Ughh, I didn’t see it before. Now I can’t unsee it. I’m enjoying the lack of arguments and divisiveness on NOSTR. I really hope that doesn’t change. If we really believe that the other coins will all go to zero in BTC terms, then we really shouldn’t care about the BCHer. Just ignore and be patient. Everyone learns eventually.

They have more blocks...

Bait the BCH people into bringing more real life people on nostr. All else will work out over time...

Custodial LN with zero privacy works great, indeed!

Filipinos are wonderful people

check out cashu

miners come together every year to decide which drive chains to turn on and off?

those people are, by and large, not using Lightning, they are using custodial wallets like Chivo and you have no proof that the majority of the transactions actually resolve on the Lightning network. When there is a custodial-to-custodial transfer, the custodians can settle up the difference however they please. It’s just a cell of fiat in a database at that point. If any significant body of people were running their own Lightning nodes, the failure rate would be massive and it would crater the reputation. You’re not touting the Lightning network’s success here, you are touting the success of simple transaction writes to SQL databases. Those are indeed very stable and useful. But they aren’t Lightning.

first and foremost, its open source so don't get angry when others use it in ways you do not like. No gatekeeping nostr second, the how is obviously click farms to me. It is a huge industry in all SE Asia. Some Btrasher is paying for these accounts to be generated.

Dude just mute them and the word BCH, use web of trust, paid relays, etc if you don't like them. Nostr is permissionless this was always going to happen. The protocol isn't dependent on lightning or bitcoin to function at all (or any crypto for that matter)

No, OP_CAT would let sidechains start permissionlessly with blind merge mining and optimistic bridge. But even string concatenation is too hard to do on Bitcoin, which is insane given that everyone wants post quantum now, which is orders of magnitudes harder.

Yes i noticed this when going through the #bch hashtag which the client seems to tag every post with.

Lightning isn't a very satisfying solution

Depends on the usecase. For instant and final settlement between businesses and institutions its pretty rad. As self sovereign consumer tech? Nothing beats onchain ux for that.

Exactly, so it's silly to insult said group for wanting more transactions on-chain

I think its ok to insult because they are not thinking about the longterm picture. The engineers who actually care about an actual global solution are not going to suggest onchain payments because it will break when it starts taking off and then bitcoin would be scarred forever and won’t be taken seriously by normies

So is there a consensus of opinion that thread? Really interested

Oh sure, I've asked every merchant in the world, they all gave me a detailed report... Good luck verifying anything that can be put behind TOR. All you can really do is look at communities and lightning network statistics, what little that can be gathered.

Okay, readies

Why would it break? Genuinely tho. Just too much to store?

blockchains are one of the slowest databases in the world…

plus blocksizes are limited to ensure decentralization and so everyone can run a node if they choose to. No way could it handle all the txns on earth. You need offchain payment protocols

XMR BCH all other groups arrived only thing matters who are active or who selling papaganda

since the invention of the centralized exchange, I have never seen anything drag more trusted third parties into the ecosystem and destroy more sovereignty than the lightning network. every year it grows a new cancerous tumor so people can keep pretending it works. it has been a complete waste of time.

there are definitely multiple ways to do sidechains on bitcoin. I don't think bip300 is necessarily the best way and I'd really like bitcoin to get covenants, but I am still definitely going to play with paul's ecash. I am thinking about how many sats I can shove into a trezor before activation day, so I can have as much of it as possible.

the only reason why people FUD drivechains, or covenants, or string concatenation, is that there is now a whole ecosystem of companies running some kind of centralized, parasitic, lightning flavored scaling on top of bitcoin. one little opcode would put these companies out of business. they have to FUD the sidechain idea and freeze opcodes so they don't die. this is a form of capture and it is sad that you can't tell it is happening.

You can just do things like that? Hmm, maybe I need to vibe-code BIP173Nostr, a client for Nostr where people salt their nsecs & on-chain zaps go to the p2wpkh derivations

GitHub

RFP/RFC: Turning a Nostr Nsec Into a Hardened Non-Taproot Address... for on-chain zaps & CRQC resistance · Issue #2360 · nostr-protocol/nips

In the end, I want nostriches to be optionally able to receive zaps to safe(r)-at-rest public key hashed addresses that are derived user/client (NO...

