Bitcoin and Crypto Thread

[Cynllo]

Interesting recent Altcoin Buzz Short Video of 5 Coins to 100X:

Curious the collective wisdom here of these 5 coins? RSVP here plz.

These don't look like 100Xs.

It's hard to get correct details. I can't see if ASTR is a 1,000 TPS chain or 1 million. It has 12 seconds to finality, which is poor for a POS chain. If it's 1,000 TPS, that is the low end of last season's picks. It does have $67m TVL though, which is decent for its size.

Myro is a Solana meme coin. Solana has become a giant meme coin casino, which maybe 1,000s of them. I think the meme coin play is only worth it if you can get in on a chain's first meme coin early. A lot of people are in BASE (Coinbase's chain)'s meme coin TOSHI. It's about $50m cap now. And a lot of people are saying it will 20X. It's named after the Coinbase founder's cat. So people say it will get on Coinbase. Another is WANG on ALPH. This is on a basic airdrop now. See @ChengisWang on Twitter. Just picking up the airdrop could end up being a few $K in 18-20 months.

Kaspa has had it's big run. I don't really see it being a top 10 coin. Could get into the top 20, but I don't think it's the strongest pick of fresh L1s.

I haven't looked into Celestia. Uma is too old, IMO.

---

I've had a look through the top 20 new L1s.

These are the ones I'd go for.

Sui has just boomed to over #50 rank. It's a 300k TPS chain that can process TXs in less than half a second. That's about 10X more than Solana. Solana's finality is variable between 500ms and 3s. Sui also has a very large TVL (locked in defi platforms). Just shy of $500m. That's way ahead of any other new chain and hyper-bullish. The more people actually use them, the higher the price will go. This was the case with Solana, ETH and BSC last season. Their strong DeFi sectors led to their boom. Strength of the DeFi sector had a high correlation to market cap. Sui is massively juicing activity on their chain, far beyond other new chains. They already have over 22 DeFi platforms. I would tip this as the Solana of 2025 - a top ten coin.

Looking at a 10-20X.

Qubic is a sleeper that is off many people's radars. Yet it's already traded up to $300M cap on a few junk exchanges due to its narrative. It's at about $225m now. I doubt it will dip much below $200m. The lead dev is probably the best dev in crypto - Sergey Ivancheglo - who was (co-)founder of IOTA and NXT. Both top 50 coins in their time. He also holds 800k BTC. Qubic is the fruit of his years of pondering on blockchain tech. This has led to the giga-chain, known as QUBIC, with a competition shredding 40 million TPS with tested 0.2ms finality. What makes this even more stupendous is that Qubic is a POW chain. All the other high TPS chains a POS chains. The closest competing POW chains are KAS and ALPH at 10k. Qubic has also woven AI into it. Not looked at specifics yet.

Hard it say on the return, as it's not out of the woods yet, but the narrative is so strong and the interest in it so high that it could enter the top 10. Maybe 20-300X.

Alephium is basically the same as KAS, but with better security, and despite smaller funds, a better and quickly growing ecosystem. Very strong community. 10k TPS and 16s block time. Still lower cap.

Looking at 30-100X.

For your fresh L1 plays from here, I'd take those three. Another possibility is Tectum with 1.3m TPS and its own consensus mechanism - not POS or POW. Sui and Tectum have staking rewards of about 20%. None for Qubic and ALPH as they are POW.

I want to look at some more of the fresh coins that are already highly ranked, particularly BitTensor. Someone tells me this a top five coin. AI.

---

@chance vought - I have a similar take to one or two of your posts above. That eventually we will end up with one ecosystem that processes most applications, data, scripts, computing. Once it gets to that point whatever token it is - it will end up mildly deflationary. And it can be used to mint some sort of stable coin, with it as backing. Preferably that can be a real stable coin tied to a real CPI basket with 0% inflation. That is real money. It redistributes to no one. But I don't know if that will be BTC. These new chains - ALPH, KAS, Qubic. Is there anything technically that they miss or are weak on, that BTC is better at? I don't know the answer. But you can see clearly there are things that are better about them. The tipping point is if one chain that has adoption cannot do what it's meant to do - be a base layer for finance and apps. That happened in 2021, when BSC and Solana were able to capitalise because ETH is too slow and expensive. Right now, IMO, Bitcoin's long-term future is riding on something like Stacks. But it even looks like Stacks is too slow (for now). If it gets to the point that this space, which is at its core decentralised computing and finance, cannot grow on a dominant chain, it will quickly loose adoption. And I think the chances of that happening with BTC are relatively high. But the reality is, that even 40m TPS giga-chain Qubic is too slow. These things are ultimately going to need to handle billions or trillions of TPS at web-speed. That's a long way out, but if BTC can't have at least 10,000 TPS running on top of it by about 2030, I think that will be the point it starts to die. There's going to be a lot more development here. Too early to pick a chain that will end up dominant, and it's quite likely that chain doesn't exist yet - whether it be an L1 or an L2 on BTC.

