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16 Sep, 16 tweets, 10 min read
On platform risk:

Smart contract platforms have seemingly found PMF with DeFi over the last year. App devs are flocking to said platforms in hopes of launching the next COMP, UNI, SNX, etc. and cashing out life-changing money after a few months of work.

Too good to be true? 🧵
The canonical platform risk case study is Facebook vs. Zynga. Zynga built a $10B company on Facebook's platform, until March 2011 when Facebook cut off Zynga's access to their APIs and cratered their business.
venturebeat.com/2016/06/30/fac…
Ethereum's narrative from 2014-2018 was that it existed to fix this problem.

A "world computer" running "unstoppable code" where nobody could pull the rug out from under you like Facebook did to Zynga.

Inspiring stuff! Have they lived up to it?
consensys.net/blog/news/prog…
Unequivocally no. A culture of scheduled hard forks and consistent tinkering with the EVM makes backwards compatibility impossible. As an example, Aragon had to rewrite their entire business in 2019.
coindesk.com/markets/2019/0…
DeFi's rise brought consistent demand for Ethereum's blockspace, generating enormous fees for miners, which is great!

...unless you're a smart contract developer looking to deploy a new contract and you don't have $10k to spare. Or a small time trader. Or a retail transactor.
So how did the community react to this new found PMF? They ensured all smart contracts deployed on-chain could still function in a high fee environment right? Holding up the social contract?

No, they poured gas on the fire with EIP-1559 to pump their bags.

PLATFORM. RISK.
Now the solution is to deploy new applications not on the base layer but on experimental L2s (or new blockchains entirely) with incredibly different security and liveness assumptions, not to mention new development environments entirely.
sports.yahoo.com/layer-2-platfo…
Why would these new blockchains avoid the same platform risk that Ethereum incurred?

Are they more decentralized? No.

As they get exponentially more popular will fees not go up? No.

Past is prologue. Platform risk exists. Especially platform risk from holders vs. transactors.
#Bitcoin moves slower, but prioritizes NOT introducing platform risk extremely highly.

Example: RBF-by-default. Many Core Devs want to push RBF-by-default which would break the ability to accept zero-conf on-chain txs, which maybe only @bitrefill does.
My sense is that Core Devs will not move forward with RBF-by-default until @bitrefill is satisfied enough with LN as an alternative that removing zero-conf on-chain txs as an option is acceptable.

What a difference from Aragon on Ethereum!
I have had many discussions with publicly traded companies, experienced entrepreneurs looking to start new businesses, fintechs evaluating "crypto", etc.

They all recognize and appreciate #Bitcoin's lack of Platform Risk as a key differentiator.

We're on the right track.
Immediate FUD I anticipate: "Bitcoin doesn't have smart contracts you can't build anything on it wahhhh!"

Check the mailing list. Covenants are coming. I've been incredibly encouraged by Core Dev focus on enabling "pooled liquidity" on-chain.
lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitc…
The brainpower behind this could light up 1000 suns: @ajtowns, @JeremyRubin, @roasbeef, @TheBlueMatt, @ffstls, Antoine Riard, and many others.

They will take their time. They will do it right. Soon ™️ we will have "pooled liquidity" on #Bitcoin without introducing Platform Risk.
In the meantime, it is up to us to create an incredible Developer Experience for building on #Bitcoin and the #LightningNetwork ⚡️: docs, GUIs, libraries, SDKs, examples, communities, hackathons, conferences. @kycjelly, @D_plus__plus, et al are leading the way here, MOAR!!!
I have no doubt that the tradeoffs the #Bitcoin is making wrt taking care not to introduce Platform Risk are the right ones. We already know the playbook for the faster moving chains: get devs, get killer app, see fees go up, burn & pump, gg.

#Bitcoin's built different. LFG 🚀
Other incredible #Bitcoin DevEx tools:
@lightningpolar by @jamaljsr
Balance of Satoshis by @alexbosworth: github.com/alexbosworth/b…
LSAT Playground by @BuckPerley: lsat-playground.bucko.vercel.app
Sapio Studio by @JeremyRubin: learn.sapio-lang.org

More from @lightning soon 😈

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More from @RyanTheGentry

Ryan Gentry Profile picture
16 Jul
I've had a lot of people reach out recently and ask what's been driving the #LightningNetwork's latest exponential growth phase.

