What's the most abstract difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum in two sentences?
Bitcoin is something with a lot of complex descriptions to it that you cannot easily grasp at the beginning, but when broken down, can be synthesised into something beautifully simple when it comes to describing what it is and how it functions.
Ethereum is something with a lot of simple descriptions that can be quite easy for you to get onboard with, but when broken down, rises more questions than answers, gets more complicated with every layer of questioning, and elicits in you a sense of dread that something like this is actually being attempted at such a scale by so many people with so much money literally at stake.
For any cryptocurrency network to be considered useful in India, it's got to have *all* of these characteristics:
Censorship-resistance, Neutrality, Decentralisation, Openness, Privacy, Liquidity.
If a particular network can offer all of these, the general public and the regulators should take it seriously and consider it as being useful. Revolutionary for sure.
If not, it's useless. Maybe an interesting experiment yes. Or a dumb one. Or an outright scam.
If one thinks that no network can offer these now or at any time in the future, he can confidently dismiss the entire industry as useless.
Government initiatives will always lack the above-mentioned characteristics, except for liquidity. If these networks can't offer any of them, we're better off not using them at all because a network lacking those characteristics are *bad* for the populace.
India's emergence on the global stage is very likely.
But I don't see uniform growth happening within the country. There have been regional imbalances in how different states have grown.
I do not see these imbalances going away.
Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka are all showing some promise.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Censorship might not be a problem for most people in India.
But it is the same generation that were my faculty in school and college that's governing us from Delhi and Chennai.
I grew up hating their guts for being dismissive of any sort of individuality.
I have very little trust in them.
I'll keep promoting tools like Nostr, Bitcoin, and TOR for that alone probably.
Revenue model for streaming live sports depends predominantly on advertisements and partnerships with sponsors.
This means partnerships with platforms that already have audiences and resources are always preferred over direct streaming to fans, supporters or general audiences over Youtube, Twitch or their own websites.
There is no incentive for leagues or teams to set up production facilities themselves and stream games directly. Not enough revenue potential. Not as good as the existing model.
A global market is there, but a global payment rail is not. Actually, there is no global payment rail for live streaming in general.
Each country has a different standard for payments and settlements and each works differently. There are regulatory and compliance hurdles, technical hurdles.
I'm informing this take based on my experience with Patreon, Twitch, earlier YouTube when Red (Premium) wasn't available in India, existing streaming platforms in India.
Getting into deals with these platforms means they demand exclusivity. They own rights over your content, whether the way they distribute your content is good or not. This kills competition.
My speculation is that an open source, global payment rail can make it easier for teams and leagues to broadcast to a wider audience and make money from it.
Maybe this won't work with bigger leagues as the sponsorship and streaming rights deals are ridiculously lucrative. Maybe it will.
But it does open up potential revenue streams for smaller teams.
Eg: I can see a new team like Real Bedford benefiting from direct pay-per-view live streaming in the near future as they climb up the league tier system as more football fans who are also Bitcoiners start rooting for them.
Other teams and leagues start using their platforms and experiment with new streaming experiences.
Gradually, then suddenly, Bitcoin can fix live streaming of sports.
I'm educating my family and friends about it. Top priority for me.
All these Lightning apps I'm creating an account on has 'sachin' available as a username and I'm loving it
No initials, underscores or numbers needed yessir
I cannot put into words how excited I am about the 'Send Globally' feature. It's a big, big deal.
Fwiw
I'm okay with Lightning taking another 10-15 years to be widely adopted in a way that adheres to properties like openness, privacy, trustlessness, security and decentralisation.
Would be disappointing for it to not happen sooner in like 2-3 years, but it is what it is.
Governance of the protocol is nascent as well, as it is with Bitcoin core. I mean, even Internet governance is opaque and nascent but that's another thing altogether.
In all honesty, I can't promise to people around me that LN will work or that it's flawless. I don't know that.
What I do know is t1hat I have used the network to send and receive value. It works.
It's worth the collective effort, despite so many people claiming that it won't work.
Okay I just got zapped by strangers for the first time. This is mad.
Lightning renders most of crypto and traditional fiat payment rails useless.
No token, open source, compatibility between implementations, adoption frustratingly slow but proper bottom up, grassroots adoption.
Most people can't run a profitable routing node and yet they do it.
Bear in mind all these people that are opening and rebalancing channels, routing transactions are not doing those in expectation of airdrops in the future.
The 5k Bitcoin in liquidity is from people doing it for the sake of scaling Bitcoin.
They've either got to be good enough to earn routing fees or be doing it for altruistic reasons.
It'll be like this till total capacity and volume goes up significantly from here. Have to appreciate anyone who is running routing nodes right now.
The significance of grassroots initiatives that are trying to create circular economies that use Bitcoin as a monetary good is underappreciated. It sets Bitcoin apart from every other crypto project there is.
One of George Selgin's repeated criticisms of Bitcoin is that it isn't widely accepted as money. Which is quite valid.
Being widely accepted everywhere in exchange for goods and services is a defining characteristic of any monetary good.
If it doesn't have this characteristic, it won't matter if it's an inherently better Store of Value, Medium of Exchange or Unit of Account than existing monetary goods in the market. It will only serve the purpose of being bought and sold at a higher or lower value. Buying it would merely be a speculative gamble in the open market.
These grassroots initiatives are solving this exact problem. They are predominantly voluntary, community-driven and bottom up initiatives that are trying to get local merchants to accept Bitcoin in exchange for their goods and services through education.