As mentioned in an earlier post, people often make the mistake of comparing crypto to internet users by looking at BTC addresses. That's the wrong way to look at it. As internet users were using the internet. BTC wallets are mostly inactive. And many people have many addresses. I probably have about 50-70. Regular crypto users are probably in the millions. Maybe 10 million. That's about the number of internet users in 1991. Expect the big adoption boom in crypto towards 2030-.

 

[chance vought]

Very cool. Thank you for the resources.

Lightning is just the beginning of scaling. Not everyone will be able to use lightning in a sovereign way, but orders of magnitude more than on-chain transactions. Nor do they need to. Everyone has people or things that they can trust, at least somewhat. Family, friends, community group, employee group etc. So having a system that is trustless between every single person is unnecessary and too expensive. Having a system that can settle trustlessly between only parties that have low or no trust, and settle in a more trusted environment between people that do have some level of trust between them, seems to be the only path forward.

People used the banking system instead of transacting in gold, because even though there was more risk, it was orders of magnitude more efficient.

Bitcoin OGs, that have hundreds or thousands of BTC, will essentially subsidize the security for people who don’t have much. They will have the optionality of instantly moving their BTC on-chain, and thus instantly punishing bad actors. This is a feature that gold did not have. JP Morgan could not prevent the Federal Reserve from taking their gold.

 

[chance vought]

@chance vought - I have a similar take to one or two of your posts above. That eventually we will end up with one ecosystem that processes most applications, data, scripts, computing.

I don't know the advantage of having only one. Why not have many that are hyper-specialized for their specific tasks? For most computing tasks, there is AWS, IBM, etc. Most of those things don't need the immutability of Bitcoin. Nor will those services be paid for by alt-coin laundry tokens. They will be paid in BTC.

Once it gets to that point whatever token it is - it will end up mildly deflationary. And it can be used to mint some sort of stable coin, with it as backing. Preferably that can be a real stable coin tied to a real CPI basket with 0% inflation. That is real money. It redistributes to no one. But I don't know if that will be BTC.

Stable, compared to what? Why abstract an abstraction with a stable-coin? Who determines the CPI basket? Very difficult to get consensus among billions of people as to what is stable and what a CPI basket should look like. Why not just have money that never changes, while everything else changes around it? To me that is the definition of stable.

Gold was abstracted to increase transaction speed and throughput (and divisibility), but it was easy to cheat, since the vaults can't be easily or instantly or cheaply audited. Bitcoin is harder to cheat, because you can have partial ownership of a larger UTXO, even if you can't ever afford a transaction, and it can be fully audited with $100 worth of hardware and an internet connection.

These new chains - ALPH, KAS, Qubic. Is there anything technically that they miss or are weak on, that BTC is better at? I don't know the answer. But you can see clearly there are things that are better about them.

The Bitcoin Trilemma: Security - Scalability - Decentralization
Increasing one of these, decreases the other two.
-Bitcoin has peerless security. It is the most secure computer network in the world, and has more computing power devoted to it than anything on earth.
-Decentralization is good enough, such that the most populous, most powerful authoritarian state banned its use and mining 2 years ago, and now the network has more than double the hash power than it had then, as well as more decentralization as a result.
-Scalability is the biggest critique of BTC. 7 transactions per second. But in order to survive attack from the most powerful states the world has ever seen, it cannot afford to sacrifice Security and Decentralization. Those are only ever as good as the base layer.

Once the base layer is less secure, and less decentralized, it cannot then be made more secure or decentralized on the layers above. That is why you must have a foundation of bedrock. Yes, bedrock is expensive to blast and make into a flat foundation, while dirt is much easier to work with. But build a Cathedral on dirt, and it will crack and crumble eventually. Build it on bedrock, and it will last.

-Scaling needs to be done with the layers above. Build the floor out of quarried stone. Build the pews, and rafters of wood.