I’ve bought the drivechain idea. I understand you have issues with miner involved governance, and I admit that these are problems, but at the very least the planned desired drivechains for geographic scaling and zk-Snarks can be set up early on the eCash fork when there is very little miner involvement outside of really committed people. In a way, the necessity of involving miners in governance might be good, because miners could have served as a check on the retarded and corrupt behavior of Core but have abdicated from this responsibility. So demonstrating to miners that there is potential ecosystem value in being more involved in governance is potentially a great thing. Regardless I feel the issues are nuanced beyond my understanding. I am not certain drivechain will work! Your criticism seems potentially legitimate. I am, however, certain that Lightning is not the solution we need and it is time to de-ossify Bitcoin, specifically clear out the dysfunctional parasites suckling on the teat of venture capital who have sabotaged it, and put new people at the helm of the ship. Even if the new people completely fail at the assigned task, getting rid of the people that have so catastrophically failed and wasted so much time and wealth is a virtue in itself. Ineptitude should be punished.

Wow, I forget sometimes that this knowledge isn't obvious, even to normies.

It's awesome at decentralization. No other money had that feature before. Decentralization has a price, which is measurable in transactions per second.

Lol, no. The problems you think lightning has are way overstated. If you think it's parasitic in nature, then you are calling me a parasite for collecting fees on my node. I guess you're not big into free markets and entrepreneuralism, huh?

it is impossible for a large number of people to run their own nodes. not just difficult, actually impossible. almost everyone on lightning is using an IOU system to borrow channels being operated by a business. they are not using their own nodes. lightning was invented to reintroduce banking into bitcoin. it is the reason why these companies exist. if lightning works, why do these companies need to exist?

I'm quite cool with Cashu too. In fact, the more options we have that use Bitcoin as their underlying money, the better.

In that case you are better off (IMO) using BCH that has all Opcode's available for drivechains. There is value in one super conservative project like BTC. I don't understand why it needs to capture all value though. Just use BCH or ETH if your use case requires it. Use Monero if you need digital cash. Without maximalism solutions are plenty.

I see what's going on here. You are convinced that if bitcoin users use lightning, they are no longer self-sovereign because of the 2nd-tier custodians. I guess there was a time when I would have argued that point too, maybe back in 2016. But you lose sight of the goal with this argument; We are trying to make money that the government can't stop us from using. Uncensorable cash. That's bitcoin's reason to exist. Lightning extends that goal for everyone, although it's not completely private for everyone. Privacy is great, but not the goal here. Think of privacy as a secondary goal for bitcoin that anyone at all can achieve under certain circumstances, but just isn't easy to deploy on a global scale. Those who tried to do that before forked off into Monero and 50 other privacy coins. The real goal is hard enough and Satoshi somehow, against all odds, delivered it and privacy all in one package. And then as bitcoin grew popular all the normies wanted to keep their coins on exchanges and other custodians for speed's sake, and even that doesn't scale enough so we needed something like the lightning network. So do I think something better than Lightning can be created for the sake of offering privacy? Sure. You betcha. But just that took 10 years, and you sure as hell aren't going to get me to use it if there's the faintest whiff of that network sacrificing uncensorability.

it needs to capture all value because of the emission curve and the dwindling block subsidy. it needs to devour other altcoins and take their fee revenue or it won't be able to pay for its own network security. this might not even work and I agree with you I am comfortable on ETH and XMR today. but BTC cannot just do nothing and everything so far has not worked. the fee market is collapsed.

The fee market idea was brain rot in 2017. Big blockers rightfully called it out as economic unviable. They claimed it will either result in a spillover effect (enshitcoinification) or centralised SQL DB aka custodians settling offchain. Well, we got both.

aren't they just a bot farm? I've just muted all bch shit. seems easy enough to me

Not a bot farm. Thousands of real users. Maybe even on path to become larger than us. I tried muting BCH stuff, they still get through.

So a bunch of normal people who have been mislead by bcash scammers? sad

No, the criticisms of largeblockers were correct at the time. Plus Ver was not much different from Luke, in that he is on video comparing people who issued fair criticisms of him to Antifa, which is a listed terror organization. It’s maybe not bad as claiming Core is engaged in a conspiracy to distribute child pornography, due to being somewhat less lurid, but “my opponents are the terrorists” is logically not any different than “my opponents are the pedophiles.” “You’re better off using BCH” just brings Bitcoiners back to the initial debate against the large blockers, where they were trounced. The problem is that everyone transferred the correct and accurate refutation of large blockers into fallacious excessive support for Lightning. Just because Lightning is wrong does not mean we should now support a theoretically unlimited blocksize on the main chain.

THANK YOU. Finally someone gets it.

Good! I am glad they are here!! It’s crazy bitcoin claim they are freedom loving but yet want to be gatekeepers!

Did I call for gatekeeping? I'm just calling them hypocrites and asking how we mute them better.

