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Gradually, and then suddenly.
This past weekend, many Bitcoin developers across a broad range of camps gave explicit support for a specific soft fork proposal. Could this may mark the beginning of Bitcoin’s next upgrade?
46 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 5 Mar
If it improves LN, I'm happy.
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OP_CTV (safe scalability) yes, OP_CAT (turing complete shitcoinery) no.
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CTV doesn't scale anything, that's a myth pushed by scammers
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shocknet, after all the back and forth, leaving another breadcrumb from my notes, largely with you...


scrolling the debate on twitter I also found this https://x.com/shocknet_justin/status/1898049077889077512
I didn't find owen kemeys's reply convincing.
there's also a whole saga of justin_shocknet and shinobi sparring across twitter and the bitcoin influencer social media.
Shinobi's an interesting guy and has interesting to say (critizing lightning mostly). eg https://medium.com/block-digest-mempool/lightning-network-yield-and-incentives-b2b624375094
There's history behind the beef. It's too much for me to grok completely as yet, but my gestalt is that shinobi has been a lightning skeptic from the early days because of the lack of a "business model" if you will, and with ark he becomes a fan although to be fair to him not a full on kool aid drinking fanboy
But he likes it, shinobi likes ark. Because ark has a business model. "Incentive alignment" to grow the network. I think to him ASPs will work a lot better for growth than the loose coalition of LSPs that make up what up little there is of commercial lightning. He's impatient, he wants bitcoin to succeed.
But now with lightning showing signs of maturity and much better usability, albeit still not that much actual use, shinobi is having a bit of a meltdown pushing ark as better than lightning, or perhaps it's more "lightning is broken but I know how to save it." Maybe he resents his earlier lightning skepticism not proving out. Or maybe he feels that it did prove out, and the clock is ticking to "save" bitcoin before it fully ossifies.
Whatever the case, shinobi seems to be in complete denial of the (lack of) scaling pressure, and also of the messy security issues, complexity and sybil risks of ark.
I find shocknet more credible.
I don't like Taproot wizards either. but just because they support op_ctv doesn't automatically invalidate it.
there is some icky coalition forming though.
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afaik they aren't scamming, they're pretty up front about attacking Bitcoin
I'm referring to the Ark startups, far more insidious
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IIUC, CTV enables ARK (maybe bad, I am agnostic) but also enables much improved channel factories. We probably don't currently need channel factories, but it's nice to have the upgrade path cleared without future softfork drama, if we can get it wrangled now.
"Channel factories by themselves do not require any soft-forks to be possible. However, the simple channel factories described above are probably impractical beyond small numbers of parties due to the coordination required to actually achieve a scaling benefit. Thus, covenant proposals such as OP_Evict or CTV (via txout trees) aim to allow more fine-grained outcomes where individual parties can be forced on-chain, without forcing everyone on-chain at once."
I don't care about Ark (or even understand it tbh) but I am all in on lightning.
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Nobody is using channel batching and that has less coordination issues than factories... because channels are not bottlnecked and never will be. All scaling arguments are based on a flawed presupposition that the bottleneck is throughput, this is because retards base numbers of billions of people.
The only scaling limitation Bitcoin has is supply, as in, not enough people will ever be able to own enough sats (5-6 digits worth of sats) to transact, even if the chain is at a perpetual 1 sat/byte due to gigameg blocks or other shitfork like CTV.
There are at most only a billion households/businesses that will ever be able to use real Bitcoin, that may even be a generous estimate given the size of many stockpiles.
All the astroturf blogs set up by these op_next scammers can't change the fact that VTXO's are not Bitcoin, and their naive investors will eventually realize they could have just built a generic custodial wallet for a fraction of the price
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I hope that those two BIP are rejected. I don't think that is safe apply any soft-fork it isn't extremely necessary to increase security.
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Yes, if I see more and more Bitcoin discussion groups being created, the important thing is that we have to be sure.
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