The tipping point is if one chain that has adoption cannot do what it's meant to do - be a base layer for finance and apps. That happened in 2021, when BSC and Solana were able to capitalise because ETH is too slow and expensive. Right now, IMO, Bitcoin's long-term future is riding on something like Stacks. But it even looks like Stacks is too slow (for now). If it gets to the point that this space, which is at its core decentralised computing and finance, cannot grow on a dominant chain, it will quickly loose adoption. And I think the chances of that happening with BTC are relatively high. But the reality is, that even 40m TPS giga-chain Qubic is too slow. These things are ultimately going to need to handle billions or trillions of TPS at web-speed. That's a long way out, but if BTC can't have at least 10,000 TPS running on top of it by about 2030, I think that will be the point it starts to die.

I'm not sure what the current throughput on Lightning Network is...it might be hundreds or thousands per second. It is hard to know because many lightning nodes run on Tor, and many channels are private - meaning they are not even broadcast to the network as a viable route, they are just for use by their owners.
Chaumian e-cash on Fedimints, as a layer 3 solution (possibly providing chargeback services in exchange for an extra fee) would provide an exponential increase on lightning's throughput, for the tradeoff of not being completely trustless, but gaining 100% privacy. Even the Fedimint, bank, whatever, can't see how much money you are sending or to who - it is blinded signatures.

https://blog.bitfinex.com/education/cashu-chaumian-e-cash-mints-over-lightning/

Necessity is the mother of invention. By the time we need scaling, there will be scaling.

 

[Cynllo]

^ Will read tomorrow.

 

[chance vought]

What is wrong with the world? Fiat. That is the one and only thing that needs to be destroyed. Bitcoin is the only thing that looks like it can destroy it.

Day trading useless tokens, monkey jpegs, and transactions per second are symptoms of the poisoning of our well by Fiat currency. They will disappear because of Bitcoin. Probably the most profound invention/discovery since fire or language. It may be more profound than writing. I see it as more of a discovery, like the number 0. It always existed, we just didn't know it existed. Without 0, there would be no calculus, no computers, no modern civilization. The catholic church tried to ban its use, but it was so powerful, people used it anyway, and more, and more, until finally it was universally adopted by humanity, because not adopting it would leave you hopelessly outclassed and unproductive compared to those who did.

This isn't a technology to replace Mastercard. This is a firmware upgrade to the human race. An end to perpetual debt slavery, and big government. A new renaissance of productivity, the likes of which we can't even imagine. Its a wooden stake in the heart of the state, banks, and the established elite. A bullet in the head of the plantation master. Yes, without the master, many slaves are going to die. But everyone else, and their descendants, will be free.

Sorry for the metaphors and hyperbole, but I see it as so profound, none of us have the language to describe what the world will be like. Maybe that is 50 years from now, maybe it is 1000. Maybe it isn't Bitcoin, but it will be something like it.

BTC is the solution to the current problem, the root of all other problems, fiat currency. Fiat ruins everything.

"You are being stolen from. Your money is being debased, your labor is being debased, your civilization and all of its institutions are being debased. You're having to work longer for less pay. You see your friends and family less and less. You eat worse food, you sleep a little less, and your neighborhood gets a little more impersonal every year. Your life is getting worse, and you are paying for someone else's excess. How did this happen, and why is it happening? Fiat Ruins Everything is an analysis of the debasement of the modern world from our banking system and real estate to our educational system and art. Learn why these systems keep getting worse and why Bitcoin will make things better."

Everything else is a solution, looking for a problem.

 

[Blade Runner]

^ Will read tomorrow.

It looks like maybe 34-36k, as we've said.

By the way, what kind of wallets do you all like? Has anyone used cold card, jade, elliptal, tangem, or ngrave?

 

[Australia Sucks]

I don't know the advantage of having only one. Why not have many that are hyper-specialized for their specific tasks? For most computing tasks, there is AWS, IBM, etc. Most of those things don't need the immutability of Bitcoin. Nor will those services be paid for by alt-coin laundry tokens. They will be paid in BTC.

Stable, compared to what? Why abstract an abstraction with a stable-coin? Who determines the CPI basket? Very difficult to get consensus among billions of people as to what is stable and what a CPI basket should look like. Why not just have money that never changes, while everything else changes around it? To me that is the definition of stable.

Gold was abstracted to increase transaction speed and throughput (and divisibility), but it was easy to cheat, since the vaults can't be easily or instantly or cheaply audited. Bitcoin is harder to cheat, because you can have partial ownership of a larger UTXO, even if you can't ever afford a transaction, and it can be fully audited with $100 worth of hardware and an internet connection.

