Pumpenomics > Utility.
“I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.” ― Thomas Sowell
First, they laughed at you.
Then, they scorned you.
Even so, you continued to believe.
You hodled, hell, you even bought more.
You spent time reading, being active, using new protocols, and gave value.
Now we're back at ATH.
And we deserve it.
We're just getting started 🫡
The 8 Best Google Play Store Alternatives to Download Android Apps
1. Amazon Appstore
2. F-Droid
3. Aptoide
4. Uptodown
5. APKMirror
6. Aurora Store
7. Itch. io
8. TapTap
Who is the world's most influential woman?
#InternationalWomensDay
If #bitcoin demonetized gold, then the age of treasure hunting will be over.
- Carman
BlackRock Announces Plans to Incorporate Spot #Bitcoin ETFs into Global Allocation Fund Assets.
Good Morning #Nostr 💜🫂⚡
Your voice will be copied
Your face will be copied.
Your gesture will be copied.
Your tone will be copied.
Your identity will be copied.
The next fight will be between you and your fake identity in the digital world (currently, 70% of your life is on screen).
The only way to win this fight is to hash your real identity and store it on an immutable distributed public ledger called Bitcoin.
Not your keys, not you as an individual.
#Bitcoin has three use cases:
- Store of value.
- Medium of Exchange
- Store identity of 8 billion on-chain.
There is something far scarier than buying Bitcoin.
Selling #Bitcoin.
"Confusion is a high state of being "
The ideal amount of not-knowing is not zero.
To make interesting work, you must be constantly pushing the boundaries, constantly finding your edge. Feeling lost and confused is a good sign, actually. It is an indicator that you are somewhere brand new.
Jacob Collier: “There’s this funny myth that you somehow need to know what you’re doing, but people who know what they’re doing don’t make interesting work.”
--
Someone once told me: “Confusion is a very high state of being,” and it baffled me until it didn’t. You cannot know until you know that you do not know. In other words, not knowing precedes knowing.
Confusion is what happens when we have followed the thread all the way down and discovered that reality, that the story we have believed for so long, is not so infallible. It rings hollow, it is empty from the inside out.
It is what happens before we understand the fundamental paradox that underlies everything. It is what happens when you blink, foggy-eyed. As you wake up.
THERE IS NO TRILEMMA
One of the arguments against scaling Bitcoin and Ethereum on-chain is the so-called blockchain trilemma. It’s a theory popularised by Vitalik Buterin which states that blockchains can only do two out of three at a time: decentralisation, security, and scalability. So, supposedly, in order to preserve decentralisation and security we have to sacrifice scalability.
It sounds smart as it reflects the more common, known to everyone, “fast, cheap, and good” triangle. Indeed, you wouldn’t expect something of a high quality made fast for a penny. So, naturally, exploring the trilemma, you’d say that you can’t have a blockchain which scales and remains decentralised. The only problem is that this trilemma is a total hoax. Let me explain why.
The first issue is measuring the sides.
You can measure “fast” in seconds, “cheap” in bitcoins, and “good” in the number of stars reviewers leave (or in tips, whatever).
But how do you measure “decentralisation”? There’s a popular approach called the Nakamoto coefficient which measures how many different entities (miners, validators, etc.) are needed to disrupt a blockchain. But it can be quite bad disregarding any scaling. As of the beginning of 2024, just two mining pools (Foundry USA and AntPool) control 51%+ of the Bitcoin’s hashrate and can (but not really economically motivated) pull off a 51% attack. Does this mean that Bitcoin is already not decentralized? Bitcoiners would say “no”.
For most people, measuring “decentralisation” is more of an intuitive feeling. Some people simply argue that Vitalik controls Ethereum single-handedly. The important point is that there’s no “consensus” on how to measure “decentralisation”.
It’s even harder with “security”. Generally, I tend to say that “security” is measured in money. Or relative money. It makes sense to put your diamonds into a safe you have to purchase first, but it doesn’t make sense to buy a tank to protect your $10 bill (unless you’re Scrooge McDuck protecting your lucky sat).
But in decentralised systems, “security” highly coincides with “decentralisation”. Does it really matter that it costs $1 trillion to 51%-attack Bitcoin if there’s a single miner capable of doing this? Decentralised blockchains are not secure if they’re not decentralised enough. Now we have a little feedback loop here as we can’t measure “security” without first properly measuring “decentralisation”.
