Weekly Revamp: Bitcoin Fashion Week

In case you missed it, Bitcoin Season 2 launched part of its spring/summer collection last week.

Above all, middleThe “Bitcoin economic layer” came out of hiding with a $21 million funding round. Alpen Research Institute Announced $10.6 million in funding to bootstrap Bitcoin-based zero-knowledge infrastructure.

Other blockchain designers, including Starkware employees, gathered together to L2O Consortium “Setting the standard for untrusted applications and Layer 2.”

Of course, no one knows what this means, but it is provocative. People move, capital bubbles, and industries come to life. Eight-figure seed rounds are underway and some major ventures are making a comeback. Almost every day a new layer is announced, or some “Bitcoin-based” protocol you’ve never heard of, and users announce that they’ve locked billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin into a “trustless” multi-signature protocol.

So I think we are entering a bull market. Interestingly, some of those involved will admit that it is closer to performance art than legitimate engineering. remember rick owens Weird runway show? It’s flashy, but who would wear something like this?

Keep in mind that most of the new devices proposed have not yet taken off their training wheels everywhere they have been implemented. For example, Ethereum’s rollup is still Clothed Multi-Signature. Likewise, this new Bitcoin-adjacent protocol appears to be launching content without a product or “decentralization on the roadmap.” Beneath the layers of dumb marketing and technical nonsense, it’s hard to find a much better trust model than the simple and often malicious Liquid Federation sidechain.

Forget one-way exits. Most “Layer 2” offerings today can barely meet that time frame under the lax policies we acknowledge here at Bitcoin Magazine.

To make matters worse, variants of proof-of-stake have seeped into the design space, despite Ethereum’s worst performance since the transition. Naturally, the conversation has already moved on. Ponzinomics Bootstrap the speculative flywheel. A new token device – “points” in the colloquial style – has appeared on the scene and has become very popular among the designer community. This new liquidity farming fad allows users to trade Bitcoin (and friends and family) surrender somewhere in return for you guessed it.

This time we call it gamification. I think this is the pinnacle of cryptocurrency nihilism. Fast fashion has officially arrived on Bitcoin!

The emperor has no clothes?

Speaking of catwalks and people in funny clothes, the crew at Taproot Wizards has been wreaking havoc in the high-profile Layer 2 community with their most valuable scientific project of late, BitVM.

My esteemed colleague Shinobi has put together a decent summary of the event. I won’t bother you with technical details, but of course the claims are hotly debated to this day. The fate of at least a dozen startups depends on this, so you can imagine what it would be like if they were publicly called out to the fashion police.

I partially agree with the wizard’s argument, but I should probably hold off on writing an obituary for BitVM. Overcoming liquidity issues appears to be one of the broad trade-offs that must be considered when designing a trust-minimized protocol based on Bitcoin. Lightning has been giving us inbound liquidity issues for years. Proposals like Ark’s were dismissed because they would require large UTXO operators to raise funds. Perhaps a BitVM bridge could be designed to ease operators’ initial liquidity requirements. At least this problem won’t be enough to make everyone drop everything and go home.

The unfortunate thing about this story is that everyone involved seems a bit amateurish. Despite counter argument, some due diligence was clearly omitted. This issue may have run through some more collective brain cells before it was published, and it’s safe to say that the audience all felt pretty blindsided by the announcement.

To tie it all together, the wizards just created their derivative proposal. It’s hard not to get the impression that this is a setup created for marketing purposes. But then again, adults wearing wizard hats, what do you expect?

On the other hand, this is a valid issue, and the response from “team” BitVM was not so kind. You’d expect thicker skin from researchers who’ve been around the block. Banning people from Telegram workgroups and hand-wringing over the entire premise is not in the interests of the communities they build. They may disagree with the conclusions, but the clear result is that the audience and interest in BitVM has now grown beyond the small engineering circles in which it was fostered. Many have suggested that this is probably the first time the mechanism has been communicated in an accessible way. If you feel your project has been misrepresented, you’ve missed an opportunity for supporters to leverage that attention and steer it in their own way.

This is all just a failed dress rehearsal because I don’t know how inspiring this is to anyone who is seriously interested in contributing to this space.

grand finale

Of course, no circus show is complete without a clown act.

The hottest protocol designer in town is getting ready to debut his latest line just in time for the halving this Friday. Runes, a protocol for fungible tokens, is probably the most anticipated drop since the Jordan 1. When we say, hundreds of users In preparation for the festival, we are syncing our Bitcoin nodes for the first time in our lives. Blockchain is expecting record crowds for this event, so keep in mind that tickets may be expensive.

As for myself, I’ll probably just watch from my balcony from the comfort of my safe and ever-reliable Bitcoin jeans. TikTok, Daum Block.