The Bitcoin Trilemma: Security - Scalability - Decentralization
Increasing one of these, decreases the other two.
-Bitcoin has peerless security. It is the most secure computer network in the world, and has more computing power devoted to it than anything on earth.
-Decentralization is good enough, such that the most populous, most powerful authoritarian state banned its use and mining 2 years ago, and now the network has more than double the hash power than it had then, as well as more decentralization as a result.
-Scalability is the biggest critique of BTC. 7 transactions per second. But in order to survive attack from the most powerful states the world has ever seen, it cannot afford to sacrifice Security and Decentralization. Those are only ever as good as the base layer.

Once the base layer is less secure, and less decentralized, it cannot then be made more secure or decentralized on the layers above. That is why you must have a foundation of bedrock. Yes, bedrock is expensive to blast and make into a flat foundation, while dirt is much easier to work with. But build a Cathedral on dirt, and it will crack and crumble eventually. Build it on bedrock, and it will last.

-Scaling needs to be done with the layers above. Build the floor out of quarried stone. Build the pews, and rafters of wood.

I'm not sure what the current throughput on Lightning Network is...it might be hundreds or thousands per second. It is hard to know because many lightning nodes run on Tor, and many channels are private - meaning they are not even broadcast to the network as a viable route, they are just for use by their owners.
Chaumian e-cash on Fedimints, as a layer 3 solution (possibly providing chargeback services in exchange for an extra fee) would provide an exponential increase on lightning's throughput, for the tradeoff of not being completely trustless, but gaining 100% privacy. Even the Fedimint, bank, whatever, can't see how much money you are sending or to who - it is blinded signatures.

https://blog.bitfinex.com/education/cashu-chaumian-e-cash-mints-over-lightning/

Necessity is the mother of invention. By the time we need scaling, there will be scaling.

I own some Bitcoin. But back to the Bitcoin trilema there is no resolving the issue if you have layer 2 solutions or layer 3 solutions which are faster and cheaper they are less secure than Bitcoin and in many of those solutions you are simply introducing similar risks, insecurities, counter-party risks etc as you are in the fiat system. So you are kind of going around in circles in a way.

In the early days of Gold there was a dual Gold and Silver standard. Gold was used for larger transactions and for storing wealth whereas silver was more used for smaller day to day transactions. We may find something similar happens in the crypto era where the function of money will be somewhat between store of value and daily transactions with different tokens used for those purposes.

 

[Australia Sucks]

Stable, compared to what? Why abstract an abstraction with a stable-coin? Who determines the CPI basket? Very difficult to get consensus among billions of people as to what is stable and what a CPI basket should look like. Why not just have money that never changes, while everything else changes around it? To me that is the definition of stable.

Gold was abstracted to increase transaction speed and throughput (and divisibility), but it was easy to cheat, since the vaults can't be easily or instantly or cheaply audited. Bitcoin is harder to cheat, because you can have partial ownership of a larger UTXO, even if you can't ever afford a transaction, and it can be fully audited with $100 worth of hardware and an internet connection.

A stable currency is in effect deflationary if economic progress and growth continue. We all know this. If that causes a currency to become 3 - 5% more valuable each year that will not cause people to unduly hoard it. We saw that during the hard gold standard. People saved but they did not unduly hoard gold and it was still used for daily transactions. This is more of a problem in the earlier phases of Bitcoins cycle which we are still in. If its value is skyrocketing nobody wants to spend it because they will become another "Bitcoin Pizza guy". You would think this problem would disappear if Bitcoin is fully mature. But how to get to full maturity and adoption while everybody is hoarding it? Therein lies the paradox.

 

[chance vought]

I own some Bitcoin. But back to the Bitcoin trilema there is no resolving the issue if you have layer 2 solutions or layer 3 solutions which are faster and cheaper they are less secure than Bitcoin and in many of those solutions you are simply introducing similar risks, insecurities, counter-party risks etc as you are in the fiat system. So you are kind of going around in circles in a way.

But you have a choice of the level of security and trade offs. Have a whole coin, ($$millions or billions) on-chain. A few thousand sats…not on-chain. You don’t spend $100 million on a tungsten carbide vault with sentry guns to store your pocket money. People with $500, or even $5000, don’t really need the level of security an on-chain transaction provides, nor will they be able to afford it. The risks are not the same as fiat. Those that have the big money subsidize the security of small holders.

