Interview with one of the biggest third party developer on one particular blockchain that wrote software in PoS chains.
Friday, January 19, 2024 in an Element chat room
š§ sporklift
By the way, has anyone here tried Bitcoin-based DeFi? I keep hearing that it's going to be the next hot thing.Chrislas
Is that a thing?š§ sporklift
I've heard of Stacks, SatoshiVM, Rollux, these kinds of things. The reason I asked was because I'm not very familiar. I believe some of them use Bitcoin as the settlement layer (in similar manner that Ethereum L2s rely on the Ethereum mainnet for security), and some that use BTC as the gas token. Heh, I took a look at the Stacks website. A lot of reassurance about how it's good for Bitcoin and actually useful. You don't see FAQs like that on protocols using smart contract chains.šØ Danny
Not advice, financial or otherwise, but in my opinion, Stacks calling itself bitcoin is a bit disingenuous. If you read about their proof of transfer and proof of burn, it just sounds like the classic DeFi money schemes. Send BTC here, don't worry nobody controls this address (proof?), then you get this new shiny token which you can use on their network and it's "just as secure as bitcoin" (it isn't) because it's "secured by bitcoin through PoX" (whatever that means). Oh and don't worry, you can always get back your BTC, you just gotta lock your STX and you get bitcoin, isn't that great? So... yeah, tl;dr: not bitcoin, at best someone could make a coinjoin that's slightly more secure because you'd be mixing with other UTXOs that aren't even engaged in your join, but, it's not worth it.š§ sporklift
Sure, there is always smart contract risk. Are you familiar with their implementation; does it look particularly risky/scammy?šØ Danny
I only looked at the resources they have on their website, particularly their whitepaper and I wasn't impressed. I'll say that much though to be fair I'm not into DeFi, or crypto, or any of this money magic. I tried 2 years ago, and it just reinforced my belief that there is only one true cryptocurrency: bitcoin (and maybe Monero), and everything else is... well... a scam of some sort (whether they're scamming you willingly or not I don't know, but that's what it feels like). Though, naturally, do whatever you want with your money. We're all invested in the biggest scam of them all, fiat, so who am I to judge?š§ sporklift
May I ask what makes you think all non-Bitcoin crypto is "a scam of some sort"?šØ Danny
Sure, I'll give you a quick rundown:- Complete lack of decentralization
- Complete lack of finality (rolling back the chain whenever convenient)
- Ponzi scheme ("foundations" and companies that run those chains control most coins)
- "Staking" as security (this baffles me in particular)š§ sporklift
Okay, I see. I was thinking of a "scam" in the sense Merriam-Webster defines it, as "to deceive and defraud (someone)". These features are well-known and frankly not really different from companies listed in the stock market.šØ Danny
Dude, I still remember the day someone found a bug in Osmosis (some DeFi in the Cosmos ecosystem) and managed to steal funds; in less than a few hours the majority of node operators got together and LITERALLY ROLLED BACK THE CHAIN. I saw it happen in front of my eyes. They "took down" the network by just shutting down 50% of their nodes and undid the changes.Literally a Sybil attack, what people in Bitcoin were worried about from day 1, and they performed it nonchalantly, showing all of the points I made at once.There was no outrage in the community, nothing, everything kept going fine and people on their Discord server were praising them, and last I checked (though it's been over a year now) it's still being used.š§ sporklift
Sure, I used Osmosis today in fact. But I do understand your preference for things to be pure and code being the law. Do you think Bitcoin will always be supreme, or do you think there'd be a state these PoS chains & DeFi could reach where you'd find them usable?šØ Danny
PoS? Never. PoS is basically a worse version of the "trust me bro" - driven economics that have gotten us to this stage where all the world's economies are failing.š§ sporklift
What about competing PoW? It'd take a lot to build Sybil resistance for a new, small network, particularly if it could be worked with Bitcoin miners.šØ Danny
There might be another PoW blockchain that takes over after bitcoin, but it would have to be significantly better in every conceivable way to every single user (with no disadvantage), which if not impossible, it's close to being impossible. To be clear, bitcoin nodes can't agree on anything except that bitcoin is the future; it takes years for certain upgrades that (some of us) think are beneficial to be implemented, and that's just installing a different piece of software on their PC... so it's possible but very unlikely.š§ sporklift
Yep, that's one of the strengths of Bitcoin. It sounds like you were not always Bitcoin-only. You played with PoS and other chains in the past?šØ Danny
I played with PoS chains, yes, and I wrote software for PoS chains. I was one of the biggest third-party developers on one particular blockchain (and no, it wasn't DeFi or NFTs).I fell for the lie because I didn't think critically. I saw all of those "cool" projects being built, and I constantly saw my own wealth go up as the price of those coins went up.And then little by little, I realized that I was being played for a fool and EVERYTHING, EVERY SINGLE THING, about PoS chains was either a lie or exaggerated. It started when one particular chain's main security feature came crumbling down, and I opened my eyes, and started seeing past the money. There were signs since day 1 but I ignored them because I was making bank.HAL9000
Any thoughts on using XMR for high-value exchanges/purchases?šØ Danny
It's fine, honestly. I feel like Monero is the only cryptocurrency except for Bitcoin that has value... the only thing I don't like about Monero is that its usability isn't great (you need to download the whole chain to do anything as a user, not just as a node, so it's basically impossible to get non-technical people to use it, unless they use stuff like Cake Wallet, which connects to third-party nodes and kinda defeats the purpose haha), and ring signatures are sound mathematically from what I can tell, but I don't think they're quantum resistant, so we're gonna have to see a lot of changes coming soon.š§ sporklift
So you were a Solidity (or similar) dev, you learned it all and gave it up?šØ Danny
Yeah, I'm not gonna say the chain, but yes, I started distancing myself in Sept 2022, and officially stopped engaging with PoS chains in general altogether shortly after.š§ sporklift
You had no hope that even with all the growing pains a new technology like this has, it could eventually become good?šØ Danny
No, because as I said I realized that I'd been lied to from day one. I was too enchanted by the quick money to think critically about their promises. The promise of decentralization; the promise of smart contracts, if they actually were what they say they are; heck, the very concept of staking... those are all great, who doesn't want those? But those are just false promises:- PoS blockchains are NOT decentralized, and will never be decentralized because there is always an incentive for them to become more and more centralized.
- Smart Contracts are impossible to decentralize, the only way to actually make them decentralized (and secure) is to make them run on the user's machine, which means that congratulations, you've just invented software, except slower and significantly more expensive.
- Staking is a dream, who wouldn't want to do nothing, lock their funds, and earn money? Sign me up! Except that it's impossible and either relies on inflation (making the earnings fake) or choosing a loser (or both). And we can clearly see what this means by just looking at today's monetary system.š§ sporklift
That must've been a real disappointment. Buying into these ideas and learning all those skills to do the programming, and then ending up so disillusionedšØ Danny
It's fine haha, I've been coding years before then and I'm still coding now, if anything, at worst it was a 2-year detour.... and to be fair, it introduced me to Rust, so it's not all bad š.š§ sporklift
What kind of coding are you doing these days?šØ Danny
Systems engineering & some web backend dev.š§ sporklift
Are you doing freelancing or did you find employment right after your misadventures in crypto?šØ Danny
I've been self-employed for years and was self-employed while working on the crypto-related stuff. I split my time 70-30 between my main projects and client projects.š§ sporklift
Nice, that's what I do as well. Learn a new thing for fun and let the clients pay for the time I spent learning itšØ Danny
haha, yep, except that I also make money from the other projects, not just clients