Thread by @muneeb

I've been politely responding to criticism from @adam3us @notgrubles for weeks.

It's time to set the record straight RE Liquid vs. Stacks.

Please retweet to help educate people.

Tweet thread👇

1/ First of all, I highly respect the contributions of Adam Back and Grubles. We can disagree on some topics, but that does not take away my respect for them.

Let's dive into their criticism of Stacks and how it compares to the work they prefer: Liquid.

2/ Liquid is a federated (closed) network where you trust a handful of signers to operate the network and secure your LBTC (a Bitcoin-derived asset). 

Liquid has no connection to Bitcoin other than using LBTC, i.e., no connection for consensus, smart contracts, security, etc.

3/ Stacks, however, is an open network; anyone can be a miner. There are Bitcoin-derived assets (like xBTC) on Stacks as well.

Stacks has direct connection to Bitcoin at the consensus level, contracts interact directly with Bitcoin state, and Bitcoin secures Stacks fork history.

4/ This unique connection to Bitcoin enables use cases like (a) earning BTC rewards, (b) native BTC swaps, (c) lending apps where BTC stays on the Bitcoin main chain, etc. These are simply not possible on Liquid.

5/ Adam and Grubles criticize an open network that enables unique Bitcoin apps and smart contracts for Bitcoin.

I find this puzzling, frankly, as they're intelligent people who should understand the significance of the Stacks open network and the tech capabilities of Clarity.

6/ This leads us to the second part of the argument, which says that the criticism is not about Stacks the technology (we can all agree that it's unique and powerful), but the criticism is about Stacks (STX) the gas asset.

Let's examine this argument.

7/ Liquid R&D and development is funded through (private) equity offerings of Blockstream shares.

Stacks early R&D and development was funded through a SEC-qualified public token offering.

What’s the difference?

8/ Only a handful of rich people (VC funds, high net worth individuals) can participate in Blockstream equity offerings. Ordinary people cannot.

The average Joe, however, could participate in the Stacks offering, even in the US. It was open to the public.

9/ Both an equity offering and a SEC-qualified token offering are legal offerings in the US; both are compliant.

The rich people will make money on Blockstream shares. The ordinary people can benefit from the Stacks offering. (Currently, the $0.12 participants are up 1,700%.)

10/ The development of Liquid remains dependent on a single company. Stacks decentralized upon mainnet launch with 30+ entities in the ecosystem now; no single entity responsible for developing or operating the network.

Single point of failure vs. an open decentralized network.

11/ OK, but utility tokens are different. Why is the gas token needed?

It's needed to:

(a) pay for executing smart contracts (computations are not free).

(b) incentivize miners to operate the network (otherwise, you end up with closed/federated networks like Liquid).

12/ For the “we need no gas assets” crowd, you can fork the open-source Stacks code and remove the gas asset, but such a network will not function.

This is an open challenge to anyone to try this. If you believe so strongly that such networks can work without gas, please fork!

13/ The open nature of Stacks is already attracting devs and users. The Liquid block explorer currently shows 1 or 2 tx per block.

Stacks has 1,113 tx pending in mempool with blocks running at full capacity. Open source devs are working hard to 10x the network capacity in Nov.

14/ Stacks is gaining momentum.

Hiro's API now gets 210M requests per month; there are 370,583 unique wallet addresses and 1,341 Clarity smart contracts deployed on mainnet.

This traction dwarfs any other federated/side chain in Bitcoin.

15/ The next time they criticize Stacks, please ask them (a) why do you prefer closed networks to open networks, (b) restricted VC equity offerings to open offerings for ordinary people, and (c) networks disconnected from Bitcoin to native Bitcoin apps and contracts for Bitcoin.

16/ In the end, critics don't matter. The free market and the developers decide what solutions get adopted.

Smart contracts for Bitcoin are a revolutionary idea. Let's keep building and growing the Bitcoin economy.

Open networks, FTW 🙌