In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.
“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”
I literally just said:
Yes, Bitcoin still uses proof-of-work. That’s because Bitcoin is itself a fossil, its userbase and developers have consciously decided to not adopt new blockchain technologies and remain locked in the current protocol. Other blockchains have continued moving on. Alas, Bitcoin has name recognition and inertia on its side, which will keep it around for a long time. But at some point I expect its obsolescence will catch up with it and overcome that inertia.
I think it’s early to call Bitcoin obsolete, it is still after all the dominant cryptocurrency by every measure.
So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there’s etherium, and it has its own issues, but what else out there do you think is really more than a just gimmick or a scheme?
Its technology is obsolete. That doesn’t mean it can’t still dominate the market share.
For example, a case could be made that coal power is obsolete. There are still plenty of coal power plants on the grid. Windows 8 is obsolete, but you’ll find plenty of computers still running it. And so forth. There’s inertia in these things.
And Bitcoin’s current “dominance” is 60%. That’s not exactly an overwhelming position.
You answered your own question.
Ethereum’s not just one token, mind you. There’s an ecosystem on Ethereum with a lot of innovation that’s not directly rooted in Ethereum’s advances. That’s the benefit of supporting smart contracts, it’s a general purpose computer that other stuff can be run on. There are a lot of layer-2 blockchains running on Ethereum, for example Aztec which has Monero-like privacy built into it.
Yes, Etherium is very cool and it can do a whole bunch of really cool things! But on the other hand, it can’t replace Bitcoin. It’s too heavy, transactions are too large, the network can’t hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does. I think most people agree that the two systems compliment each other, they each work well in their niche, but couldn’t do the others’ job.
So yeah, I don’t see Etherium replacing Bitcoin. Perhaps a layer-2 could, but I have yet to see any that offer the kind of tangible improvements that would really make it stand out.
As of this writing, Ethereum is handling 21.1 transactions per second. Bitcoin is handling 4.9 transactions per second. So purely in layer-1 transactions per second Ethereum’s got 4.3 times the capacity of Bitcoin.
Some of those Ethereum transactions are for running layer-2s, as you mention that greatly expands Ethereum’s capacity. Ethereum is specifically designed to be able to handle layer-2s well, it has features that were added to make them easier to scale. Bitcoin, on the other hand, was never designed for layer-2s and what it does have are hacked-together bodges like Lightning that are going nowhere.
What “job” does Bitcoin do that Ethereum can’t? And before you say “digital gold”, there are literal gold-backed stabletokens on Ethereum if that’s what suits your fancy.
A lot of bitcoin transactions are opening lightning channels so second layer is working there too
The comment you’re responding to linked to a page giving statistics about the Lightning network. The number of channels peaked in 2022 and has been going down ever since then.
Number of channels is decreasing, but the money in each channel increased. In BTC terms the money decreased, but in real terms the money increased.
Real terms being 2022 dollar value
No it hasn’t. Again, according to that link I provided, the total capacity of Lightning peaked in December 2024. These are not the graphs of a growing layer 2, it’s been stagnant for many years.
Bitcoin simply wasn’t designed for this sort of application, and Bitcoin’s foundation layer is absolutely frozen due to the ideology of its users and developers so I don’t expect the situation will improve. If you want to do a layer 2 then why not use a blockchain that’s specifically designed to support it? If you use Ethereum you can even use token-wrapped Bitcoin as your medium of exchange. There’s $14.4 billion dollars worth of WBTC on Ethereum available for exchange, as opposed to the $440 million worth in Lightning channels.
Sure. But they’re relegated to the realm of highly sketchy pre-mining schemes and pump-and-dump market gambits. There’s no serious third party mining community for these boutique coins.
We still have people digging yellow rocks out of the ground and shoving them in big vaults to store fiscal value.
If that’s not obsolete, I’m not holding my breath on Bitcoin.
Ether has a market cap of $450 billion, and that doesn’t count all the other tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s been running since 2013. If you call that a “boutique coin” based on “pump-and-dump” then clearly you’ve either got a highly biased or highly ignorant view of cryptocurrency.
There are technical flaws in Bitcoin that could literally crash it if they aren’t patched out before they become exploitable, as in it’s at zero value and will never recover. That’s not something that can happen to gold.
Ah, yes. The fine folks that gave us NFTs.
No pump and dumps to be found over there
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To be fair, the concept of an NFT was very cool when it was first imagined, but then all people used NFTs for was stupid gifs to be sold like trading cards or fucking pogs…
But the concept is cool if you actually use it for something. For instance, you can create an NFT as a digital key (like a literal key that unlocks something) or as a legal deed that proves ownership of something. Then you have a digital asset that can be resold or folded into a smart contract, where the digital item actually controls something physical. For instance, you could design an NFT to be the actual key that can unlock and start a car. If you sell this digital asset, you will not be able to start the car, but the new owner will. That is cool, monkey gifs are stupid bullshit. And if you try to convince people to buy bullshit, that makes you a scammer.
But Etherium didn’t invent the stupid bullshit, they just created a system that made more interesting things possible. And then with the power to do anything, some people made the stupidest shit in the world. It’s like, you can hand someone a pencil and paper and some people will use that to prove a theorem, some people will sketch a landscape, and some people will draw a huge cock and balls… But you don’t blame the people that created the pencil and paper.
Going to have to agree to disagree.
It was always vaporware. A bunch of empty promises that predicted a digital monoculture. Feel like I have to carve “Ready Player One was a Dystopia!” on a baseball bat and hit people with it.
So I’m hearing that perhaps the idea I talked about in my example didn’t sound cool to you. But it was cool to a lot of people, and your opinion doesn’t speak for everyone. And it does work, like today.
So were pogs
So you really think the ability to trade digital keys is useless? That’s honestly weird.
I mean there are so many instances of people actively using digital keys right now, so clearly that part of the functionality has value. Surely there are situations where one might want to sell access to something, and the ability to transfer a digital key with a single transaction would be useful.
I think you’re being overly dismissive based on preconceived notions.