Weekly Revamp: It’s Different This Time

my friend harry sudoc I made a bet with Danny Knowles Bitcoin became famous for its prediction that it would receive a 50 BTC block reward in this new era. Leave one or two aside fat fingersThe last time this happened was over 4000 days ago.

Late last Friday night, his bet almost reached the first halving block of 40.751 BTC.

Ironically, it was during this era that the miners achieved great victories. 100 million dollars Total revenue for the day was nearly five times the previous all-time high.

Dates before and after the halving visualized as block fee rates. https://t.co/FP3PfGHAiB pic.twitter.com/xcS22GPw79

— Soft Simon (@softsimon_) April 21, 2024

Beyond the numbers, the feeling was different this time. Halvings are usually a reminder of Bitcoin’s reliability, but this year’s events were anything but predictable. Important narratives from on-chain and off-chain converged, culminating in an unprecedented climax. I wasn’t present for the first halving, but the previous two events seemed insignificant. Somehow Block 840,000 felt like the beginning of a new era.

Culturally, Bitcoin appears to be approaching escape velocity. Even four years ago, it would have been difficult to find a Bitcoin user who didn’t rally under the maximalist banner. Following a bloc war and a brutal bear market, orthodoxy reigned supreme.

The landscape is unrecognizable today. Piety was openly ridiculed and most of the high priests were exiled. Apostasy is a trend. We broke the mold of isolation. Everyone is a Bitcoin user.

money for enemies

Of course, with the collapse of dominant cultural institutions, savage It’s in front of the door. The sacred blockchain is being plundered and no Bitcoin node is safe. Even to use another analogy, it is a true Berlin Wall moment. Speculative mercenaries are coming over and looking for a pretty comfortable place to be. Ordinal, BRC20, rune. that dough The world and we all live in it.

As expected, this undermining of Bitcoin’s sanctity does not sit well with the old guard. They were busy condemning these actions and insisting that heretics must act decisively. filtered Ostracized. “Bitcoin should not be associated with fraud.” They seem to have little regard for the unauthorized ideals of the system while ignoring the Bible. Sinners must repent or burn in hell. Their culture must win so that Bitcoin does not fail.

Not since Silk Road has a Bitcoin use case been so widely debated. I know it’s sacrilegious, but it’s not surprising. The free market has a way of exposing the hypocrisy of even its most ardent advocates.

I agree with the idea that this rampant assumption is damaging to most participants. Fiat has completely ruined the financial incentives for regular people, so gambling is now seen as EV+. Memecoin is the lottery of Generation Z and Bitcoin Memecoin is the new meta.

If you’ve dedicated your life to freeing up your money to distance yourself and your loved ones from this exact behavior, it’s pretty depressing to see it rear its ugly head in your realm. In fact, those who seek to create value should hate nothing more than to see others flush value down the drain. Bitcoin, on the other hand, makes no such moral or ethical judgments. Salvation is not promised or expected from those who accept it. It’s for the best and worst for all of us.

scaling fumble

The halving also brought attention to Bitcoin’s awkward technical state. Bitcoin was virtually unusable as a payment method over the weekend, unless you were a privileged few with existing Lightning liquidity. Can you imagine the dunk fest on Twitter when LN nodes were proposed? Disable routing To avoid costly forced closures.

I don’t think there is an easy way out of this predicament. Of course, we can bury our heads in the sand and pretend that our current activities are unsustainable. we can circle fool About UTXO and channel management.

Another option is Meet users where they are. Let go of your ideological arrogance and acknowledge that in order to build a global and trusted payment system, you can tolerate certain compromises where they are not necessary. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but trust-based alternatives are viable and, for all intents and purposes, probably superior to the approaches currently required by “untrusted” alternatives.

This is why I choose to remain optimistic about the path ahead. that much development If you ask me, the area around ecash mints is awe-inspiring. This allows us to leverage Lightning’s strengths while solving the last mile issues that have plagued it. This opens up a world of possibilities for construction companies to improve their existing management solutions and break out of the silos they currently operate in.

In the meantime, we can continue with more ambitious research. proposal Attempts to reduce or eliminate trust assumptions. Bitcoin’s properties should not be easily sacrificed for mass adoption. That said, the devil is in the details, and complexity often comes at the expense of user experience. Not all payments are equal and probably should not bear the cost of on-chain censorship resistance.

This is not a Bitcoin Renaissance, at least from a technical perspective. It’s almost a case of everything old becoming new again.

From Satoshi dice to Magic Eden.

From opponents to runes.

From Digicash to Fedimints.

We’ve seen this story before, but this time it’s different.

This time we have to pay for our success and the arrogance that comes with it.

We can’t be cute anymore. We’ll have to do better this time.