With normies storing coins (IOU) on CEX you are back to fractional reserves and price suppression. All that because Bitcoin is not dangerous enough for states to delist it from exchanges. As someone who entered Bitcoin I'm 2010 I know your position very well, but you never bothered updating the talking points of the early days to the reality in 2026. Back then before Bitcoin got the NGU CEX KYC approval we knew what we were fighting for and because we discussed all the privacy enhacjng tech (that later only got implemented in Monero) we rightfully believed Bitcoin could become fungible money. You miss two points. Privacy is a prerequisite for mathematical (not by decree) fungibility which is an essential money property. And you seem to miss that (private) property depends on the state to be enforced. So the only private property you really can enforce yourself needs privacy at its base. Back in the day we also believed that Bitcoins pseudonimity is enough because we didn't anticipate regulatory acceptance. The state is not fighting transparent Bitcoin though. It doesn't care if there is another store of value next to Gold that is easily taxable. It fights Monero, Bitcoin's earlier destiny the OGs that came before you signed up for. Get back on track. Now I don't say there is no value in Bitcoin as is. It's just that you are riding a dead horse. Bitcoin can't become private cash as envisioned by cypherpunks, not with LN and neither wiith cashu. Enjoy what works for you, but don't build your Bitcoin maximalism on the weak thesis that everybody has the same needs as you. Personally as an OG Bitcoiner I'd make a fool of myself or even endangering my family if I wouldn't store the majority of my holdings in Monero and only spend in the most private ways possible. You are either naive (paying the bill later) highly technical (for never fucking up coinjoins in the future nor the trade partners of yours) or you missed out on the biggest gains despite being early. Afterall there were only two kinds of Bitcoiners early on. Cypherpunks that understood everything that is wrong with fiat and the privacy erosions in society and those that needed some Bitcoin to buy drugs on the Silkroad a use case that is now fully dominated by Monero because Monero means save transactions.

I appreciate your effort to educate me. “safe transactions” not “save transactions” right? Let’s check back in a few years from now. Hopefully we’re both right. Monero is still at 2010 prices. Didn’t porn and video games decide who won between blue ray and dvd? You probably know the story better than I do.

Is there a reason everything must ride ontop of Bitcoin?

Valid point

Valid

Thanks, yes. Already corrected it. I do think porn would choose Monero. That said the next revolution will be about weeding out weak states of mind that get easily seduced by it. And one can find arguments why Bitcoin (transparent confrontation) or Monero (neutrality) are better at it or maybe you need both.

Probably I talk fantasy but I the whole calculation/computing that Bitcoin makes is meaningless. Don't get me wrong - it's still a good value storage but instead of computing bytes to be in a certain shape, you could compute something more meaningful like: - Reasoning power, token computation. - Genome computation to make early illness detection. - New meds discovery via simulation computing. - Other weird ideas to make our life easier.

Nostr becomes much better when you stop looking at the 'trending' feed.

Of course! Bitcoiners are all trying to separate money from state, but the challenge is that money itself, the very concept of it, is a network good, meaning that it lives & dies by the Network Effect. The more people that trade their dollars or euros or altcoins or any other tokens in for bitcoin, the stronger it becomes, and the more successful we are at separating money from state. Humanity is only going to get exactly 1 chance at doing that. Governments will see us coming miles away next time. So if Bitcoin fails, for any reason, you can expect CDBCs to be the new definition of money for tens of thousands of years.

This point was brought up by roughly 50,000 pre-bitcoin maximalists during the years of 2012-2017. I have missed it! Very, very cute little misunderstanding you've got there, which led to the creation of most altcoins. But once you research bitcoin more you'll become a maximalist yourself. I highly recommend you grab a copy of Saifedean Ammous' The Bitcoin Standard to correct this misunderstanding. A free way to do the same faster is to read through the Nakamoto Institute Library at:

Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

Library | Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

Advancing and preserving bitcoin knowledge

Keep in mind that Bitcoin has the only design anyone has ever come up with to separate money from state. Mining seems wasteful to someone new to the subject, but Proof of Work is one of those once-in-10-millenium discoveries that will absolutely blow your brain when it clicks.

