dear maxipads,
the alts are going to be especially vulnerable this year. take the drivechains and use it to slaughter them
goatmeal
I had a closer look at bip110 and thought about it for longer. We can imagine what it would actually do if it got activated and think about the motivations, or we can be more realistic and view it as nothing more than discourse warfare.
It looks like it is trying to surgically disable anything that represents a competitive threat to the centralized lightning company ecosystem. The main competition right now is bitvm-based solutions including merge-mined sidechains and rollup chains. I think these solutions are not perfect but they are not as bad as lightning, for reasons I have discussed before. Lightning doesn't scale without help from many centralized lightning middleman companies. It is fertile ground for this kind of business model. Users can instead rely on the miner-controlled sidechain idea and get more of their security from miners. Bitvm in its current state does not complete the miner-controlled sidechain idea, but there is a risk that further developments can narrow the gap and make alternatives look more appealing. Even in its current state it represents the only reasonable alternative totally outside of the lightning ecosystem. The competitive threat must be neutralized in order to protect centralized lightning companies.
We have simpler examples of centralized lightning companies. The original Wallet of Satoshi and apps like Strike are still being used as custodial lightning wallets. Then we have the unholy combination of Liquid and Boltz representing a fake sidechain paired with a centralized lightning bridging service. These would all be unharmed. Newer "fancy" entrants such as Spark and Arkade improve on the Liquid/Boltz idea by parking your money in a centralized L2 statechain outfitted with an expensive escape hatch. They still have a centralized operator dispatching lightning payments on the user's behalf.
Spark and Arkade rely heavily on taproot not just for basic statechain functionality but also features that more closely resemble defi. I think that bip110 could gimp taproot enough to disable these features. Spark and Arkade would be reduced to parking spaces next to centralized lightning rails. This benefits any custodian offering tightly controlled bitcoin-flavored tradfi, such as Strike and eventually more banks. Monetary activities beyond the scope of simple bitcoin payments will be handled the old fashioned way by custodians.
I do not think bip110 will activate. The miner's job is to maximize fee revenue. Most miners want to continue getting revenue from merge-mined sidechains and rollup chains reliant on bitvm, witness stuffing, and even large OP_RETURN. They care less if a tapscript makes Luke Dashjr cry than if it pays a competitive fee. The bip doesn't make any sense in the reality of miner economics. I do not think bip110 is intended to activate either. The low activation threshold alone will tell you that. It's completely obvious that this is just a narrative play.
Proponents of bip110 are trying to redefine what counts as legitimate use of bitcoin, and it just so happens to fit tightly inside the lightning monopoly. At scale, wealthy people will be permitted to do simple bitcoin transations or maintain lightning channels. The poors will do only the most basic payments via centralized government-compliant lightning companies which may or may not let you unilaterally exit to a congested L1 and get eaten alive by fees. Some people will use unregistered cashu mints that don't make Lightspark's whitelist, until they either get rugged by the operator or their coins get transferred to Uncle Sam's strategic reserve. Lending, trading, and other monetary uses will happen inside 100% custodial walled gardens. Despite all this there will still be art NFTs, which they don't actually care about.
The bip110/knots people can assuage some of these doubts by acting like they actually want to improve bitcoin as money instead of just demolishing everything that isn't purposed to enshrine the disappointing lightning status quo. They can start by recommending suitable bitvm replacements such as bip300/bip301. They could advocate for features that improve privacy or monetary use cases such as CISA or CTV. They need to stop mischaracterizing legitimate smart contract use cases as non-monetary by dishonestly conflating everything with art NFTs and memecoins. I want to see them stop terrorizing the only people in the bitcoin ecosystem who understand ZK proofs. They are not doing any of this, and is unreasonable to let them throw the brakes on everything and give them a year to stall and pretend to care. I don't think they care about any of these things at all.
luke is abusing the current narrative in an attempt to grab power. he wants to replace core with himself. then you will be stuck with the status quo of centralized L2s and no new opcodes ever again, plus confiscations and the abolition of censorship resistance. god told him to do it.
the same clueless people who missed their chance to fire core in 2017 are now scrambling to replace him with crazy luke, and none of these people even know what the word "sovereign" means
"only use mints you trust" - a completely retarded and meaningless statement that applies to absolutely nobody
bitcoin before lightning shit the place up: "don't trust, verify"
bitcoin after lightning shit the place up: "only use mints you trust"
I want all the speculators and perpetual optimists to get their shit pushed in. they deserve it for being dumb and annoying.
I want miners to keep bleeding until they become interested in consensus changes that increase fee revenue.
I want all the people who keep bikeshedding these consensus changes to lose all their credibility or ragequit.