this is why ark needs covenants. don't just sit there and go "duh, they made ark work already, we don't need no stinkin softforks." it's not that simple and you have to look more deeply. the ark design keeps changing and there are different versions of it with different user experiences. ark without covenants has user experience problems that will harm its adoption. complacency hinders technological progress. don't be a boob.

Second Blog

Introducing Erk: Ark without liveness requirements

Meet Erk and hArk—new variations of the Ark protocol that use bitcoin covenants to enable offline refreshes, reduce interactivity, and improve re...

Delving Bitcoin

Evolving the Ark protocol using CTV and CSFS

Last weekend at OP_NEXT I outlined a novel variation of Ark that removes all need for user interacty in rounds, dubbed Erk. In this post, Erik De S...

most bitcoin maxis stopped saying "not your keys, not your coins" to everyone because they believed that inviting more custodial activity would make the price go up faster. they traded sovereignty for more money.

offchain money certificates for bitcoin are usually just altcoins. L-BTC, custodial lightning, ecash tokens, and different kinds of ERC-20 tokens depend on an entity or group of entities to maintain a peg outside of the bitcoin blockchain according to a totally different security model. none of these solutions are real bitcoin. they are all altcoins. the only genuine money certificate for bitcoin is money held in a lightning channel that you personally control. and the UX for that is terrible and it's always going to be terrible. self-custody lightning is shitty, and fully custodial lightning is often shitty as well. you can't fix it because payment channels are a fundamentally flawed idea. if you want people to believe that you actually hate all altcoins, please don't make excuses for using inferior and less secure money certificates. some of the excuses have to do with small vs large amounts i.e. "it's okay to use ecash if it's less than X number of dollars." the amount has nothing to do with anything. you are promoting insecure fiduciary media. don't get complacent. "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs" is a lie written in bumper sticker language by parasites who want to control your funds. genuine offchain money certificates with good self-custody UX are possible, but bitcoin doesn't have them yet.

altcoins are BAD. except for L-BTC and ecash tokens. I'm going to make believe that those aren't altcoins whenever I shill them aggressively on people who don't know better. they even have a little B with a line going through it. that makes it okay. a good bitcoin maximalist is a DUMB person.