The argument for bitcoin always has and always will be that it is mankind's one single shot at trying to separate money from state. The challenge is that money itself, the very concept of it, is a network good, meaning that it lives & dies by the network effect. The more people that trade their dollars or altcoins or any other tokens in for bitcoin, the stronger it becomes, and the more successful we are at separating money from state. Humanity is only going to get exactly 1 chance at doing that. Governments will see us coming miles away next time. They already see us, but bitcoin is too large for them to stop. Not so with any other coin. So if Bitcoin fails, for any reason, you can expect CDBCs to be the new definition of money for tens of thousands of years.

bitcoin is not scaling properly. when most people must use lightning through a trusted third party (like lightspark) it behaves identically to a CBDC. the bad thing is already happening right now! some of us have recognized that lightning cannot work at scale without depending on these bad companies and we are suggesting to do sidechains instead. if you still don't understand this we cannot understand it for you.

The only chad move then would be implementing the privacy changes that were prepared for Bitcoin, but only got implemented on Monero. Let Monero be the test bed. How many more years do you need before implementing in Bitcoin?

This was the original definition of Bitcoin maximalism, before jerkoffs like Saylor and today’s Core sabotaged Bitcoin’s future. Altcoins were supposed to be demos that, when proven reliable, were to have their features integrated into Bitcoin. Instead Bitcoin’s entire “utility” became a bag to pawn off to retirees, useful idiots, and pension funds.

That's not a chad move, That's getting bitcoin banned in every jurisdiction like monero is. Meanwhile, bitcoin is extremely private if you know how to use it well. (Such as self-custodial lightning or eCash.) No need for monero once those are better implimented.

If you think Saylor and even core devs like Zhao have "Sabotaged bitcoin's future" then you think far too little of bitcoin. It's more resilient than you imagine, and has only gotten stronger each day of the last 17 years, not weaker. Saylor has added a (very annoying) layer to bitcoin's interface to wall street. I wouldn't own that crap, but wall street traders, hedgefund managers, and others who play that game can appreciate. I'm very annoyed at it and all that ETF money moving the price of bitcoin around, but how does any of that change or weaken bitcoin's ability to produce a valid block every 10 minutes? It doesn't, therefore bitcoin will succeed one day.

I can't image why you think "people must use lightning through a trusted third party (like lightspark)" First of all, who is lightspark? Never heard of them. Secondly, assuming your point is about custodial lightning solutions, why not use liquid, or eCash like Cashu? Or run your own lightning node and be your own custodian? Or just stay on chain for now because the cost of a TX is almost always 1 sat per byte these days. The greatest thing about bitcoin's scaling solution is that it's not set in stone... It's a free market where anyone, from you to JP Morgan can add their own "layer 2 solutions" to make bitcoin payments practical. Many have, and the market will decide in time which everyone wants to use.

And by the way, liquid is a sidechain.

liquid is a completely fake thing. you give real bitcoins to a closed secret club of private companies, then they give you fake bitcoins on their own separate UTXO ledger which doesn't have proof of work or even proof of stake. I can't tell if you're a bot or if you are just too stupid and lazy to read the documentation and figure out how things really work underneath all the marketing gloss. you're a useful idiot

By the way, you said: "Altcoins were supposed to be demos that, when proven reliable, were to have their features integrated into Bitcoin." I bet you can't find a source from the old documentation (pre-2017) on that. I'm pretty sure that's a narrative invented by altcoiners and just repeated enough to gaslight bitcoiners. Ossification is a VERY desirable property of a monetary system.

I was there, asswipe. everyone believed this

ok I guess I'm the idiot for talking to a bot for two days

And yet, it's a sidechain. You keep advocating for them. I personally have nothing against federated custodianship like liquid and Fedi, but I trust bitcoin more so my money stays there. In theory it's far, far more reliable than the federal reserve since all of the companies invited to be a part of that federation are self-interested to protect bitcoin. (Their businesses would lose revenue if they harmed it.) What would be your ideal sidechain?

How does Bitcoin losing value weaken Bitcoin’s ability to produce a valid block every ten minutes? How does people using other blockchains for literally every real world application of blockchains weaken Bitcoin’s ability to do so? It doesn’t! As long as Bitcoin produces a valid block every ten minutes it wins! Therefore, by your logic here, Bitcoin can fail in every conceivable manner, it can lose every single product application, but still “succeed” because you can jerk off to the current hashrate and block height. Well, most people want their money to do something other than be a masturbatory math problem. In terms of Saylor specifically, he openly says Bitcoin is *done*. That it doesn’t need a security budget. That it doesn’t need any additional features. That LN works perfectly and needs no further work. And he specifically has sabotaged research grant orgs like OpenSats under this logic, going to their patrons and aggressively demanding that they withdraw their pledges of *free financial support* towards further Bitcoin development. Note that I have been in Bitcoin since sub-$5 and most OG Bitcoiners aggressively dispute Saylor’s ideas here:

X (formerly Twitter)

Eric Voskuil (@evoskuil) on X

More cringe every day.

