? MONEY. Everything else in cryptoland is attempting to get you to exchange that money for their speculative token. Then you can take those speculative tokens and join the orgy of swaps, wraps, burns, mints, and stakes, run by dapps that do nothing but optimize token interactions to keep the orgy going.

So the less friction there is in using that money, the better. Sidechains have failed at this. They've added friction, distractions, federations, and ramps. Lightning is directionally (albeit slowly) solving that transactional friction. What we're doing here with zaps is an example, all with a maintenance free casual LN wallet that's interoperable with the LN network.

100 sats \ 6 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

You don't think that there could be any utility in a decentralized ledger for certain applications that need higher throughput or more flexibility than the main chain?

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @mallardshead 22 Sep 2023

The state channel design pattern of lightning (directionally) is the only thing that makes sense to me. I've used so many different sidechains and crypto layers. Along the journey, frustrating at times, I concluded DeFi, applications, or L3s should look more like kids with a lemonade stand on the roadside with a QR code taped to the front, or a free Ln wallet in the operator's pocket. Or it should look like LNMarkets, where I can zero auth a new account open, fund it, and pull off a derivatives trade all in under 60 seconds if I'm fast. Or Stacker.News and Nostr with zaps and marketplaces. Or DEXs like Robosats and Bisq. And so on. These don't require a special sidechain, blockchain, or token. What business or service does? It's the ability for anyone in the world to plug into the network, frictionlessly, instantly, by downloading a free app.

At least that's my two sats.

52 sats \ 4 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Something like LNMarkets is 100% custodial though. Why would you prefer a custodial solution like that over a non-custodial one?

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @mallardshead 22 Sep 2023

Because of the simplicity, speed, and convenience. I'm more interested in trust-minimization than I am decentralization for businesses providing a good or service. LNMarkets has done a good job of trust-minimization (no KYC, etc). I'd say the same of Stacker.News which comes with a casual custodial wallet and is a centralized business. But a derivatives trading platform isn't something you can decentralize without immense tradeoffs. There are smart contract platforms for derivatives on ETH, but you can't do 100 trades in an hour because transactions take too long to settle, and more importantly, you'd lose all your money to tx fees. The Lightning Network does away with the settlement time and cost constraints entirely. It's instant and basically free. LNMarkets built a business around that. Decentralizing it would increase the cost, reduce the speed, and add friction. It's easier to do that with Stacker, Nostr clients, or Robosats (who are in the process of decentralizing via coordinators).

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

There are decentralized margin trading protocols built on ZK rollups that allow far more than 100 transactions in an hour and have very low fees. Afaik very few people do anything like that on the ETH main chain itself.

I still don't understand how LNMarkets or SN are "trust minimized". You're basically limited to keeping very small amounts in these custodial services. If SN were a smart contract you could just interact with the contract and not worry about SN having access to any of your money.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @mallardshead 22 Sep 2023

ZKs offer a bunch of promise across many applications. Bullish on those. They're clunky on the platforms using them and have quite a ways to go to prove themselves, from settlement to interoperability, especially interoperability which is the LNs specialty.

But why would SN need to be a smart contract? The beauty is that it's a simple HTML site anyone can access on the web from any device anywhere, sign up instantly, and it has a free disposable wallet attached to your username that's interoperable with the rest of the entire Lightning Network. You don't have to do anything or even keep a balance. I'd say at most you just want the wallet to be non-custodial, that's it. I think the LN will offer plenty of solutions for that in the near future based on the work of today.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Because if it were you wouldn't have to trust any of your sats with it. You'd literally just be transferring sats from yourself to whoever you're trying to upvote and to the contract itself at the point of transaction, otherwise your sats stay in your custody at all times.

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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nicosey 22 Sep 2023

Yes Ocean. Now dead but did run for a while...

https://github.com/commerceblock/ocean

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

Interesting, hadn't heard of it. And it launched on mainnet at some point?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rsync25 22 Sep 2023

I already used Liquid and RSK.

Nowadays, I use only LN.

0 sats \ 8 replies \ @DarthCoin 22 Sep 2023

Is Stacker News a sidechain?

21 sats \ 7 replies \ @patrick1 OP 22 Sep 2023

In a way, I suppose it's a very centralized sidechain, ha. It's got a database with a sat ledger.