“Scalability”, on the other hand, can be easily measured in something like “transactions per second”.
Now, the theory behind the trilemma is that if we further scale a blockchain, we’ll lose in decentralisation or in security. But is it really a solid theory if nothing can be really calculated?
The second issue is that it doesn’t work backwards.
One would expect the trilemma works as a two-way street. If we scale a blockchain, we lose in decentralisation. If we descale a blockchain, we gain more decentralisation. But is it so?
Well, indeed, if we increase Bitcoin’s block size to 1 exabyte, there will be some issues with running nodes, which well affect our “intuitive” decentralisation measurement. It will become even more hard to run a node, so maybe we’ll be down to just one mining pool controlling 51%+ of the hashrate. As if having two pools wasn’t bad enough.
But what about decreasing the block size to, say, 1 kilobyte? We’d descale Bitcoin that way, it’d become easier to run a node, but what about security and, in turn, decentralisation?
Miners won’t be really able to include anything besides a coinbase transaction. They won’t be able to earn in fees opening Bitcoin to an even worse scenario of the security budget issue. Maybe they’ll be able to fit in a single clearing transaction for some L2, but no user will be able to use Bitcoin non-custodially anymore on L1. This is neither “secure” nor “decentralised”.
The third issue is that it doesn’t work at all.
Scaling to 1 exabyte or descaling to 1 kilobyte are, of course, extreme examples. But what about something more cautious?
How would increasing the block size by, say, 400% affect decentralisation? Would it drop decentralisation (however you measure it) by 400%? Would it even drop by 1%? How many of the current Bitcoin miners earning tens of millions of dollars a month won’t be able to upgrade their node servers? Not to mention that increasing the block size doesn’t even require a lot of hardware upgrades. And what about the tech progress?
SegWit made it possible to mine 4 MB blocks, a 100% increase from 1 MB. Does it mean that on August 24th, 2017 Bitcoin became 400% less decentralised, or 400% less secure, or maybe 200% less decentralised and 200% less secure at the same time? No, we didn’t really see any drop in the node count (mining and non-mining) or the miner revenue.
You can’t plot a mathematical function here. The trilemma is nothing but a bunch of buzzwords. It only works at extremes, but do we really need 1 exabyte blocks?
Introducing The Reverse Blockchain Trilemma
In all fairness, it’s important to note that blockchains don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist on a competitive market for P2P electronic cash. Blockchains may have their own advantages (whether it’s a first-mover advantage, most PoW, most PoS, cool features, etc.), but they compete with each other.
Now, imagine someone wants to run a new business (or even a new protocol) on Bitcoin. Unfortunately, as Bitcoin is unable to scale its L1, this someone decides to move to another blockchain, say, Ethereum. What happens?
* Bitcoin’s decentralisation is not increased, as this person won’t be running a node.
* Bitcoin’s security is not becoming better, as they won’t be paying fees to Bitcoin miners.
* Ethereum is the winner here: decentralization is increased, as they will be running an Ethereum node, and validators will earn more money by collecting their fees.
Not scaling in time is a blown opportunity to increase both decentralisation and security. This has already happened in Bitcoin vs. Ethereum: by a lot of measurements Ethereum is doing better than Bitcoin. Ethereum users pay more in fees, there are more Ethereum nodes than Bitcoin nodes, and so on. But the very same problem is looming over Ethereum as it doesn’t scale anymore either.
The Reverse Blockchain Trilemma can be defined as this: “You won’t be able to have all three: not scaling L1 to fit all users, the most secure blockchain, and the most decentralised blockchain”.
- Nikita Zhavoronkov
How to Create Anonymous Email Aliases with SimpleLogin
https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-anonymous-email-aliases-with-simplelogin/
🇺🇸 SEC Chair Gary Gensler has compared #Bitcoin to a roller coaster and says it's a "highly speculative asset class."
Tongue is the most dangerous organ of human body.
GM #Nostr
The Industrial Revolution caused environmental pollution, while the information revolution causing mental pollution.
IPv6 is increasingly important because of the rapid increase in the number of IP-addressable devices being used today.
Once upon a time, all food was organic.