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All the World's Txns www.truthcoin.info/blog/all-world-txns/

2072 sats \ 15 comments \ @elvismercury 3 May bitcoin

Good blog post by Paul Sztorc doing some calculations / economic modeling on viability of L2s under future transaction demands.

I am too dumb / have not read closely enough to react in more detail, but PS makes his assumptions explicit and walks you through the logic. He also provides some links to previous discussions on the topic that I wasn't aware of, so that will be almost certainly be good context.

If you're into detailed game-theoretic analyses of how the economics of this stuff works, have a peek.

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329 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 3 May freebie

Some great research but some strange conclusions. I wish the same effort had gone into explaining why bip300 is superior, besides fees and it’s opt-in nature.

In other words, every L2 will be “run by the miners”. ARK, BitVM, etc – they will be “run by miners”, and all of their special security guarantees will cease. The cryptography they employ will be useless. Bip300 is the only security model that is unchanged if a miner-coalition runs the L2.

Binary flippant conclusions like this damage some of the discussion and progress. Wish more people today were open-minded to being wrong or to alternative futures or viewpoints. Sidechains for sure have a place in the mix, especially as we want to incentivise more people to mine for security. But the thinking that LN is a “dead carcass” already because it is not paying miners is pretty laughable.

LN is the only L2 with any sort of traction today, in spite of all its flaws & issues. The first LN transaction was in 2018, so we’re still in 2015 (in Bitcoin terms) as far as Lightning is concerned. Just because it doesn’t process 6.45 trillion transactions a year doesn’t mean in the future when necessity arises it cannot. Humans are compelled into action when the pain of not building something is greatest.

I predict the world will have 13 L2 payment-sidechains, distributed geographically: East NA, West NA, Central America (+Caribbean), South America, West &North Europe, East Europe + Central Asia, Middle East, China, India, Japan, Oceania, Africa, Rest of World / Internet Native.

Then the idea that the world will organise itself around using 13 geographic sidechains is also an interesting take. Who would organise that? Isn’t the whole point of bitcoin to make geography irrelevant?

So yeah, some great research but some very premature conclusions, for me.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 3 May

Paul does a really good job of not listening to a word his opposition has to say to him.

346 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 3 May

People don't want to change miner incentives. PS positions BIP300 toying with miner incentives, and giving miners more power, as a virtue, but this is the problem most people have with BIP300 afaict. BIP300 can only kill other L2s if it's running and it isn't.

Things like BIP300 are cool but they'll only be run when other L2s have actually failed (and are not just declared dead by anyone who wants the attention of us low IQ, greg-dick-sucking, ln-vc-marketers) and we have no choice but to deliberately change miner incentives, no matter how many curses PS thinks he puts on other L2s.

110 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 3 May

Things like BIP300 are cool but they'll only be run when other L2s have actually failed

I'm not enough of an insider to opine on specifics, but my vague take is that btc is dominated by two extrema:

a) circlejerking maxis shouting as loud as they can that everything is fine and will always be fine, and any suggestion that something could be a serious problem (e.g., dwindling block reward) is met w/ accusations of shitcoinery and even less coherent replies because btc is inevitable

b) doomsayers who never shut up about how obviously nothing can ever work, and any argument that it's working now is a delusion

Both camps are tedious to me, but I dislike the first camp more, because the second camp is trivially refutable, and thus harmless. The first camp could be an existential risk. I appreciate PS for offering concrete diagnoses and proposals.

109 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 3 May

I don't mind PS either. We need orthoganites. He just beats his own drum a little too much, insisting it produces The True Music and everyone else is hearing impaired.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 3 May

orthoganites

Did you just make this up? I like it.

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 3 May

Yes lol. It felt like I met a language pothole.

108 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 3 May

Underneath PS's megalomania there is an interesting hypothesis though. He just overextends it.

It's premised on L2s needing to settle onchain and miners needing incentivizes to mine those transactions. He suggests if miners benefit more from another L2, they won't mine a competing L2's txs. And, surprise, drivechains are such a miner-biased L2.

This assumes:

miners can distinguish between an L2 tx and ordinary tx
the network has no recourse when miners act a fool
drivechains are activated

The interesting bit here is that L2s could have such significant dependency on miners that it requires a disproportionate "bribe" be paid to miners. I'm not sure that's true, but it could be.

21 sats \ 4 replies \ @justin_shocknet 3 May

PS is a one-man cult, many analogues to the CTV cult but at least CTV'rs generally admit they're grug brains shilling something too esoteric for them to understand themselves.

