.. they wish and b) they did generate a massive business, even in terms of aggregated rugpull value. Again, you may disagree with the ethics of that business, but the facts stand: they did "build" something and got rewarded for their effort. fair point.
Find it hard to argue with: 'censorship resistance is the value prop' I just find there's minimal value to come from the suggestion that defi will do xyz argument. I remember we had that whole prop on ERC20, and many (including myself) being a naive Bitcoin student at the time, was sucked in to and luckily pulled myself out of before becoming rugged and learning from that.
Appreciate your reply. These conversations help straighten out internal arguments in my mind. Think my mind rests in the possibilities of a data-rich blockchain, as you say. Maybe the current epoch is that of a teething stage we must go through.
I feel like the whole "DeFi" thing is greatly misunderstood, along with "Web3", and even villified in the bitcoiner circles just because of where cryptobros took them, which is, mostly shitcoin casinos.
Very few finance applications with "real world application" (in quotes, because I'm careful not to denigrate businesses that were built and gave value to their creators) were actually built in the crypto world.
Things I'm mostly looking out for in the Bitcoin world:
  • Derivative instruments on commodities (not just BTCUSD), that is futures and options. These are instruments that producers, manufacturers and merchants used for a long time (futures are way older than modern fiat money) and will need those going forward, even if fiat systems collapse and hyperbitcoinization happens. These would ideally be programmed to be self-sovereign and settled without intermediaries, making this a "true" DeFi.
  • Actual "Web 3.0" (as in, a significant upgrade to the current enshittification) wherein Bitcoin gets tightly integrated into internet protocols, so that you can, for instance require payment to receive an e-mail, or call API. I want 402 Payment Required to become commonplace.
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228 sats \ 1 reply \ @xz 6 Dec 2023
I want 402 Payment Required to become commonplace.
As I understand rice futures in Japan were the beginning of financial instruments that hedge risk and I can see necessity to have such instruments but isn't layering transactions and settling on-chain a more feasible than encoding data in to on-chain transactions?
To my mind, Web 3.0 rarely seems to be talked about with Bitcoin in the same breath and usually current ideas leverage a digital implementation of fiat as opposed to the tight integration with Bitcoin. Still seems a long way to go.
If someone told me that the reason mempools are full is because of an email service which has launched, or some other real-world utilization of block space to encode data to authenticate transactions, that'd be different. I can't see similarity to these use cases with Oracles, Inscriptions, nor BRC20 tokens.
Maybe there's value by extension by testing block space readiness (and simultaneously creating pain in the fee market?)
Appreciate your thoughts.
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isn't layering transactions and settling on-chain a more feasible than encoding data in to on-chain transactions?
I'm afraid I don't understand Bitcoin programming nearly enough to answer this.
But I think this is going to be a case of "buy a house on-chain, buy coffee over Lightning", where participants will weigh the risks to decide which layer to use. For instance, these "microtransactions" (another villified word) for API/emails will surely take place over L2/L3 but a large farmer might want to secure a price for his produce by timelocking funds on-chain, and binding them to an oracle-arbiter (a third party to discern whether goods have been delivered per contract).
This might also not happen at all. I can equally see a future where Bitcoin simply replaces US Treasuries as a backing asset, and even a unit of account, but the vast majority of it, at least in the corporate world, is centrally custodied by banks and there are proprietary networks that move it around much faster and cheaper (and only batch-settle, say, hourly).
And I think we're precisely going through a test period right now, and I hope it's spurring silent innovation, with builders trying to work around a problem (unfeasible fees for retail transactions) and we will see the fruits in the coming months/years.
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The thrust of this discussion is what I was poking at here. I think the things you're looking for will be met needs that the ecosystem satisfies, either on btc or on something else.
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