You make a great point. But stacks is not the solution. It encourages the growth of the stacks network. Takes money away from Bitcoin essentially as it uses its stx token for gas/transaction fees.
Solution is drivechain or layer 2s that pay miners, where fees are in bitcoin.
Stacks miners post BTC for the chance to mine the next stacks block so it creates a perpetual demand for Bitcoin… check out proof of transfer
You’re playing bitcoin affinity word games.
In this post please clarify: What are “miners”? What hash do they use?
What does it mean to “post” BTC?
How is the “chance” determined? How do I increase my chance?
You’re using bitcoin related terms to describe proof of stake bullshit.
Transfer to who? Who holds the keys to what I transfer?
Watch a YouTube video on it lol
“Stacks (STX) is the native token of the Stacks blockchain that fuels all activities that occur within its ecosystem. Similar to ether (ETH) on the Ethereum blockchain, STX is used to pay transaction fees, for smart contract execution, and to power web3 services across Stacks. By locking up STX tokens on the network, or 'Stacking', you provide valuable security benefits to the network. Your reward is bitcoin yield. There are multiple ways to stack and earn bitcoin: on an exchange, in a non-custodial pool, or by yourself.”
Um, no thanks. ⚠️
I worked in Rootstock ecosystem for a period of time at Sovryn. So I am aware of the differences.
When I looked into stacks to compare the differences I realised some red flags.
Stacks blockchain doesn’t use BTC as the native currency. It uses its own token Stx.
When stacks talks about bitcoin. It’s wrapped bitcoin in the stacks blockchain like how WBTC is erc20 token that represents bitcoin on ethereum.
The bitcoin on stacks in held in SEC approved custodian company called Anchorage who must comply with US laws. Trusting the government with your bitcoin.
I am all for bitcoin sidechains. Ones where bitcoin is the native currency and fees go to miners like Rootstock. Preferably where there is no custodians/federations like Drivechain.
The truth is Stacks managed to raise a whopping $150 Million at peak of the bull market from some dumb VC investors who know nothing about bitcoin. They have so much cash to marketed themselves as the best bitcoin layer 2 and platform for bitcoin defi, ordinals and nfts.
Thanks for the explanation. Lots I didn’t realize.
Follow the money as they say.
Saying that, Stacks Team have provided a lots of funding in past few years to bitcoin core developers and lightning developers via grants. So Stacks deserves some merit.
Also, Here’s good article explaining the technical perspective by Sergio Lerner:
Thanks for sharing I’ll have to check that out 🤝
Is this what you are talking about?? There is no entity holding the Bitcoin it’s all done at the protocol level…
xbtc is different from how Stacks secures itself with Bitcoin proof of work
The only link between Stacks and Bitcoin is that Stacks uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a technology to secure consensus, and as a byproduct stacks has a Bitcoin blockchain oracle.
Stacks 2.0 native currency is STX, not Bitcoin.
As the intent of the Stacks developers is that people stack (lock for long periods) the STX token, it looks like the incentivized use case for STX is as a store-of-value, directly competing with Bitcoin.
In an event of confrontation between the Bitcoin community and the Stacks community, ***Bitcoin miners could censor Stacks PoX transactions***, leading to problems or a halt of Stacks consensus. Because of the lack of cross-chain incentives between Stacks and Bitcoin, Stacks is a Remorachain. 
But when you lock up your STX you get Bitcoin as the yield. So how is that competing with Bitcoin when you can have the best of both worlds. Sure maybe it’s a slight competition but they are mutually beneficial to each other.
Stacks miners need Bitcoin which creates demand for Bitcoin block space.
Stackers get BTC yield for providing security.
Where’s the issue here?
As the image states, the remora chain causes no harm to bitcoin.
The competition is that it uses STX as its native currency instead of BTC.
Its creating to two networks when you only need one big network.
Like Lightning, Liquid, Rootstock, Fedimint, Ordinals at least all using BTC as the native currency. ALL the capital flows to Bitcoin network not spills over to other networks.
Ahh I see what your saying thanks for the clarification 🤝
I dunno just don’t see malice with what they are trying to do. I’ve listen to them enough to see they are genuine in the conviction and the support and commitment to Bitcoin.
