3654 sats \ 2 replies \ @timechain 29 Jan 2023 \ on: Answering Objections to Drivechain bitcoin
I'm not able to adequately assess mining game-theory risks, but I think I'm pulling for this. Here's a few reasons why:
Privacy. Chain analytics will only get better, KYC laws will only get worse, governments will only get more authoritarian; privacy will only get more important. Liquid has confidential transactions, but it still displays the recieving and sending addresses, and are centralized institutions that can be pressured.
Miner revenue. This past bull market presents a more subtle path of NGU than we expected. When a different macro climate is occurring and we can't rely on NGU in the future to match the rate of the past, the fact that tx fees make up generally less than 5% of total miner revenue is an issue. I think drivechains is a superior option to Peter Todd's Tail Emission like Monero, or Jason P Lowery's use of taxpayer money to have the Pentagon defend the hashrate.
Ossification. Counterintuitive to bring ossification through a change, but since almost any change except a bug fix could be done on a sidechain, a decade from now, it could be seen as what brought ossification to the base chain.
It is the game theory risks and long range scenarios I am most interested in. I can appreciate right now that it would provide some utility, but it is hard to predict out what will evolve from it.
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Yeah, I get that. We really went through most of the last bull market with the mempools clearing. I guess still like 2% or less of the world use bitcoin. But I think if there's any utility that can be added to (or reclaimed back to) bitcoin, the fees would be great. Bitcoin is #1, but if you go with tx fees (as Paul says "paying customers") Bitcoin is #4, behind Ethereum, Binance, and Uniswap. Those are "gas" currencies so it's comparing apples to oranges, but I think Bitcoin can be so good that we can still be able to compare apples to oranges and still like the orange coin better.
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