In the early days of Gold there was a dual Gold and Silver standard. Gold was used for larger transactions and for storing wealth whereas silver was more used for smaller day to day transactions. We may find something similar happens in the crypto era where the function of money will be somewhat between store of value and daily transactions with different tokens used for those purposes.

That was because gold was not very divisible. You would need a speck too small to be practical to buy bread. Bitcoin is very divisible. 100,000,000 sats, and on lightning, each sat can currently be divided by 1,000. Once a second layer was built on gold, with modern banking, silver lost its monetary premium and use case. Abstracted gold became the one money. The remaining monetary value of silver flowed into the gold system.

 

[Blade Runner]

But how to get to full maturity and adoption while everybody is hoarding it? Therein lies the paradox.

No, as it continues to outperform, and it will because of the fiat system it was created for (to solve), people will increasingly want to be part of the network because they are forced to OR they are debased even more. The deflationary money FUD is nonsense for many reasons and it's generally not understood because old people, or people who don't think very much, are simply unimaginative. It's really a simple thought experiment: the point of having money is to improve your life, so you spend it to improve your life. If anyone has paid any attention, even in fiat systems people hoard money for no good (or worse) reasons. For some reason we never hear about this though - how convenient.

 

[chance vought]

A stable currency is in effect deflationary if economic progress and growth continue. We all know this. If that causes a currency to become 3 - 5% more valuable each year that will not cause people to unduly hoard it. We saw that during the hard gold standard. People saved but they did not unduly hoard gold and it was still used for daily transactions. This is more of a problem in the earlier phases of Bitcoins cycle which we are still in. If its value is skyrocketing nobody wants to spend it because they will become another "Bitcoin Pizza guy". You would think this problem would disappear if Bitcoin is fully mature. But how to get to full maturity and adoption while everybody is hoarding it? Therein lies the paradox.

Saving is not a problem. People “hoard” something if they think the market undervalues it. People like me will not sell BTC for $40k, because I know it’s true value is higher than that. People “hoarded” gold during 6102 because they knew it was more valuable than the government price. People will spend the crap money before the good. They will preferentially accept good money and try to spend the bad. There will eventually be a price penalty if you want to pay in fiat. People with bad currencies will grudgingly accept their local fiat, but enthusiastically accept dollars today.

Store of value comes before unit of exchange or unit of account. Bitcoin can fill all those roles, and more that we haven’t thought of. But first it must accrue enough value. All other money’s that we know of, monetized before we had recorded history of the process.

Fiat money never really monetized, it was slowly untethered from gold, over 4 generations, punctuated by Britains “bank holiday” and failed war bond auction during WW1 (bonds that were fraudulently bought by the BoE with printed money), creation of the federal reserve, 2 defaults: 6102 in 1933, and the Nixon shock in 1971. It’s essentially a gold affinity scam now. A pure unbacked fiat could never be decreed from nothing…it had to first be ”backed”. Then slowly debased, just as Nero couldn’t simply mint lead coins, declare them the new money, and be able to spend them for anything. He had to replace a tiny fraction of the gold with base metals. And the next emperor, add a tiny bit more base metal, and so on.

 

[chance vought]

I guess the gold/silver equivalent of today is equities/bonds/real estate vs dollars. The poor hold the dollars, which are good for day to day transactions, but not for storing wealth. The rich have a much larger percentage in gold (equities, real estate), that are constantly accruing the value of the poor who hold dollars.

 

[chance vought]

There is no reason for a litecoin, cardano, or anything. Once you discover absolute scarcity, you can’t create it again. There won’t be “a silver to bitcoin‘s gold.” You can’t improve on absolute scarcity, because there is nothing that can be as scarce or more scarce. By definition there can never be a “fair launch” again. Once the idea of this evolved…this is our one and only shot. So far, it has survived everything, and everything makes it stronger. Yes, it can change, but only by consensus, not by decree. Anyone at any time can choose which version they want to run. It is 100% voluntary. People acting selfishly benefits Bitcoin, and benefits everyone who use it. The meme “everything is good for Bitcoin“ is amazingly true.

Once you discover the number 0, there is no rediscovering it, or improving it. You choose to use it as a tool, and benefit from it, or you choose not to use it, and don’t gain the benefits.

 

[eradicator]

These don't look like 100Xs.

