How would you like bitcoin to improve?
Cat/CatVM to improve bitcoin as an application platform
or
CTV/LNhance to improve bitcoin as a money
Personally I prefer the latter.
Discussion
A viable alternative to Lightning
Right now the best alternative would be ARK which would be greatly improved with CTV or LNhance.
Could we just leave bitcoin layer 1 as is and built on layer 2+ ?
Let's not fuck this thing up
That's not how protocol development works on bitcoin, in order to affect layer 2 and above you need to make changes on L1, because L2 runs on top of L1.
LNhance for example greatly improves the onboarding of LN via ln-symmetry so new users don't have to worry about prefunding channels.
In addition to this LNhance could help scale L2 with non-interactive channels and channel factories.
You can read more at utxos.org/uses and lnhance.org.
Thank you Vortex.
Do you have any worries on some change that might go wrong ?
You have to understand where LNhance is compared to something like segwit and taproot. These were HUGE changes literally changing how bitcoin transactions worked on the network.
By comparison CTV alone or LNhance is extremely minimal while providing extremely useful features that make bitcoin a better money.
Vaults for example are way more safe and useful then raw MultiSig and can provide devs with the tools they need to build apps with more robust self custody capability than anything Coinbase could ever offer.
While I can't provide a 100% guarantee there won't be issues, the minimal risk is worth it to move bitcoin forward as the world's most powerful freedom money.
Clean up the code base and leave it alone. No need for new toys right now or anytime soon.
No.
Cleaning up the codebase is what the GCC is about and will for sure be done no matter what over time (decades).
However bitcoin does need to become more efficient and provide safer more reliant options for self custody (vaults) in addition to needing lightning to scale and have easier onboarding (ln-symmetry).
New op codes can do all of these things and more, they're not "shiny toys", they're purposeful tools designed to make bitcoin a better money.
I get that there are some things that are needed to make bitcoin scale to the point that 7 billion people can self custody a utxo. And I’m happy that people are working on it.
Vaults are definitely not a necessary change though. Bitcoin works without them. The fact that satoshis coins haven’t been hacked and held in an older, less secure address type are proof that what we have works. Vaults are indeed a shiny toy, and a solution to a problem that only a small portion of users experience, and one can be solved some other way without altering the base layer.
I am however all for improving lighting functionality. I just feel that there isn’t an immediate need to shove a fix into the code base. OP_cat / CTV / whatever are all worth pursuing. And maybe one day when they’ve been working on testnet for 10 years with no issues we can implement them.
I get that you probably know a lot more about the nuts and bolts of btc than me. But if you’re asking the daily active users what they want from bitcoin. I’m willing to bet 99.9% will say they just don’t want it to break.
> 7 billion people self custodying
This will likely not be the case as 100% of people will never be self custodying since most prefer custodians, however I'd like to see at least 1/8th of the world be able to (1 billion)
> Vaults are definitely not a necessary change though.
Vaults are so many times better and safer than raw multi-sig and will allow devs to build more robust setups due to features Vaults give you that multi-sig does not such as clawback mechanisms, delayed spending/tiered access, smaller on-chain footprint and recovery paths like fallback addresses. Satoshi doesn't use his coins, others do.
> shove a fix into the codebase
That's not what's happening, a carefully developed, long planned upgrade that has gone through more than a half a decade of testing, feedback and discussion is being strategically and thoughtfully implemented into the codebase.
> I’m willing to bet 99.9% will say they just don’t want it to break.
Gee you think? I'll let you in on a little secret, neither do the devs.