Which coins and for what?
Discussion
privacy by default, domains, dexes with deep enough liquidity. you can figure out which ones. if the bitcoin devs never got sidetracked by this lightning garbage and if the community didn't push so many people away we'd probably have all of that on bitcoin already. bitcoin's biggest competitor narrowly escaped nonexistence over it. can you imagine a world where bitcoin devs didn't start huffing paint and ethereum simply never got created?
I do agree Lightning was over-hyped. It has also taken forever to implement the incremental changes to make it more scalable. And even then, most honest devs knew then what people are learning now: Lightning doesn't get the whole world into non-custodial Bitcoin.
vitalik was a bitcoin developer. he was going to extend the functionality of bitcoin and the other developers were too busy blocking the stream to sell liquid. they had to get rid of him. fast forward today and EVM based solutions have more bitcoins deposited into them than the whole lightning network and several independent teams are desperately trying to staple the EVM to the bitcoin network to make up for lost time. ethereum literally gets used more to transact bitcoins than lightning and liquid. it's absolutely pathetic and it could have easily been avoided.
while that was going on, bitcoin lost its grip on the black market by failing to deliver solid privacy and a good enough UX for ecommerce. while the bitcoin developers were busy zapping each other and licking 9-volt batteries for fun, everyone on the DNM forums learned to avoid bitcoin. they wrote it out of all of their guides. when newcomers arrive asking questions, they are warned that they must never use bitcoin. markets that allow bitcoin are treated with suspicion, and markets that don't allow it at all are more highly recommended.
everyone who pushed this lightning garbage should be held accountable. bitcoin dominance could have easily stayed over 90% if not for lightning. the worst part is loads of people warned against lightning ahead of time. they all said this would happen and they were met with extreme hostility.
I don't really understand the criticism of Lightning. It's not harming Bitcoin; it's just a pain to run a node. The idea is that it will be the transport layer for other layer 2s. It also has privacy that would make it quite suitable for dark markets, especially if the market ran its own ecash mint.
I agree it seems devs are quick to build an EVM on Bitcoin, but since some of them require no new OPcodes, they will be deployed whether we like it or not. Maybe some of the market for wrapped BTC will come over from Ethereum.
Part of the value proposition of Bitcoin, and the reason it holds the highest market value, is precisely because it doesn't "move fast and break things" like all other crypto.
dude we are well past the point of bragging about not moving fast and breaking things. this is an intervention where someone's gotta stop huffing paint behind the dumpster.
I'm not opposed to large centralized nodes, depending on how much authority regulators are able to impose on them. It's another case where it doesn't matter that not *everyone* is running a node, as long as anyone *can* run a node.
Complaints about liquidity being complicated are certainly valid. However, offline payments are almost here. IIRC Phoenix is launching soon.