Agreed. Another similar one is sei but I’m not counting it as a 100x. Msybe 20x . Another one I have on watch list is a Hello labs. They made a tv show . But the coi. Is t as bling pretty hard right now

 

[Cynllo]

I don't know the advantage of having only one. Why not have many that are hyper-specialized for their specific tasks? For most computing tasks, there is AWS, IBM, etc. Most of those things don't need the immutability of Bitcoin. Nor will those services be paid for by alt-coin laundry tokens. They will be paid in BTC.

It could be more than one, or mostly/all built into the L1. Both TON and TRIAS have built in all the computing power to the L1. That is probably more secure and robust.

There is a few things a chain needs:

- massive TPS and low finality (web-speed)
- programmable
- decentralised computing power
- secure

For Bitcoin, or anything else, it makes sense that it is the reserve asset or base asset for decentralised computing. That would give it a massive use-case and end the debate about intrinsic value.

If you don't have that, you only have the aspect of being some sort of reserve asset, because price goes up.

Being the base asset of most computing would lead to the situation where it deflates at close to the inflation to computing power - something like you mentioned.

Stable, compared to what? Why abstract an abstraction with a stable-coin? Who determines the CPI basket?

I don't know. Something like that would have to be trial and errored like everything else. But I think it has the prospect of being better than what the money changers come up with. But the basic system has been tried multiple times, using a crypto to over-collateralise a stable coin or stock or commodity. The base asset just needs to have good integrity. Not like LUNA. And something that is required to pay for most computing processes will have a lot more value that BTC's current proposition, which is pretty vague.

The Bitcoin Trilemma: Security - Scalability - Decentralization
Increasing one of these, decreases the other two.

You may be right about this. But so far I am not aware of any major chain having any issues due to not having the attributes of BTC. If you want to attack Solana, you will need $10b or more, and pretty soon after the attack, the chain will probably be hard forked. So the $10b goes to zero. Or it gets frozen from deposits by exchanges etc. Granted the chances of a 51% attack on BTC are probably 0%. As it would be impossible to assembled the necessary hardware.

But so far this security attribute has had no real-world relevance, and I can't really see it ever having any. On top of that KAS and ALPH are BTC, but with a higher TPS. Basically nothing of early LANs is still in use in the internet. There isn't any reason for early decentralised tech to stay around 20+ years in the future. Similar with computers. Early computers were the size of a warehouse, would take all night to print off a page and create huge amounts of heat. It sounds like BTC to me. Everything those computers did can now be done better, from every angle.

By the way, what kind of wallets do you all like? Has anyone used cold card, jade, elliptal, tangem, or ngrave?

I have only used SafePal and Ledger and SafePal annihilates Ledger. Worth noting is that a lot of these hardware wallets require you to use a 3rd party wallet in tandem with the hardware wallet. This is very cumbersome. With SafePal, it's all built in and is has lots of features built into it like swaps, dapps, bridging, Binance and several other exchanges. It dramatically reduces the time I spend moving coins around, swapping/exchaning, lending, DeFi etc. I plan to look at the Ngrave at some point. Also a lot of them are not air-gapped (don't need to be attached to a computer).

---

All the crypto groups I am in went pretty quiet yesterday. Pretty much everyone has remained bullish, even though it's been pretty sideways for almost two months. Bull are worn out. Even people who read this dip in the charts kept aping in. I would have limit orders placed on choice coins at around support.

---

I own some Bitcoin. But back to the Bitcoin trilema there is no resolving the issue if you have layer 2 solutions or layer 3 solutions which are faster and cheaper they are less secure than Bitcoin and in many of those solutions you are simply introducing similar risks, insecurities, counter-party risks etc as you are in the fiat system. So you are kind of going around in circles in a way.

Good point. You could attack Stacks (BTC "L2") with several hundred million right now. I guess it gives a layer of abstraction. But I think with something like POS like Solana. If it's at $1T+ cap, then it becomes impossible to attack, just as BTC is impossible to 51% attack.

I am agnostic to what wins, and don't think it necessarily exists yet. It's possible something slow like BTC could be essential. But my feeling is it doesn't make sense, and that people will be able to improve in each area. Looking at Qubic.

But how to get to full maturity and adoption while everybody is hoarding it? Therein lies the paradox.

It's the base asset for decentralised applications. Still a very early space. And most of what are called dApps now, are all only partially decentralised. The most logical way to do this is issue a stable coin, over-collateralised with the base asset. Eventually, if there is mass adoption, they would end up with a similar value.