I dont think there is malice either. But they exaggerate marketing thats for sure.
I they have given lots of money to bitcoin core contributors and other bitcoin projects in grants to help with development.
The issue I have with them is the competing cryptocurrency, bitcoin miners can censor stacks transactions, and the wrapped bitcoin token is held in a SEC approved custodian.
BTC was supposed to be p2p with no custodians and middle men.
I hate on LN, Liquid and Rootstock too.
LN is becoming centralised with central liquidity hubs to route payments and the fact 90% of users are using custodial wallets. In the future these can enforce KYC, and become regulated by governments and custodial wallets can steal you bitcoin at any time.
Liquid requires trusting your funds with the Liquid federation who are unknown and unverifable members. The state can easily regulate via KYC and censor certain wallet addresses on this network. The transaction fees go to blockstream.
Rootstock requires trusting a federation but you can verify the members of the federation. But still has the same risks of censorship and regulations like Liquid. Rootstock is merge mined so the fees go to miners making it 2nd most secure network after bitcoin in terms of hash rate.
Drivechain L2s require trusting miners like users already trust miners for L1 transactions so most decentralised, secure and censorship resistant. Bringing any cool idea to bitcoin layer 2s, like Monero, Z-cash, Ethereum, Stacks, Bcash, Potential BIP ideas, all using BTC as native currency (shitcoins without the shitcoins). The downside is that it requires a soft fork to bitcoin core which requires approval from core developers, node runners and miners.
Stacks devs are working on a native bride sBTC were you can bring L1 Bitcoin into the stacks ecosystem and out again trustlessly. Should be released on mainnet sometime Q1 2024. Also the working on Nakamoto release that will improve transaction speed.
Regardless your analysis of Stacks is solid and I won’t argue with you on it faults.
I agree with you on LN, becoming entirely captured by centralized custodians and wallets. Plus when you add a high L1 fee environment, how does that impact LN over the long term? LN is untested in this type of sustained price levels.
No one uses liquid so that basically it doesn’t exist.
Rootstock is cool to but adoption is low as well. But for all their shortcomings any of these solutions are head and shoulders above fiat currencies! I just want to see us succeed in remaking the world and making it a better place for our children and future generations. It starts with the money
Exactly, it’s a free market of ideas. All have trade offs.
I think the layer 2s we use now probably won’t exist or have no users in a few years.
Better layer 2s will come through bitvm, decentralised roll ups or drivechain.
If it helps, I put together this list of 22 different Bitcoiners stating that Stacks is a shitcoin: https://x.com/chowcollection/status/1599826033921777665
Clever putting all these together in a thread.
Drivechains creates a hierarchy scheme that has miners on the top. Each drivechain layer will have to get approval from multiple chains above it to get back to base chain.
Broken incentives.
This is incorrect.
DC uses the same security model as bitcoin L1. That 51% of hashrate is honest on L1.
Except with DC you need 3-6 months of more then 75% of hashrate to be malicious. One can say its even more secure in that regard than layer 1.
It’s the same game theoretic incentive model.
If you don’t trust miners for DC then you’d should not trust bitcoin at all.
Anyways, it’s the risk is opt in for the users. If they are worried miners are all sudden to become malicious then don’t use them. But don’t stop others from using them.
Let the free market decide what a good idea is, true meritocracy.
Why not apply this same outlook to Stacks? Let the free market decide right? If everyone wants to consider it a shitcoin because it has a token so be it but it isn’t going anywhere and will be a bigger deal than many think.
If it was a shitcoin builders wouldn’t be flocking to it and would have got washed out last year during the peak of the bear market.
I dunno it’s all good I’m not for fighting about this stuff lol. I like Bitcoin and Stacks. If the makes me a shitcoiner so be it guess…
Yes it’s a free market.
People are free to use Stacks, Ethereum, Avalanche or whatever.
I am for competition and free market of ideas.
I say try everything.
All I am saying, I dont think it’s the solution. A lot of false marketing. Theres a reason most of bitcoin technical community dont take stacks seriously.
