Muneeb and crew know exactly how to affinity scam bitcoin.

Ego death capital 😹💟

They must not know about zaps

In a post-segwit world they chose to mint tokens instead of writing software 😤

Affinity scammers, wouldn't waste time with them

Really nothing to ask, you said it all.

They’re just recreating the shitcoin casino through Bitcoin affinity scams.

Whatever they do on BTC can be done anywhere, not interesting.

Finance on a volatile thing is pretty much a casino

This whole push for Stacks recently, feels like a "me too" riding in the back of Ordinals popularity. They throw flowers at BTC in general and then push the narrative that, it lacks x or y that (no wonder) Stacks brings to the table.

I think that most important point is, that they approach the general topic with a mindset, which is underset by fiat principles. To overcome this is, is/was even hard for a BTC maximalist.

And second i always feel that to fully understand Bitcoin, you have to be a generalist, not just a specialist in one topic. You need to understand physics, economics, philosophy, history and so much more. The further a specialist is in his own rabbit hole, the harder it gets to get him to see the topic from various other different angles. Open minds and less ego are mandatory.

Don't have a general solution for this problems, but i think it is always good to have these human mechanics in mind when discussing with people about BTC.

Spent weeks studying the Stacks code base.

I wouldn’t put any money in there.

Tbf that’s not different from most projects I study — I hunt and report bugs for a living so I tend to focus on things that I think have issues or are broken.

On the other hand there’s basically no money in hunting bugs in most Bitcoin projects — yet there are few hacks or serious vulnerabilities. I spent a long time on the Bitcoin Core code base and a some early LN code few years ago and I’m still betting on these.

I have a sincere question related to the economics of Stacks:

Proof of transfer is a neat idea for transferring Bitcoin to a sidechain that is not federated, and also not burning it. In order to mint STX, the miners must transfer bitcoin to some kind of contract in exchange for the opportunity to mint STX. This is clever, but it means that miners effectively have to sell BTC to get STX.

They try to balance this out by letting stakers (or stackers as they call it) stake STX in exchange for a share of the transferred BTC. Again, this seems fairly clever and demand-neutral for Bitcoin.

This brings me to my question: In order to actually use STX for gas, you need to not be staking, which means that in order to use Stacks as intended, the whole system must effectively be overall demand-negative for Bitcoin. How can this incentive model actually good for Bitcoin?

Ask him if Stacks has zaps

While the stacks ecosystem is surely an interesting topic, Id like to dig into the mining mechanism he calls proof of transfer. To me the ecosystem is secondary to the creation of the blockchain, and the “mining”’of said blockchain seems suspiciously similar to a proof of stake methodology.

What is called “proof of transfer” “miners” bid on the next stacks block by with bitcoin, and the more bitcoin you bid increases the likelihood you win the block.This bitcoin is then distributed to “stackers” who have locked up their stx for the benefits of those “rewards”. The “miner” is rewarded with a block reward of stx tokens. The white paper describes stacks as a “virtual blockchain” working in tandem with bitcoin and using OP_Return to anchor each block to bitcoin.

While an interesting and very confusing to the layperson concept, In practice this seems to just simply be people buying stacks tokens with bitcoin.

In particular, I’d like to ask how much bitcoin in aggregate has been spent creating the “virtual blockchain” that is stacks, how much bitcoin has been distributed to “stackers.” what percentage of stackers are core developers, how much of the bitcoin has gone directly into core developers pockets, what is the purpose of the stx token if bitcoin is being used to mine it, why can’t the clarity smart contract language be incentivized using satoshis?

It seems like Muneeb is ignoring or not paying attention to the use cases for 3rd world countries. Instead he is focusing on 1st world problems. Nothing wrong with that but that does leave out a major bucket.

For me bitcoin/lightning development can be split in two major buckets (1) Solving for 1st world problems vs (2) 3rd world problems

The 3rd world problems can then be split into two major buckets which you described

on a podcast.

Bitcoin/lightning adoption should be focused (1) Energy access or (2) Bank access

A lot of the projects you mention focus on 3rd world problems

Stacks is a steaming pile of 💩

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🚨🚨🚨 huge scammer alert. Stay far away from this person.

I dont think his intentions are genuine. Ask him why STX token is necessary and if this is distracts from the main Bitcoin use case and philosophy.

Absolute scam. If you haven’t read this thread, please do— https://twitter.com/coryklippsten/status/1587186802145861633

With all the BTC development happening over the last few years, honestly it's been surprising how little it has impacted BTC.

A. That's a testament to how far along BTC already was, but also

B. As we see by Ordinals/inscriptions, there are other use-cases which require very little actual development, just the right set of people coming to it.

Most of the devs in the STX space are probably chasing the same defi stuff the rest of the smart contact platforms are, for bet or worse. It don't excite me either.

One thing that makes them stand out is the code is readable, not compiled and not Turing complete, important to us who still contend Turing complete and Blockchain don't mix.

I liked the idea of Namecoin, and am a fan of some aspects of Handshake. I'd love to be able to link a handshake TLD to a STX contract to offer decentralized SLD's off of. I wish these things coulda launched without a coin. The coin is always the worst part of good alts. A part of me still believes the good platforms will be swallowed up by BTC and the coins will become nothing. In the meantime, there is interesting tech out there w some projects and that's with celebrating.

I would ask him why / how Stacks will attract the best devs over Bitcoin/Lightning?

Muneeb reminds me of Charles from Cardano. They want to rule, not abide by rules. I guess too late for them to pivot and focus on what matters…

Notice how none of these guys promote NOSTR? Could have anything to do with the fact that there’s no 💩 coin to pump and no cross financial play (NFT) to co opt?

In my humble opinion muneeb is a truly genious and I will love to meet him one day. The best way to make a great ecosystem is thru enhance more opportunities for devs to build all amazing shit that we love and have crazy ideas like stacks foundation for sure will empower bitcoin ecosystem

I thought the focus of stacks was block solve distribution while maintaining PoW?

Spot on, Lyn. The key barrier to universal BTC adoption is the lack of technology for "non-freak" self-custody that is inheritance friendly. There is great technology for the tech-savvy but the masses require something far simpler.

The development in this area is far more important than anything else.