X (formerly Twitter)

FRANCIS ⚜️ BULLBITCOIN.COM (@francispouliot_) on X

Pack it up everyone, no need to build anything anymore, we have already won. Governments are on our side and stablecoins on altcoin chains are goin...

Saylor is poisonous to Bitcoin’s success, unless you define Bitcoin success as merely more blocks being solved. Which, I agree, Bitcoin will continue having valid blocks, and the fee market will continue to be a fucking ghost town because people will continue to not use Bitcoin and the blocks will be fucking empty.

Lopp was also there, and he also says this was the real history openly:

X (formerly Twitter)

Jameson Lopp (@lopp) on X

For the first ~7ish years of Bitcoin, the prevailing narrative for why altcoins were doomed was that they were test networks. The idea being that B...

You can also find a ton of statements to this effect on OG Bitcoin-talk threads if you want to waste time searching. But I think from here this discussion is obviously over, because this “Luke” person was clearly either not there or is intentionally deceptive. He’s either a fucking idiot running his mouth or a liar, and I don’t have time to entertain either.

Then I'm guessing you were there to shitcoin. All the bitcoin maximalists I followed in those days would have argued against this narrative, excepting, of course, Roger Ver & Erik Voorheez, who later went on to shitcoin themselves.

The shitcoin-promoted narrative is the exact opposite. Luke Dashjr promotes an insane narrative that any steps to further the utility of the Bitcoin blockchain will make it a conspiracy to distribute child porn. Of course, the board of his company is run by shitcoiners. Shitcoiners own all the equity in the company that employs him.

"they would have completely agreed with my narcissistic jerkoff vision of Bitcoin” is hilariously solipsistic

>what would be your ideal sidechain scroll up nigga. I'm done talking to you

But it's not a ghost town, sorry. You're just wrong about that. I think that just because you don't see all the different uses yourself you imagine that they don't exist at all. Even in the country of Peru alone I bet there is more bitcoin traffic than your mind would accept as a global number. Meanwhile, taking the time to go search for this, even in the age of AI, wouldn't fit your narrative very well. How much would it hurt you to ask ChatGPT to compare bitcoin's global traffic, including all 2nd layers, to say, visa's traffic in terms of total money and transactions? I'm guessing it would only hurt your pride. Adoption is a little ugly right now as it always is during the low part of the 4-year cycle, but not beneath the normal low point... Meanwhile new apps, communities, circular economies, and even network layers are being created at a more than encouraging pace. & I don't care what Saylor thinks, I'm no MSTR fanboi. If he said it's done I'll be surprised, but he certainly hasn't sold many of his 840,000 BTC so even his own words are insignificant to his actions.

Lol; the old "Everyone I don't like is hitler" response. I'll take that as a formal admission of defeat.

> But it's not a ghost town, sorry. You're just wrong about that. Thankfully we can simply look at Bitcoin’s present-day fees and know that I am tangibly right and you a retarded liar. Fees are low because nobody is using Bitcoin.

