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> those who want to see this industry succeed As a very early and ardent believer in cryptocurrency, and cryptography in general, I'm not sure that I do want t
by jl2718 4y ago
> those who want to see this industry succeed
As a very early and ardent believer in cryptocurrency, and cryptography in general, I'm not sure that I do want this "industry" to succeed. I see it as an imperfect but necessary mechanism to survive inevitable disaster. The "industry" must eventually die, either from obsolescence to the ideas that started it, or the failure of those ideas. I've accepted that it may be necessary, but also an existential risk, as the "industry" will always avoid self-obsolescence, and push toward the latter. This is already obvious from the cryptography perspective. The "industry" will never allow their products to adapt beyond their control.
- sph 4y agoThat's why I am part of the oft-maligned Bitcoin maximalists. Bitcoin was an incredible technological achievement. It has interesting implications in the computing, social and economic spaces. It's borne out of the anarchic and cypherpunk ideas. It has no leaders, no visionaries. Then came the people wanting to profit. The companies. The scammers. The get rich quick con artists. The trading apps. The DeFi venture capitalists. The alt-coins. The far-right libertarians. The banks. The memers. The Twitter bots. The governments. And here we are. For all I care it can all burn to the ground. The price of Bitcoin ain't that interesting anyway, just like I don't love a programming language only iff it has a lot of users. To me Bitcoin is a bit like Lisp: a ground-breaking white-paper way ahead of its time, which has spawned countless imitation and is often misunderstood.
- simmerup 4y agoIsn't there pretty persistent rumours that bitcoin was created by a government?
- gasull 4y agoIrrelevant. The US government created the Internet.
- gasull 4y agoThe cypherpunks talked about DAOs even before Bitcoin existed, and you can't have DAOs without DeFi. Bitcoin is cool, but isn't the only thing.
- once_inc 4y agoDeFi is however possible on Bitcoin, and the decision for pretty much every Defi company to build it on another chain that is a) less decentralized b) less secure or c) less permissionless means that all of those products inherit those risks. DeFi is crippled by the decisions their creators made at the start. Bitcoin is the hardest, most secure cryptocurrency. Building on top of it means being cautious and careful, lest you lose tokens of actual worth, as opposed to tokens that have value solely because your own system uses it.
- stefanha 4y agoCan you explain in more detail how DeFi is possible with Bitcoin? I thought that smart contacts in particular are not possible due to Bitcoin Script's limitations?
- jl2718 4y agoA simple way to do this is to lock up coins on a lightning channel and then use that state as input to a side chain. This would probably require some form of massive multisig to form output consensus, which is a lot more efficient with Schnorr signatures, but not great. Bitcoin could become Turing-complete, private, and very efficient with the addition of a few op-codes required in zero-knowledge verification. This would probably lead to a hard fork because the “industry” would not accept it.