I think I'd attribute it to four main sources:
🧵👇
1) The combo of @getumbrel, @RaspiBlitz, and @voltage_cloud with the host of node & liquidity management guides produced by @LeoAW and @hmichellerose have made it stupid easy to get a node online and connected.
docs.lightning.engineering
This laid the groundwork for some super vibrant communities of node runners to pop up a la Ring of Fire and Plebnet. These groups are the primordial soup out of which the next wave of LN startups will emerge IMO... lots of tinkering and lots of great memes
Read 9 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
14 May
Recently, I've been thinking about this chart from @hasufl and @nic__carter concerning the changing #bitcoin narrative. I think the recent focus on NgU has been misguided, and we've lost sight of the true common thread tying all of these together:

#Bitcoin is freedom money.
One thing I've learned from watching DeFi over the last year is that NgU tech is not unique to #bitcoin. Supply side liquidity crunches can be programmed in a few lines of Solidity.

But true monetary freedom cannot. #Bitcoin is the money chosen by people seeking to be free.
As the FUD machines spin up and market dominance wanes, I think this is very important for us to internalize. #Bitcoin guarantees its adopters that they will be free. Being free does not guarantee being rich. And if freedom is not continually fought for, it will disappear.
Read 9 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
15 Oct 20
So I have a lot of thoughts about this. History is definitely rhyming as we build the Internet of Value today in a similar manner to how the Internet of Communications was built from the 1970s to now. But many people are applying the wrong lessons from the past to the present!
Email (SMTP) was invented in 1982, and was the Internet's (TCP/IP) killer app for 30+ years and arguably still is. When @ChairmanHeath says "Internet" he's prob referring to HTTP, invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and popularized by the browser, the Internet's second killer app
I can't remember where I got this screenshot, apologies, but it perfectly distills what HTTP brought to the table: more media types beyond text!

Similarly, Bitcoin only transfers BTC, while Ethereum allows for many types of "value" transfer. Pattern matching to HTTP isn't crazy.
Read 11 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
2 Oct 20
So now that we all agree that globally available blockspace is not scalable for actual computation, but is best used for verification of off-chain computation instead, here are some thoughts on Ethereum's approach to scaling vs. Bitcoin's.

~👇~Thread~👇~
First, definitions:
1) broadcast txs: all-to-all gossip comms that succumbs to the scalability trilemma (all L1s)
2) unicast txs: 1-to-1 direct comms that occurs between two peers only (LN)
3) multicast txs: 1-to-many comms between a subset of peers (rollups, sidechains)
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum's L1 use broadcast txs. But because of (IMO) Bitcoin's use of UTXOs vs. Ethereum's use of accounts, Bitcoin has prioritized unicast txs via LN first, whereas Ethereum's initial unicast txs projects have been discarded in favor of multicast txs.
Read 20 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
5 May 20
0/7 I just released a new post about the Lightning Network as a utility for Web3 development. Web3 has typically been owned by the non-Bitcoin community (ETH, DOT, etc.), but I argue here that LN brings it firmly back into BTC's domain.

multicoin.capital/2020/05/05/lig…
1/7 Multicoin defines Web3 as “the unbundling of data and application logic.” Rather than focusing on storing user data on a blockchain, LN takes an incremental step towards that vision: "strong decoupling of authentication and payment logic from application logic" h/t @roasbeef Image
2/7 This is fascinating to me. Web2.0 has been dominated by freemium business models with two tiers of users:
1) free and pseudonymous if you use Tor/proxies/etc.
2) paid, giving up your identity and data ownership

This given rise to the structural problems fueling Web3 interest
Read 8 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
24 Sep 19
0/3 @mattshap1 and I just published "Privacy is a Feature, Not a Product"
multicoin.capital/2019/09/24/pri…
1/3 In the essay, we argue that privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a product offering in and of itself. Users should not have to take balance sheet risk (e.g. by selling some BTC or ETH for ZEC) on less valuable and less secure cryptocurrencies
2/3 in order to achieve financial privacy. At the end of the essay, we study the nascent privacy pools on Bitcoin and Ethereum to evaluate if they offer sufficient privacy guarantees for most users to never need niche privacy-focused blockchains.
Read 5 tweets

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