Hi anon, good to meet someone on Nostr who's been in bitcoin even longer than me, even if you have turned to the dark side. I arrived in 2011, but was already an AnCap libertarian seasteading advocate by then so the concept of removing money from the state was extremely important to me and always will be. Anyway, you said a lot I wanted to respond to, so forgive me for going full reddit-mode on you here: > "With normies storing coins (IOU) on CEX you are back to fractional reserves and price suppression." Correction: Those fools who store their coins on a CEX are back to fractional reserves. Me, not so much. Exchanges have never held any of my net worth for more than a minute. > "As someone who entered Bitcoin I'm 2010 I know your position very well, but you never bothered updating the talking points of the early days to the reality in 2026." Why should I? My mission to remove money from state has never changed, and it's absolutely still on track to accomplish that. Just because Wall Street got a chunck of coins (that includes saylor) doesn't mean that they can change bitcoin's mission nor even eventual fate. We could never become money for the whole world without them, now could we? > "Back then before Bitcoin got the NGU CEX KYC approval we knew what we were fighting for..." Many still do. Those who don't will be forced to when they're staring down the double barrel of a mandated CBDC. Tons of countries already have one of those up for debate now. > "because we discussed all the privacy enhacjng tech (that later only got implemented in Monero) we rightfully believed Bitcoin could become fungible money." This was never my concern, because on-chain fungibility is already better than the fiat currencies' fungibility it is replacing. That's already an improvement, without removing money from the state yet. Meanwhile, we can always build more privacy on layer two, adding fungibility to the overall system. That'll only improve over time. You jumped ship too early bro. > "And you seem to miss that (private) property depends on the state to be enforced." Here's where we'll likely disagree fundamentally. I believe your private property is simply another form of your time. It certainly is exchangeable for your time. Do you need the state to enforce your time? Therefore, owning property has always been a basic human right and no government has the "right" to do anything with it. So taxation is theft, governments are illegitimate, and you are free to protect your private property by any means necessary. Sadly, we're ruled by violent gangs who don't agree, so that's why I'm a seasteading proponent... We'll build our own land and leave out the government this time. > "So the only private property you really can enforce yourself needs privacy at its base." I'm certainly not arguing that privacy is not needed. It just isn't needed on the bottom layer because that's a really freaking hard thing to do without breaking several things that make bitcoin awesome. Like accountability. We know right now that there will never be more than 21m BTC. Can you prove how much monero is in circulation? How many there will be in 1000 years from now? > "Get back on track.....Monero, Bitcoin's earlier destiny the OGs that came before you signed up for." Now hold on a damn minute. When I arrived, I spent half a year reading every last post of the bitcointalk forum, the cypherpunks mailing list, and lots of the sourceforge.net forum too. Of course plenty of people talked about wanting more privacy, but to say that "monero is Bitcoin's earlier destiny the OGs that came before" is imagining things. Satoshi took plenty of precautions (like telling wikileaks to back off) to stop the community from making an enemy of the state. I don't think he or Hal or Martii or many devs at all back then would have suggested making bitcoin's base layer totally private, at least not once they realized what true privacy does to the 21m limit. And even if they did, maybe they hadn't thought it thru far enough? Keeping bitcoin from being inflated is far more important to bitcoiners nowadays than privacy on the bottom layer is. > "Bitcoin can't become private cash as envisioned by cypherpunks, not with LN and neither wiith cashu." Then something else. Layer 46 then. Maybe one day monero will become a Bitcoin sidechain. The point is that Bitcoin _IS_ more private than dollars on the base layer already, and it is far more private still on the layers above that. Seriously, why do you have to make "perfect" the enemy of "Good enough?" > "don't build your Bitcoin maximalism on the weak thesis that everybody has the same needs as you." I have built it on the inarguable thesis that if we must seperate money from state. Those who try to argue it simply don't understand how bad the state is and are basically children playing with fire, & desperately need our guidance. > "Personally as an OG Bitcoiner I'd make a fool of myself or even endangering my family if I wouldn't store the majority of my holdings in Monero and only spend in the most private ways possible." Whoa.... I hope that was a mistype! Are you really keeping the majority of your family's net worth in a coin that has lost 50% to BTC since it was launched, and that you can never know how many exist? Because it's more private? I'll take the higher security, acceptance, and performance of BTC over privacy alone, anyday of the week and twice on billpay day. > "You are either naive (paying the bill later) highly technical (for never fucking up coinjoins in the future nor the trade partners of yours) or you missed out on the biggest gains despite being early." None of the above. I've been 100% in bitcoin since 2016, Zero fiat held that whole time, and I simply sell BTC each month from a bunch of hardware wallets through CashApp or Strike or a similar service to immediately pay off the credit card bills that I used to purchase everything with, including rent. (Bilt rocks) I basically use Citi, BofA, Wells Fargo, and others as my 2nd layer, and in a bitcoin-only world, it would be the exact same setup. A line of credit is just too useful to go without. (Not to mention all the miles/points/freebies they give. Not trivial. My bilt points alone bought me airfare already.)

LOL! You think that the present day fees are representative of bitcoin's TX throughput? ;p Your assumption must be that lightning, liquid, eCash, Fedi, and other L2 solutions have all failed and didn't move any traffic off-chain. That's pretty pathetic, seriously. You are tangibly wrong and the only retarded liar here.

Excellent. I can mute you now. L8r, loser.

Lol. Back in the day there were no shitcoins. The first major shitcoin was Ripple and everybody in the space agreed on it. Nobody would have dared to call Litecoin, or Peercoin or Namecoin a shitcoin. Maybe Feather as the only project that tried to build in demurrage.

So you claim Bitcoin is not anti-fragile? You are exposing little by little the larper you are. Early on we always assumed that the Bitcoin idea would end in a huge confrontation with the state. We assumed that Bitcoin needs to make it in the underground first without regulatory approval. Why would the state invite its enemy? But then everything changed. Bitcoin got embraced (kiss of death). While the state moved on to fight Monero.

In other words you fear for the fiat value you put into Bitcoin that now needs regulatory protection else NGL. Thanks for clearing up your stance.

