I'm not pessimistic about scaling solutions, I'm realistic. They are a few scaling solutions being currently proposed and discussed. It will take a few years for those who pass the discussion and experimentation phases to actually be available to Bitcoiners. The Fedimint protocol on the other hand exist and soon Bitcoiners will be able to use it. Fedimint is another custodial option we can chose from. Which I consider to be a good think. Drivechains are not a noncustodial bitcoin solution. Bitcoin never leaves the Bitcoin network. Users deposit and withdraw their bitcoin in and out of a sidechain with a one-to-one conversion rate. Drivechains help find new ways to grow the revenue from transaction fees by offering functionalities not available on Bitcoin. You want zcash privacy without the exposure to the token valuation, you deposit your bitcoin on the zcash sidechain. Want to move back into bitcoin, redeem your sidechain tokens for bitcoin. You want smart-contract functionalities without etherium, deposit bitcoin on your smat-contract sidechain of choice. When you are done exchange the sidechain tokens for bitcoin. That's not even bitcoin custody. You exchanged bitcoin for sidechain tokens. What do you mean by Bitcoin facing vendor lock-in?

>Drivechains are not a noncustodial bitcoin solution. Bitcoin never leaves the Bitcoin network. Users deposit and withdraw their bitcoin in and out of a sidechain with a one-to-one conversion rate. Your understanding about how DC works is incomplete. I could waste my time and describe it here, or you could actually read how the escrow would work. No one has custody of the escrowed funds. More non-custodial and trustless than 15 multisig federation. Look specifically at whether the author expects users to be doing this depositing or not. >That's not even bitcoin custody. You exchanged bitcoin for sidechain tokens. Depending on the sidechain design, the exchange could be for tokens you have direct custody of just like a main chain bitcoin wallet. It's funny, you have a similar lack of horizontal thinking as Peter. Not an insult, nothing i say here is personal, just a critique of the same arguments rehashed since 2015 if not earlyer. >What do you mean by Bitcoin facing vendor lock-in? Any solution that is not LN, gets shot down. The approved solutions happen to depend on LN. When alternative solutions or improved protocols exist but a company is unable to support them because their investment in one single software that excludes them, the company is locked in to that exclusion. This can be life or death for a company or project and is one of the competitive advantages of opensource and libre. Sort of like how Microsoft has or had a monopoly on South Korean (among other states) computer infra. Those who advertised these changes to Bitcoin including segwit, happen to be selling solutions they stand to profit from and are skill stacked to exploit, not because alternatives do not exist ready to go, or that it is inherently impossible for alternatives to exist. The tautology goes like this: This and not that, can be trusted. You can trust me because i trust this and not that. Circulars like this all eventually fail. The free market eventually breaks them. This is a fast and true law. The only question is if Bitcoin survives this inevitability. Not guranteed. Drivechains allows the freemarket to both break this circular, experiment, keep main layer bitcoin stable and benefit Bitcoins long term survival. Bitcoin should be as popular and dependable as Usdt and Usdc by now. It should be as private as Monero and as experimental as Ethereum was. Instead we are dealing with layer 1 spam drama, again. And fucking block templates. Insert WHAT YEAR IS IT meme. It only isn't because of the logic loop influencers and devs are stuck in that stand to lose through their ad-hoc bandaid solutions and inbred conference circuit. Their popularity will, as a consequence, not survive the next big crisis. It didn't have to be this way, but is historically predictable. An example is RGB and tokens/assets. Zero adoption. LN ~5k bitcoins. It is that factions answer to ordinals and tokens (a fad already on its way out) they spent years of dev time to build a response to a fad, with no monetary signal to tell them if the effort was desired by the market. We, therefore are locked into their vision of bitcoin and lightning. Only to have ordinals cause a huge issue on main net ANYWAYS. DC could have avoided this misallocation of effort with immidiate monetary feedback for the idea in a sandboxed sidechain on a reduced blocksize attack surface. (To be fair Primal and related tech by Orlovsky has enough creativity to outlast even the next crisis or off chain innovation. Its that far ahead in antifragility and uniqueness.) It's actually getting to the point of criminality if not outright sabotage/treason. For instance, I'm rather technical and security aware. Through poor ui and lack of op_vault and other solutions, have had funds stolen, just replicating regular user behavior as an experiment. I hold them and the toxics responsible for it and countless other thefts and privacy breeches. Bitcoin and software is not easy, it's true. All the more reason not to out all our eggs in a single basket of orthodoxy.