Another day, another Bitcoin Maxi throwing around the "shitcoiner" term. The hilarity this time stems from attempting to help him diagnose his failures on Lightning and why he was LOSING SATS.
I know there are things I don't know and many smart people working on brilliant ideas.
To have the intellectual conceit to write off the collective work of thousands of smart people without studying it just reveals a serious character flaw.
I have come to see no matter how smart some of these Bitcoin maxi people appear to be, they'll always intellectually cripple themselves with a blindness to new ideas.
Bitcoin has been built
Aside from the sound money supply and 21m cap of Bitcoin, Satoshi built in an even more valuable part to Bitcoin which is often overlooked by toxic Bitcoin maximalists:
The economic incentive to run miners: the data storage and processors of the system.
There is almost ZERO in-built economic incentive to do anything else within Bitcoin. You can run a validating node, as I do, which stores the whole chain and verifies new transactions conform to the rules, but you only do this if you want to contribute to Bitcoin or are mildly paranoid about financial privacy. Bitcoin's core protocol gives you no reward no matter how many messages you forward or how much data you store.
Bitcoin's core data is currently taking up 498 Gig or half of my 1TB SSD. I store and process this on a Raspberry Pi and Bitcoin the protocol gives me nothing though the hardware requirements are clearly cheap.
But for Bitcoin Miners, value for value is baked in and they can make money if they invest a huge amount of depreciating capital for equipment and pay very large ongoing energy costs.
Who paid for Bitcoin to be built?
The Bitcoin network and economy was built with very rapid inflation of the money supply and good luck. The good fortune was some of the earliest Bitcoin developers got wildly rich before Bitcoin was taken seriously by too many people.
Bitcoin is a sound money replacement for our broken banking systems. But it doesn't replace all the current functions of banks.
Bitcoin as a base layer is slow and lacks so many things we would need to replace all the rest of today's centralized web horror show.
We can build identity and reputation, limited storage, shared global state and all these good things but not directly on Bitcoin's base layer. Bitcoin's features are set and largely frozen and the tailing off of any inflation helps stop it from changing.
Blockchains are crap databases. But they are the only databases which millions of people can use simultaneously without trusting any single individual, government or corporate entity.
When done right they can also help come up with internal incentives to both stay honest and to reward the hardware AND software people who keep the system ticking. My honest belief is Hive has got this right and very few others have but I won't write anything else off until I've studied it.
Bitcoin rewarded the software guys through luck and vast inflation. Only because Bitcoin actually caught on, early software creators got rewarded even when most didn't work on it for the rewards.
Today there is no reward for software or any development in Bitcoin. All Bitcoin dev is paid for outside the protocol.
Some of this is charity from early players who became fabulously wealth with the early inflation but most is speculative development to try to capture future growth.
This is why Bitcoin's most prominent scaling attempt, the Lightning Network, is suckling at the teat of Silicon Valley VCs.
They know core Bitcoin is never going to change at the protocol layer to reward anything other than mining, so that layer is ignored.
But it also means there are a multitude of things which Bitcoin will never help you do.
It's all about incentives, stupid
The part of today's Bitcoin network which the worst of the toxic maxis seem to forget is where are the incentives coming from. It's the old adage of "follow the money".
This is my underlying philosophy of evaluating what to work on and what to back with my time and sometimes cash.
There really are a ton of shit coins, that is for sure. I always look at pre-mines: who holds them and how can they abused in the future (toxic maxis always overlook the Satoshi Stack and assume it won't move). I look for who or what is ultimately paying for development. Are they spending more on marketing and tweets or coding? For me, very few projects survive close scrutiny but obviously one that did and still does is Hive.
If I look at who is paying for Lightning development today I see the worst of Silicon Valley are all over it. That's a huge warning sign to me. I don't trust these guys at all.
But fortunately they are (for once) working on a largely open protocol with largely open source software. Hurray, we can take or fork whatever good tech we want. All the work they do to make small Lightning payments acceptable across the world, immediately mean we on Hive can use the infrastructure they built. Thanks. I'm seriously concerned how the Lightning Network could be captured by data selling centralised routing nodes but this is just something I watch for now. There is pressure to keep privacy within Lightning but whether this can survive the onslaught of VC money and US regulation is an open question.
I'll just carry on building great things on Hive and interfacing with the best stuff which VCs pay for. But of course, I'll only do it in a way which means WE control our own technical destiny.
Thank you
And a short note about my @v4vapp SPK Node and Encoder node. Many of you have delegated your Larynx to me, I'm the third most highly delegated to node (by number of delegators) so a huge thanks for these delegations.
I don't think @spknetwork has adequately explained yet the unbelievable power of what they're building and the amazing way that building on top of Hive keeps it incorruptible. Just be aware that any small action you take, like harvesting a seemingly irrelevant amount of Larynx and then delegating it to me or any of the other REAL PEOPLE with REAL REPUTATIONS who you know on Hive, will make a huge difference.