It is kind of parasitic in that way too since transactions happening on lightning don't pay miners transaction fees to secure the blockchain. If most transactions are supposed to happen on lightning in the future, and block subsidy is going away, who is going to pay miners? Lightning works for now, but a Drivechain future seems more symbiotic and sustainable.

> LOL! You think that the present day fees are representative of bitcoin's TX throughput? ;p Yes. The numbers are very obvious about this. In early 2022, there was over 83k LN channels. Today there is half that. The number of LN channels that are associated with CEX/swap services have increased massively as a percentage. Nobody is organically using LN. There’s also a thousand less BTC available as liquidity. A sixth of the network’s liquidity has disappeared as people head for the exits. All available data shows that LN capacity was not organically driven by real consumer usage, that capacity and liqudiity were established using unsustainable VC bonfires, and that virtually nobody is using Lightning regularly for commerce, there’s just not enough L1 activity of channel activity to make this giant LN economy in shitholes you claim real.

Bitcoin Visuals

Lightning Network Statistics - Bitcoin Visuals

Bitcoin lightning network dashboard with charts and statistics on nodes, channels, capacity, distance measures, completeness measures, clustering m...

https://news.bitcoin.com/data-shows-sustained-slide-in-lightning-network-capacity-channels-through-2025/

"Unless someone invented a way to made On-chain payments scale without the centralizing tradeoffs, Bitcoin had no other way to make it to visa-level TX activity." isn't this exactly what BCH did? the more I read the more I'm convinced the community chose the worse bitcoin version

Sigh... Or maybe you are half the Austrian you claim to be. (Ok, technically you didn't, but you still would have been exposed to it.) Since I was already aware of Mises/Rothbard/Austrian economics before bitcoin, I knew right up front that money lives and dies by the network effect, so they exist in competition and there could only be one. I have played with a few coins in those years, but I made it clear from the beginning that altcoins were only stealing bitcoin's thunder and should be shunned. We have bitcoin testnet for those things, of course it may have been naive of me back then to imagine millions of devs would try out their apps and features with so little hope of monetary compensation that route provides. Yes, I was aware of the "bitcoin is non-fungible money" camp back then but I was on the side arguing against them, stating that it's already more fungible than a dollar bill, with it's serial numbers and banking network that can track stolen dollars. The mission for everyone was to separate money from state back then, so to say that "nobody" would have accepted an only Slightly-more fungible money than what we already had but that the state can't control is absolutely a silly argument.

That's exactly what they pointlessly tried to do. And they still don't understand that they've failed to do that at scale. The lightning network alone already routes more payments every minute than BCH can do all day. If they ever experienced any real popularity like BTC did back in 2017, they'd suffer the same fate, no matter how large their blocksize is. Meanwhile, having a large blocksize restricts everyday plebs from running a node. Hardware costs go sky high pretty quickly as you raise that particular number. That means very few nodes on BCH exist (comparitively) and if bitcoiners wanted to, we could redirect a few nodes of our own and 51% attack BCH quite easily. It has been done several times. So ultimately keeping payments on-chain is a security issue. The final boss for bitcoin is state attack, and that would be like handing them a leash around our necks.

Yes, let's quote the organization behind bitcoin cash about lightning statistics. That'll surely win me away from lightning! "All the available data" you are quoting here is hilarious. I already told you how to figure it out for yourself instead of listening to its' haters. But you won't, you're a poser. And now you're muted. Have fun with your shitcoins.

Bitcoinvisuals.com is not behind Bitcoin cash. You can also just scrape the data for open lightning channels off the L1 blockchain right? This is not secret data.

so thinking about it a bit more I now see that both BTC and BCH can't or won't follow the original whitepaper(even if the reason is valid, like hardware/bandwidth limitations), and I always have seen lightning as insecure for peer to peer with uptimes normal people can have, and it gets worse with its centralization growing. I really don't see much of a path forward against a state attack if BTC/BCH can't handle enough volume and lightning(or whatever alternative) is hosted on centralized servers more and more. Idk, maybe I'm just blackpilled today