 

[Australia Sucks]

But you have a choice of the level of security and trade offs. Have a whole coin, ($$millions or billions) on-chain. A few thousand sats…not on-chain. You don’t spend $100 million on a tungsten carbide vault with sentry guns to store your pocket money. People with $500, or even $5000, don’t really need the level of security an on-chain transaction provides, nor will they be able to afford it. The risks are not the same as fiat. Those that have the big money subsidize the security of small holders.

That was because gold was not very divisible. You would need a speck too small to be practical to buy bread. Bitcoin is very divisible. 100,000,000 sats, and on lightning, each sat can currently be divided by 1,000. Once a second layer was built on gold, with modern banking, silver lost its monetary premium and use case. Abstracted gold became the one money. The remaining monetary value of silver flowed into the gold system.

Bitcoin is highly divisible but the slow speed and high transaction costs prohibit it from being cost effective and convenient for small transactions without using some type of layer 2 or layer 3 solution. The question is when Bitcoin is being used on a layer 2 or layer 3, etc for small transactions is it really superior to that purpose than just using some other crypto currency? I think its too early for that question to be answered.

Also I think Silver lost its monetary status because of Greshams law which occcured because of price fixing where France fixed the ratio of gold to silver. Any time you peg one currency to another you create market distortions. And that eventually spiralled into silver getting demonetized. I don't want to talk too much about that though as its going off on a tangent.

On the IMF website there is an article talking about this:

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications...ld-silver-monetary-stability-johannes-wiegand

Although as we all know anything written by the IMF has an agenda and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

[Cynllo]

Qubic is sitting on support at $190m cap.



I would buy in and add more if it breaks this support.

https://tradeogre.com/exchange/USDT-QUBIC

 

[chance vought]

You may be right about this. But so far I am not aware of any major chain having any issues due to not having the attributes of BTC. If you want to attack Solana, you will need $10b or more, and pretty soon after the attack, the chain will probably be hard forked. So the $10b goes to zero. Or it gets frozen from deposits by exchanges etc. Granted the chances of a 51% attack on BTC are probably 0%. As it would be impossible to assembled the necessary hardware.

If you want to attack Solana, you don't need hardware or electricity. You just need to round up the few dozen people that run it. Like XRP, you just need to sue them in Federal court. Or capture them with regulations. When you have thousands of miners and node runners around the world, that is impossible. Bitcoin is run by the users, and owned by no-one. Solana is not. ETH is not. There is no "Bitcoin Foundation" or board of directors to attack. It is no-one.

But so far this security attribute has had no real-world relevance, and I can't really see it ever having any.

As people discover that it is the only private property that cannot be confiscated by any means, via guns or inflation, the price of Bitcoin is shows that people think that there is a use case for that.

On top of that KAS and ALPH are BTC, but with a higher TPS. Basically nothing of early LANs is still in use in the internet. There isn't any reason for early decentralised tech to stay around 20+ years in the future. Similar with computers. Early computers were the size of a warehouse, would take all night to print off a page and create huge amounts of heat. It sounds like BTC to me. Everything those computers did can now be done better, from every angle.

The number 0 was first discovered 1,000 years ago, but we still use it, and even more amazing things, double entry accounting, calculus, computers, and cryptography were all built on that as time went on. We didn't discard the number 0 because something better was discovered. It just is. Bitcoin is not a computer program, network, startup tech company....its not the MySpace of digital money, to be replaced by something better, later.

None of us, in our lifetimes, have experienced a 0 to 1 innovation. The 20th century, the century of fiat, never had a real breakthrough. We had only improvements on existing technology. Someone from 1900 would recognize most of our world. Someone from 1800 would not recognize the world in 1900. Much of the world, up to 1908, did not believe powered flight was possible, even though the Wright brothers had been doing it for 5 years, and there were plenty of reporting of it. Not until they travelled to Europe, rebuilt the flyer after customs damaged it, and demonstrated it to the crowds in Paris. Humanity had been trying to fly around like birds since before we had writing, probably, and people simply would not believe it unless they saw it with their own eyes.

Bitcoin is the same. It is new. It is not just an improvement on existing technology. It is a new thing - unconfiscatable, immutable, and perfectly scarce...that there is nothing to compare it to, there is no previous experience or technology that we can draw upon to explain what it is and what it means. Like the number 0. You cannot just make a better number 0...

