Recently, I penned an essay on why drivechains won't eradicate altcoins, and it appears to have sparked some heated reactions. Several drivechain advocates have come forward with different responses, prompting me to write this follow-up piece to clarify my stance and address the critiques.
Firstly, some argue that drivechain proponents are not actually claiming that altcoins will be eradicated. However, this is manifestly untrue. For instance, Paul Sztorc has openly stated that drivechains will eliminate 99.9% of altcoins. While the claim has been made, there is little evidence to support it.
David Bailey further summarized the argument, stating that if you eliminate an altcoin's claim to technological novelty, you reduce its value to that of meme coins like Doge or Pepe. He believes this would prevent significant malinvestment. But this assertion also lacks supporting evidence, and here's why:
  1. Unaware Investors: Most altcoin investors are barely aware of the technology and rarely examine arguments against their chosen altcoins. They are often oblivious to factors like serial scamming or the open source nature of the code, which would deter investment in a rational world. This lack of knowledge is usually only rectified after investment, by which point bias clouds their judgment.
  2. Persistence of Altcoins: History has shown that events that should have killed off altcoins (e.g., the DAO incident, exploits, chain reorgs) haven't done so. Decisions surrounding altcoins are rarely made rationally, and the behavior of investors does not align with the homo economicus model of economic rationality.
  3. Unpopularity of Non-Premine Protocols: We already have sidechains that allow building features using Bitcoin as the native asset, without premines or native tokens. Generally, these do not get nearly as much attention as an altcoin with its large marketing budgets and gambling potential. Without a get-rich-quick scheme to fuel the frenzy, technological advancement alone fails to garner much interest.
Considering these factors, the assertion that drivechains will eliminate or even significantly weaken altcoins is unfounded.
What is the purpose of drivechains if they won't diminish the popularity of altcoins? Drivechains may foster experimentation with various technical features or serve as a platform for token launches, akin to Ethereum. But this objective has been chased by nearly every altcoin since Ethereum came into existence, with few managing to dent Ethereum's popularity among altcoin investors, even in the face of its evident technical failures. This means drivechains' value is as a technical playground, which undoubtedly has value but prompts the question: Is it worth implementing through a soft fork in Bitcoin? For many Bitcoiners, the primary feature of Bitcoin is its secure value storage. Anything perceived as a distraction to this capability is likely to be met with resistance and in a consensus driven network, this means doom for the proposal. The lack of sufficient support for drivechains over the past six years illustrates this sentiment.
In conclusion, the belief that drivechains will reduce or halt the proliferation of altcoins is rooted more in wishful thinking than in tangible evidence. While drivechains represent an interesting technological aspect, their impact on the altcoin space is overstated. Far from ending or even significantly curtailing the diverse altcoin gambling market, drivechains simply adds another competitor to an already saturated landscape. The real challenge remains in educating and guiding investors to make informed and rational decisions, rather than hoping for a technical silver bullet that suddenly curbs the altcoiners' desire to gamble.
I'm not sure why this is controversial. Drivechains may still differ from existing sidechains in a way that matters to altcoin investors but no one knows to what extent if any. Presenting an argument that Sztorc oversells drivechains isn't a direct argument against drivechains.
I'm hoping this reorients the conversation back to what value drivechain brings rather than fantasies of eliminating the "competition."
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drivechains' value is as a technical playground, which undoubtedly has value but prompts the question: Is it worth implementing through a soft fork in Bitcoin? For many Bitcoiners, the primary feature of Bitcoin is its secure value storage. Anything perceived as a distraction to this capability is likely to be met with resistance and in a consensus driven network, this means doom for the proposal.
Many if not all Drivechain proponents consider drivechains more secure than the centralized or federated systems people use today (CEXes, fedimints, federated sidechains, statechains, etc) and think Bitcoiners should be able to opt-in to this new security model. Maybe drivechains are not secure enough for life savings but secure enough for a right-sized portion of the stack to get some extra features e.g. vault-style covenants, or stronger privacy, or new L2 protocols like Ark, or whatever else users want. As a point of comparison, few people would suggest Lightning is secure enough for life savings but it may be worth the risk to users to deposit some right-sized portion of the stack to earn routing fees or make cheap, fast payments. So is Lightning, or the soft forks that enabled it, a distraction? I think not, and the same logic applies to Drivechain.
(As a technical point, note that in the case of a soft fork, some minority of resistance can be tolerated, since the change is backward compatible.)
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My gut feeling tends to agree here. There will always be new altcoins with new or slightly altered narratives to trick the new batchs of investors.
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Most altcoin investors are barely aware of the technology
most bitcoin "investors" follow influencers in cowboy hats and have zero technical skills themselves. disconnected.
2023 is the year bitcoiners have become so stale and boring its barely worth reading anything lol.
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