"who is going to pay miners? " I've literally heard that question every single market low. 1 out of every 4 years... And the other three years are all record profits for miners, even when mempools are empty. Also, with AI they have fallbacks for their data centers during unprofitable months too, now. About drivechains, I really don't know why people hold them up to compare to lightning at all. This is a category error IMHO. Lightning is optimized for fast, cheap, high-volume payments while drivechains are for feature experimentation & new asset types. It's honestly closer to ethereum. Then there are many downsides to drivechains, even if you care about exploring new features more than you do hard money. Where to start? I can think of 4 no-gos right off the top of my head: 1. They have a serious miner custody risk. Probably the biggest technical objection is that withdrawals are gated by a simple hashrate majority (the spec uses a roughly 50%-of-blocks-over-~13,150-blocks threshold). This hands miners, rather than users or cryptography, effective custody over sidechained funds, creating a bribery/collusion attack surface. (A coalition with enough hashpower could approve a fraudulent withdrawal bundle and steal sidechain BTC!) Developer "Calle" has argued BIP300 drivechains grant miners excessive authority and could enable a hashpower majority to misappropriate funds. 2. Slow, capital-inefficient withdrawals. The ~3-month withdrawal delay is a deliberate security tradeoff (giving the network time to detect and react to fraudulent bundles), but it's much slower and clunkier than Lightning's near-instant settlement, making Drivechains far less suited to everyday payments. This makes them fine for developers playing with small amounts of coins for development only, but horrible for use as money. 3. The "shitcoinification" of Bitcoin. Most maximalists worry that opening this door invites speculative, low-quality, or scammy projects riding on Bitcoin's brand, which could reflect poorly on Bitcoin even if technically isolated. 4. No live mainnet deployment & stalled consensus. BIP 300 has been a "Draft" status proposal since 2017 and has never achieved the miner/community consensus needed for activation; it remains contentious within Bitcoin dev circles, with prominent developers opposed. So as far as I'm concerned, drivechains are DOA. That's a shame, because I'd like to see many 2nd layers bloom on top of bitcoin until the public chooses the best one and we all run with that.

Well yea isnt' it obvious?... it's working right now even when the mempool is empty because there is still a block subsidy 1. Using drivechains is optional though. People who don't trust it can completely ignore it. They never have to expose any of their funds to it and can continue using on-chain, lightning, ark, ecash, etc. Bit of irony considering the last three have a lot more trust assumptions than drivechains, but people are still okay with them. 2. You won't literally have to wait 3 months to get your coins if you don't want to. You can swap with other users on-chain or use services like Boltz that there will surely be a market for like every other coin. I think there is even a drivechain for decentralized exchanges already. 3. Honestly, I don't really have a strong opinion on this. It's kind of already shitcoinified isn't that the whole contention with BIP110 vs Core right now? At least with drivechains the incentives push people to do that off the L1. Most people already associate Bitcoin with crypto in general and use them interchangeably. 4. True I don't think drivechains will likely happen either.

i can't tell if you're being sarcastic or real at this point

oh no what will we do! :D

No, it's not obvious, for a few reasons. Did you know that there have been days of fees far exceeding block rewards? On April 20, 2024, miners earned over $80 million in transaction fees in a single day, far surpassing the $26 million earned from block subsidies. It doesn't matter than this was just a spike in the ordinals craze... The point is that the mining infrastructure THRIVED with all that traffic and payments still go through that day. But more importantly, bitcoin mining has massively changed in the last 5 years. The big plants like HUT8, Marathon, and Bitdeer are losing ground to the energy companies. Nowadays, "profitability" isn't as important as simply being available at the source of energy production. Imagine you have an oil well or windfarm or some kind of energy to sell and the grid wants to buy it from you at different rates for the different times of the day. Because the nearby city has a massive solar field already, your energy is only worth a lot to them at nighttime. So what do you do with the energy that you produce during the day? Bitcoin mining at ANY profitability would be a way to save massive amounts of revenue for you. For this reason alone, bitcoin mining will always have enough miners, and always be attractive in all jurisdictions.

Yea I meant it's likely not happening on BTC. You're talking about Sztorcs Ecash right? Definitely interested in checking it out when it drops

You're talking about exceptional days with a lot of traffic though. I'm hardly surprised they were thriving. Kind of my point that miners will need a lot of traffic to make it worth their time once block subsidy fades away. Not once in a blue moon spikes. Where is all that traffic going to come from if it is expected that most users are going to transact off-chain on lightning, ark, ecash, etc in the future? I need to think more about your last two paragraphs. Not sure if intermittent mining with excess energy would be enough to offset all the other hashrate that would be lost that would no longer feasible.

people who use altcoins were born on those days. people who think touching bitcoin L1 is a very very bad idea were born on those days. they never want to pay bitcoin miners again.

Um, you're not sure that *all the energy producers in the world* intermittently mining with their excess energy would be enough to offset what you think will be lost? That's like saying you're not sure that the pacific ocean produces enough fish to offset the lost salmon from your plate last night at Captain D's.