Bitcoin Optech

On the one hand I am happy to read a, at first sight, well balanced and well thought out critique of "web3"...

On the other hand: I can not escape the idea that he picked specific examples to make specific point:

- People don't want to run a server... Do they not? Or are most APPs simply not build with server capabilities? In the early days of Spotify they had a limited server capacity and everyone who streamed a song simply downloaded it from a server and peers mix, and in the background uploaded it to others peers. People were feeling just fine about 'running a server', just because they didn't even knew they did. The app hid (or abstracted) away the whole client/server question. [1]

- decentralisation doesn't work because "the blockchain" is hard to query and you need centralised APIs to do it for you. Again, a very weird and false dichotomy. Why take Ethereum as an example for "the blockchain". If I wanted to write a pro-blockain piece I would pick the Bitcoin blockchain as an example of how this CAN work. At this moment I run several apps on my iPhone which all query this blockchain for their functionality and it words just fine (and decentralised). To clarify I don't have the whole chain on my phone, it connects to random nodes (or my own if I so choose) and queries the chain via Bloom-filters [2].

- OpenSea as a example of a decentralised market place that doesn't seem to work. Again, why this example? Why not BISQ, a marketplace that is truly decentralised and…

Neither he or you have any idea where I gather information on cryptos.

You are both essentially speculating and accusing me of being ill-informed without providing a shred of evidence.

[EDIT]:
And even if you were correct, you're both attacking the messenger and not the message. That pretty much fits my definition of an ad-hominem.

I claim (I might be wrong, please provide counter-evidence) that there is more innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem than in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

As proof, I offer, however misguided these efforts might be (you can't innovate if you don't try "silly" things), sorted by more to less silly:

- cryptokitties

- NFTs

- DeFi

- scalability via layer 2 solutions

- scalability via sharding

- actually working smart contracts instead of a vague promise of their eventual feasibility based on a yet-to-be-deployed piece of infrastructure

- a concerted effort to move to PoS

- ongoing work on integrating ZK (zcash, beam, grin, monero)-type transactions.

Many of these things don't seem to have an equivalent in the Bitcoin space (except L2 scaling).

The list provided by the GP (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topic-dates/) IMO very much falls in the "polishing the turd" category: many tiny improvements that very few people care about and show the disconnect between Bitcoin development and what the market wants.

The fact is : ethereum is here, it has real smart contract, it is well on its way to have PoS, and it's slowly…

"SWIFT does not facilitate funds transfer: rather, it sends payment orders, which must be settled by correspondent accounts that the institutions have with each other."[...] While SWIFT transports financial messages in a secure manner, it does not hold accounts for its members; nor does it perform any form of clearing or settlement.[1]

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum can perform the settlement of transactions. Ethereum currently has support for complex financial transactions with Smart Contracts. A SWIFT replacement could include settlement on chain, but on-chain transactions for SWIFT type co-ordination is probably too expensive with Bitcoin and Ethereum without the use of L2 and Lightning Network support for the co-ordination feature of SWIFT.

If this were done, it would only succeed if the smart contracts are open source, formally verified and audited by a third party. While Taproot adds tapscript support[2] to bitcoin, there still remains the development of sophisticated financial products.

As a net exporter of Energy products, Russia would probably lean more towards Bitcoin or other PoW protocols, as their customers could run mining operations with the energy they are buying. This would exclude Ethereum when the PoS merge occurs.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT
[2]: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/tapscript/

The only thing that comes to mind here is that there was a fee spike [1] and they've got too many unspents stuck in the mempool and can't initiate further withdrawals because their wallet is effectively "spent" until those pending transactions complete and they receive their change. I find this a bit hard to believe though...wallet management isn't simple when it comes to the scale that Binance handles, however I'd be shocked if they didn't have code written to trigger CPFP (Child Pays For Parent) [2].

[1] https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,30d,weight

[2] https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/cpfp/

> The reality is: if you compare the speed at which and the amount of new stuff being built in and atop the ethereum ecosystem to the innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the difference is absolutely striking.

Here's a list of technical developments related to Bitcoin (including LN) grouped by month and topic as covered by a single publication over the past three years: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topic-dates/

I'd be interested in seeing a similar such list for Ethereum or any other cryptocurrency that shows a similar pace of development.

Edit: removed paragraph based on accidental misattribution.

https://bitcoinops.org/

> This week’s newsletter describes a proposal for delinked reusable addresses, summarizes how the WabiSabi protocol may be used as an enhanced alternative to payjoin, examines a discussion about adding communication standards to the DLC specification, and looks at renewed discussion about updating LN commitment formats. Also included are our regular sections with summaries of new software releases and release candidates plus descriptions of notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.