Scaling frauds like Paul somehow stay in the roadmap conversation anyway because there's some built-in virtue signaling element to saying we must scale at all costs, despite a preponderance of counter-evidence.

But clearly, these scalooors must love Bitcoin and poor people more than anyone.

Fact is that every scaling proposal requires baseless assumptions about demands and wild speculation on utility. It's sad how much attention this recycled garbage gets any time someone has to pay a slightly higher fee than they did a few weeks prior.

17 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 3 May

to saying we must scale at all costs, despite a preponderance of counter-evidence

I dunno what "at all costs" means concretely, and I don't what preponderance of counter-evidence you're referring to. Can you expand?

218 sats \ 2 replies \ @justin_shocknet 3 May

"At all costs" means introducing a new consensus that is not Bitcoin, basically a shitcoin "pegged" to Bitcoin that introduces unknown incentives into Bitcoin itself through a potentially deleterious fork.

The counter-evidence is the fact that fees are still only 10% of block subsidy, and they're not even in an up-trend despite FUD over things like jpegs.

There's also nearly 0 new demand for self-custody relative to adoption. This is evidence we've reached a self-custody maximum, not because it's expensive, but because Bitcoin isn't here to obviate credit.. it's a measuring stick against the Cantillon effect of central banks with added systemic optionality.

Anyone interested in self-custody has had ~15 years to decide that. Hell, even the fake maxi's on Nostr are mostly ECash simps these days. New adoption is going to off-chain governance, like ETF's and Corporate Treasuries.

Even 10s of millions in Liquid astroturf marketing can't find a meaningful userbase.

Reality is Bitcoin is NGU tech first and foremost, as much as Agorist-minded folks like myself would like to see more means of exchange.

Now, hopefully the observations supporting a self-custody maximum are misleading, and new tools (like those I'm working on for that matter) re-accelerate self-custody and make it viral as MoE... But even then Bitcoin could still onboard a billion to Lightning with existing batching tech. The knocks on Lightning today are largely downstream of the high-time-preference stupidity and wastefulness of mobile nodes. Just imagine how much more efficient Lightning will get when bozo's aren't buying unstable channels tied to one mobile device.

At the end of the day, the scale ceiling is nowhere in sight, so the conclusion we must draw is that it's a red herring being exploited by scammers with the help of of their virtue-signaling useful idiots.

17 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 3 May

Thanks for the reply.

What about this hypothetical scenario: major governments stop being adversarial to btc. Tax law changes s.t. buying coffee is no longer taxable event. Now people can use it for MoE if they wanted.

I take your comment to mean:

a) nobody really wants that, so scaling isn't an issue and won't be an issue in any conceivable near-term b) if they did start to want that, there would be a variety of signals, including upticks in self-custody and demand for blockspace

If b) happened, would you then believe that scaling shortcomings were inevitable and needed to be solved, by something like PS's proposal, or something else, and it could be handled at that time? Or are you saying that even in that case, existing infrastructure is up to the task?

In other words, I'm trying to figure out if your principal objection is timing (it's not a problem yet, it's more harm than good to pre-solve it) or something more foundational.

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 4 May

I believe in that scenario, the current state is up to the task,

Digressing, I also think that's the case now and not a hypothetical. My thesis is Bitcoin is a white-hat psyop by NSA/military intelligence to save America from the Triffin dilemma and inevitable global reserve collapse. We're just watching this op, among many others, like a movie🍿

In any event, US adoption ends in it becoming a foreign reserve backing the dollar, the US Treasury and it's foreign peers basically becoming giant ECash mints (see ECash Act)

Why is this path inevitable? Because anything else requires destroying Bitcoin as we know it. No scaling proposal can accommodate the ridiculous hypotheticals of ~8BN people using it to buy coffee self-custodially and remain Bitcoin. At best, we're talking a peg, with a weaker form of consensus.

We already have pegs without destroying the base layer, so there's no rationale to add risk to the base layer because a peg is inherently a downgrade.

Reasonable scaling improvements (optimization within current design space) are marginal by comparison so they tend to not be as exciting. They are also unquantifiable until they are actually needed- and we have the real data necessary to quantify them.

Scalooors like Paul and the CTV clowns do a disservice by taking resources away from projects that want to get us to that very achievable milestone of 1BN users.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Coinsreporter 3 May

It's a little complicated for me to understand but It's a good read.

However, it says that miners aren't paid by LN. Isn't it something that everyone already knows?

127 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 3 May

However, it says that miners aren't paid by LN. Isn't it something that everyone already knows?

It's just not true. Miners are paid for channel opens and closes. Miners aren't paid for all LN txs though because they happen offchain, so he argues LN operates against a miner's interest.