The very nature of Bitcoin means it can't happen again. It makes no sense to make something new - why not just improve Bitcoin? And that is exactly what is happening. People are free to choose, and they will choose Bitcoin, as they have, for the last 14 years. Now that there is a global communications system that the world relies on, are we now going to ditch TCP/IP and go to a new protocol? No...maybe tweak it here and there, but abandoning Bitcoin gives up all of the Quadrillions of hashes since 2010 that now secure the asset. You abandon the 400 billion kWh of electricity that is the nearly impenetrable electronic vault of Bitcoin. Abandon the only fair launch that can ever be in history of a perfectly scarce asset...the current and future users will not choose to do that, because they are selfish. The best thing for all selfish actors is to use Bitcoin, and that is what will continue to happen.

I have only used SafePal and Ledger and SafePal annihilates Ledger. Worth noting is that a lot of these hardware wallets require you to use a 3rd party wallet in tandem with the hardware wallet. This is very cumbersome. With SafePal, it's all built in and is has lots of features built into it like swaps, dapps, bridging, Binance and several other exchanges. It dramatically reduces the time I spend moving coins around, swapping/exchaning, lending, DeFi etc. I plan to look at the Ngrave at some point. Also a lot of them are not air-gapped (don't need to be attached to a computer).

Coldcard is really the gold standard of hardware wallets. Simple as you want it to be, but also extremely feature rich. For everyday spending I just use lightning off my own node or with phone wallet. Tapsigner with Nunchuck if you literally use BTC every day, which I don't, so I don't have one, can't comment on those. Coldcard is awesome though.

 

[chance vought]

Another use for your sats...

https://home.plebai.com/

PlebAI​

Silicon valley elites are pouring billions of dollars in building closed AI systems that can ingest all of our data. Then scare politicians into creating regulations that install them as overlords. They will not win in that game because of millions of Plebs like us band together, build in public (#buildinpublic), democratize AI access for all and beat them in their own game.

We call this movement PlebAI.

AI Chat

Features​

• No email or signups required
• No credit card or up front payment required
• No Ads or trackers
• Chat history only stored on the browser
• Using only open source LLMs (Llama2, Mistral, Stable-diffusion 1.5)
• Pay with SATS to continue conversation
• 100+ Powerful and automous agents that can works for you
• Create your own agent and make it private or public

 

[chance vought]

Bitcoin is highly divisible but the slow speed and high transaction costs prohibit it from being cost effective and convenient for small transactions without using some type of layer 2 or layer 3 solution. The question is when Bitcoin is being used on a layer 2 or layer 3, etc for small transactions is it really superior to that purpose than just using some other crypto currency? I think its too early for that question to be answered.

Yes. The user has a choice of which layer to use. Why do you need the most secure computer network in the world to transact for a $50 steak? You don't. But you have to choice to use it if you are willing to pay for it. You can't have perfect security for free. If there isn't a cost, then there is no security.

Also I think Silver lost its monetary status because of Greshams law which occcured because of price fixing where France fixed the ratio of gold to silver. Any time you peg one currency to another you create market distortions. And that eventually spiralled into silver getting demonetized. I don't want to talk too much about that though as its going off on a tangent.

Its not a tangent. The key to understanding Bitcoin, is understanding what money is, how it came to be, and how it works. 4 years ago, I did not understand money. "...its what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Silver was always inferior to gold, as money, why? Because its stock to flow ratio was lower. It is easier to produce, and increase production, relative to the above ground supply. Gold, on a global scale, had the highest stock to flow ratio, even as technology improved. Modern banking solved gold's divisibility problem, the only reason for silver to be used. In the face of rapidly improving technology, it was the only thing we couldn't produce exponentially more of, because gold is indestructible. By the time we could use chemical processes, giant machines, and dynamite to mine it, humans had been accumulating, and never destroying gold, since the last ice age. The inflation rate never got above 2%. It was the hardest money on earth, and those who didn't join the gold network, became impoverished, had their resources taken by those with hard money. Africans sold each other into slavery for a penny's worth of glass beads. Asian and east African's real wealth extracted for a pennies worth of cowrie shells. More recently, in the 19th century, the Chinese on a silver standard, were impoverished by European powers on a gold standard. A little bit of gold could be spent to rapidly increase silver production, and inflate the Chinese out of their real goods.

Hard money wins against soft money, and will impoverish those who use softer money. Bitcoin is the hardest money there is. It's stock to flow ratio trends to infinity. 21 million divided by 0.

On the IMF website there is an article talking about this:

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications...ld-silver-monetary-stability-johannes-wiegand

Although as we all know anything written by the IMF has an agenda and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Truer words were never spoken.