But maybe, because they're not asking for an ICO or investment or any of the other warning flags, they don't need to shout about it right now and the decentralisation that comes from just existing on the Hive eco system is good enough.
You can delegate Larynx on Dlux's site to @v4vapp and earn SPK tokens. In fact delegating is the ONLY way to earn these right now (other than running hardware like I do). I take this seriously, we're not doing much right now but the way the system is designed to reward and incentivise storage, encoding and sharing of video and other data is what is completely missing from today's web.
We will build the future and we'll do it before most people notice and once it's too big to stop they'll all wonder how we did this in plain sight.
Background to the Tweet
Fiatjaf is one of the most prolific developers in the Bitcoin Lightning world and currently hard at work building a new communication protocol called Nostr which looks to me like it will do 1% of what Hive does today but without any thought of how to incentivise the running of hardware for his system or security and storage of data beyond "hey we'll use Lightning".
It appears he hasn't managed to set up his own Lightning Node correctly to receive payments! I haven't seen this failure before. These payment on Lightning don't get stored and sent later, they just never happen and the sender will never try to send them again.
Last week he appeared on a popular Lightning focused podcast, The Kevin Rooke Show and part of that appearance is he got "put in the split" of the episode. That's his Lightning Node public key directly in the split for the episode. Which means when someone listens to the show on any of the Lightning enabled Podcast Apps (I wrote about those apps here) listeners can send small minute by minute payments (streaming sats) or larger payments with a message (boostograms).
Fiatjaf has criticised the whole idea of value 4 value because he disagrees with the foundational idea of letting each audience member decide how much value they have received and want to return. This doesn't sit well with economic theories which presume all people are 100% rational and will never pay for things the aren't forced to pay for.
It turns out, and charity relies on this, if you give people something they really do value, and then ask them to pay for it, often times they will pay. This is the foundation of Value 4 Value.
BTW this system is enabled for ALL videos uploaded to 3speak! Every user has a channel which is also a video podcast. Go here to Curiocaster and search for 3speak and the name of your favorite Hive creator. Except in this case all sats get converted to Hive and you don't have to think about anything or worry that your Lightning Node will not accept payments.
Because Kevin, the host of the show, put Fiatjaf in the split, 49% of the value of the payments on that episode and the messages go to Fiatjaf.
But Fiatjaf complained on twitter he wasn't getting his sats! He could see the payment attempts happening but for reasons I've never experienced, the payments weren't completing. Skip this if logs make your eyes glaze over but for reference, when I get this type of payment on behalf of anyone on 3speak I see this happen:
2022-08-28 06:27:19,980 INFO lnd_scanner 285 : Payment blocks: 1
2022-08-28 06:27:19,980 INFO lnd_scanner 289 : dbroze | dbroze 3Speak Podcast | The True Story of Mormon President Gordon B. Hinckley | 1 | 10 | 0:00:06.961000 | 10
2022-08-28 06:27:19,980 INFO lnd_scanner 308 : Waiting for 56s
2022-08-28 06:28:11,738 INFO lnd_scanner 189 : New invoice received: Value: 10 | add_index: 4966 | Settled: False | settle_index: 0 | zKD4rw1Ud50RuLM8zbySGpKdjEwKcXmv+6HFka/ah34= | | No broadcast: False | Timer: 172.871697
2022-08-28 06:28:11,738 INFO lnd_scanner 213 : Invoice has no htlcs: 4966 | Wait for next alert with htlcs: zKD4rw1Ud50RuLM8zbySGpKdjEwKcXmv+6HFka/ah34= | Timer: 172.871961
2022-08-28 06:28:11,739 INFO lnd_scanner 189 : New invoice received: Value: 10 | add_index: 4966 | Settled: True | settle_index: 3506 | zKD4rw1Ud50RuLM8zbySGpKdjEwKcXmv+6HFka/ah34= | | No broadcast: False | Timer: 172.872593
The important bit is this:
2022-08-28 06:28:11,738 New invoice received: Value: 10 | Settled: False | Timer: 172.871697
2022-08-28 06:28:11,738 Invoice has no htlcs: 4966 | Timer: 172.871961
2022-08-28 06:28:11,739 New invoice received: Value: 10 | Settled: True | Timer: 172.872593
My system first registers a payment looking to come in and then settles the payment and this happens in 0.9 milliseconds!
Unfortunately this isn't working for Fiatjaf:
So I sent him a couple of small payments to see what happens at my end and sure enough, his node refuses to take my money!
This is my own internal private system which lets me pretend to be a podcast player and send any data I like as if it was a streaming payment:
<sarcasm>
Lightning is wonderfully expressive with error messages and always tells you detailed information about why something fails hence the reply my node got: "payment_error":"error".
</sarcasm>
Side note.. as I type this I'm seeing 10 sats per minute arrive steadily for the @dbroze 3Speak Podcast. He'll get his sats as HBD in a few minutes when I've batched them up.
So merely trying to do some debug help for this guy was enough to elicit from him the "shitcoiner" language.
And this is why the Bitcoin Lightning space is often so toxic but also so fun to poke a stick into.
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