While asked what makes Bitcoin stand apart from thousands of other projects, I used to have so many arguments lined up in my head.
They'd include some or the other version of a long-winded lecture about decentralisation, fair launch, capped supply, governance, ledger size, security, immutability and the fully open source and transparent nature of development.
Which are all very strong arguments to argue Bitcoin's difference.
But over the last few months, I started looking for places where people use Bitcoin to buy real goods and services. Where people use Bitcoin as money. I found a lot of videos with people doing exactly this. The diversity of places that these videos were coming from blew me away. Over 15 different countries and more that I don't know about.
Only Bitcoin has this.
Other projects do have tons of conferences over the course of a year to onboard developers but you don't see bottom up, voluntary and community-driven initiatives solely focused on creating circular economies like the ones Bitcoin has for other crypto projects.
Bitcoin is different things for different people based on where they live and what they use it for.
It is a speculative investment for people who have access to decent monetary, payment, banking and financial systems. They don’t necessarily need bitcoin for anything more than buying it and maybe selling it at a higher price.
It is a reliable currency for those living in broken monetary regimes that do not let them reliably store their wealth over a period of time. Long term capital accumulation via savings is nearly impossible for those living in these countries because their currency loses its value by double digit percentages every single year because of supply inflation. There are about 1.8 billion people who face this situation around the world.
It is a non-censorable, neutral payment system for those having to deal with financial censorship and deplatforming. It is a peer-to-peer censorship-resistant network that does not need the identity of the sender and receiver in order for them to transact. Doesn't matter what their race, gender, caste, creed, nation or religion is.
It is a banking system for those who are unbanked. There are places in the world where people have to walk for miles in order to reach the nearest bank. Places like El Salvador whose interent infrastructure is decent but banking infrastructure is sub-par can benefit from Bitcoin’s feature of enabling people to digitally take custody of their money without relying on an institution's servers to do it for them.
It is a path toward energy abundance for places that have an energy source that hasn’t been tapped into because of its distance from the grid. Transporting electricity over long distances is not at all efficient. There are a lot of renewable sources of energy like this located at considerable distances from the grid. Bitcoin miners can be buyers of energy at these places.
There is no singular, correct answer for what bitcoin is. It can be different things to different people based on how they want to use it.
To quote Beautyon, 'Bitcoin is. And that is enough.'
There was no way for staking rewards on Ethereum to compound till now because there was no way for any staker to withdraw their CL and EL rewards.
Now they can.
And restake it.
PoW miners have a lot of operational costs to cover with the block rewards and tx fee that they get, which will keep increasing with increasing difficulty.
The only direction for the difficulty target number has been down and nothing else.
Which means difficulty of mining has kept increasing over the years.
Hence, the cost of mining has kept going up. Bitcoin had to be sold and supply had to be redistributed.
There is no such thing for stakers.
There is a one-time cost of setting up a staking node and buying 32 ETH.
There is no real necessity for them to distribute their rewards into the market.
Possible centralisation vector for PoS block production and validation.
And we'll be able to see what happens at a proper scale with a network as big as Ethereum having implemented it in full with the shapella upgrade. It has been incomplete till now. No more speculation.
If you want to keep an eye on what happens, there'll be data on dune analytics.
Plebs in India.
If you're reading this, keep in mind the enormity of the task that lies ahead of us.
Each one of you has seen the possibilities that the Bitcoin protocol enables.
The nodes you run, the PR's you open that gets accepted by the community, the asics you hash with are in agreement with a set of consensus rules that lets you be a part of the network. That is the only thing that matters.
You have your own personal incentives that drive your contributions toward the protocol. You have your own reasons for wanting this network to be used by the general populace of the country.
It might be to let you use your stack to buy goods and services anywhere in the country. Maybe you want to remit money to multiple countries with instant finality and negligible transaction fee. Or it could be that you want exit liquidity to sell to at a higher price. More ambitious is to want the country to break free of the shackles that the western monetary and financial system enslaves us with. Or you think religion and caste based tensions are on the rise and you want financial censorship to be made difficult. Maybe privacy isn't being cared about in this country and you want to build tools that will let people preserve their personal privacy and thereby their individual sovereignty.
It doesn't matter. Bitcoin will be different things to different people. Your own agenda about what Bitcoin should be will not be accepted by everyone else.
The institutions that keep our wheels running are enormous. The legacy of our culture is near unmatched in its richness and diversity. The potential for how powerful this country and its leaders can become is truly humbling.
To get Bitcoin to be adopted in such a country is no small task. You need to be extremely articulate, based, knowledgeable and sharp to achieve anything of substance here. Convictions cannot waver.
Western narratives will not work here because the the guy at the tea shop you go to to put a smoke and have tea does not care what Janet Yellen says or what happens at the FMOC meeting. He cares that his business runs smoothly and he's able to provide for his family.
Your job is to explain to people around you in very simple and digestable language what Bitcoin is and can be. And the ways that it can solve their problems.
Or build things that lets them access the network and use it to make their lives better.
And let them know without fail what the consensus rules are and how protocol governance works.
The market will indeed take care of the rest.
There's going to be so many people in their early 20's starting to ask how the fiscal and monetary system works.
As would've been the case with every generation. We're not special. But, they never had an alternative to help them opt out.
That has changed.
The opinion that everything outside of Bitcoin is borderline scammy or borderline stupid
Is better arrived at by using the other networks, doing tx's and trying to become peers, developers (foss) or validators on them.
Rather than through maxims heard from other people.
