#[0] re: #[1]

New thread to avoid spamming others. Preface: don't buy shitcoins.

How does Rootstock fit into this? Is it 'true' Bitcoin? I like Rootstock for what it attempts to do without a shitcoin. But I dislike it for the tradeoffs therein -- being based entirely on a federated peg that uses obscure signing hardware to channel network fees directly to the founders and their friends; it being a full-bore sidechain that does not validate on or fork with Bitcoin; its use of the EVM which I think is crap in general.

I dislike Stacks for its use of an ICO shitcoin and have been vocal about that with their community. I dislike it for its (currently) centralized nature, with too few nodes and miners driving the network, and still relying on the foundation to pay for developers to build out the protocol and the ecosystem. Incentive alignments are all over the place. Despite this I am willing to dabble and entertain some of their ideas if they are 'good enough' ideas with a chance of working, even if a shitcoin is involved on some level.

One of those ideas is this. Hypothetically, suppose that the Stacks protocol had a trust-minimized two-way Bitcoin peg, using taproot contracts operated at the protocol level, with the desirable property of open membership for operators as opposed to a closed federation. Now suppose that you could then use that pegged BTC *as the gas token* to make payments and use smart contracts, without ever interacting with the STX shitcoin. Then the Stacks protocol would be *at least* as much 'true' Bitcoin as Rootstock; arguably more so.