Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Adam Curry, the Podfather, inventor of podcasts has created Podcasting 2.0 on the Lightning Network. Direct payments to content creators, completely removing middlemen. Silicon Valley is going to get disrupted, music and documentaries coming soon.

Timestamped the below for Adam Curry interview. Max Keiser must have lost his voice screaming "Fuck Elon"

Tmac said:

How’s that work?

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You have a lightning wallet (Breez wallet for podcasting right now). You find a podcast through a podcast 2.0 aggregator (Podcastindex.org - No Agenda for example) you stream sats while watching the podcast. Lightning Network can support sending as little as 1 Satoshi at a time with little to no fee (depending on route).

I think there are more seamless ways to do this (automate Sats per second, boost button he talks about) using some of the apps that support this (Podcastindex.org/apps) but I've not played with this much yet myself. There may be more technicalities in the data delivery method streaming over Lightning as well, but I don't think thats required for the funding method to work. Essentially you're removing 99% of the infrastructure between the listener and the content creator.

This is a similar system that sphinx.chat uses for messaging (sats per message, creates a Lighting Network tunnel between recipients to allow private uncensorable communication)

James said:

The point here is that it's nearly impossible to do anything Aave does with Bitcoin. Where are you depositing your Bitcoin? Where are you getting loans against your Bitcoin? Are they decentralized like Ethereum applications are?

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Sovyrn runs on Rootstock, which has been around since 2017. Rootstock is a sidechain smart contracts platform that is pegged to BTC and merge mined with BTC, so it uses BTC as its native coin and Bitcoin's proof of work for security. In this way it also funds Bitcoin miners who receive the vast majority of the gas fees. (there is a possible answer to 'will BTC die when the block subsidy ends?) Merge mining it is actually very simple, requiring zero new hardware other than running a node, so most of them already do it. Rootstock also uses Solidity so it makes copying ETH contracts over much easier. And that is exactly what Sovryn is doing: rapidly copying the good stuff ETH devs are doing and porting it over to BTC. (ain't open source great?) They're also backed by notable figures and organizations like Bitmex. (A Bitmex endorsement carries a lot of weight with me personally)

Who will win the DeFi space is very undetermined. People switch centralized exchanges all the time, so first mover advantage means little here and they'll all have bridges. Nobody is married to Uniswap just because they used it first. I consider Ethereum to be the laboratory that plays fast and loose with security and efficiency and that the more conservative and security minded developers will simply copy and improve what ETH devs start on a different network. Sovryn is one example. I don't think Solidity is a great smart contracts language though. Long-term, something designed from the ground up that learned lessons from years of Ethereum's failings may be more likely to win out. (e.g. Radix) That is not a bash on Ethereum though, because they could not have predicted a lot of the deficiencies that manifested over time. Software requires iteration.

Flobee said:

Adam Curry, the Podfather, inventor of podcasts has created Podcasting 2.0 on the Lightning Network. Direct payments to content creators, completely removing middlemen.

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Is this the best current solution for micropayments? What about distributed mining? It seems like the best overall thing for content creators would be if people could be low-key mining while consuming the content and using that to pay for it. I know people hate the brower-mining addons, but if they were opt-in and non-abusive, that would seem like the ideal way to support online creators/communities. I think I'd be ok with foh eating a couple of % of my cpu/gpu while I'm on the site to help keep the lights on.

Control said:

Is this the best current solution for micropayments? What about distributed mining? It seems like the best overall thing for content creators would be if people could be low-key mining while consuming the content and using that to pay for it. I know people hate the brower-mining addons, but if they were opt-in and non-abusive, that would seem like the ideal way to support online creators/communities. I think I'd be ok with foh eating a couple of % of my cpu/gpu while I'm on the site to help keep the lights on.

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I think sites like Theta.tv use browser mining. You're mining their shitcoin so I guess if that floats your boat then sure. Lightning network solutions use Bitcoin for the payments and fees are nearly non-existent. I would argue its the best micro-payment solution available, but I don't know of very many alternatives

Torrid said:

Rootstock is a sidechain

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Sidechains are a dubious scaling solution at best, I'm not convinced they will stick around in any meaningful capacity. The fact that Bitcoin is still piddling around with them without a single thought as to how a rollup would be implemented should be hugely worrying to everyone in the Bitcoin space.

Torrid said:

Rootstock also uses Solidity so it makes copying ETH contracts over much easier. And that is exactly what Sovryn is doing: rapidly copying the good stuff ETH devs are doing and porting it over to BTC. (ain't open source great?)

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Do you understand how copying someone else's work means you are not innovating at all? You're saying that Bitcoin devs are so deficient that they have to copy what Ethereum devs are doing. Why are you not worried about that?

Torrid said:

Who will win the DeFi space is very undetermined.

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No, Ethereum has already won it. You can tell because of the billions of dollars locked into Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem, the huge and diverse set of decentralized applications already running on Ethereum, and how all of the innovation in the DeFi space is happening on Ethereum. You are living in a fantasy if you think Sovryn can even begin to compete with just Aave alone, let alone protocols built on top of it, let alone protocols built along side it.

Torrid said:

That is not a bash on Ethereum though, because they could not have predicted a lot of the deficiencies that manifested over time. Software requires iteration.

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Where are you getting the idea that Ethereum is not iterating? It's had more substantial updates to it already than just about every other blockchain combined, and have more substantial updates planned - you should watch Vitalik's presentation about updating Ethereum after the merge, there's a lot of work to do. Bitcoin devs are the ones not iterating, happy with the 7 TPS Bitcoin can achieve. You're nuts if you think Ethereum is even remotely similar.

James said:

Do you understand how copying someone else's work means you are not innovating at all? You're saying that Bitcoin devs are so deficient that they have to copy what Ethereum devs are doing. Why are you not worried about that?

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Blizzard's entire MO was to copy and polish. They did fairly well.

Most ETH devs copy from each other as well. That's how software is. (any intellectual property really) Blockchains and DLTs have to be open source by necessity so that means good ideas will spread very quickly. If Sovryn comes up with some good solutions, ETH devs will copy them in short order as well. Not all developers are so tribalist that they would stick to just BTC or ETH in the first place and might work on both. I replied to your comment which stated that 'you can't do this on Bitcoin' and merely pointed out that you can in fact go onto that website and activate a wallet there and use DeFi on Bitcoin just like you can using Metamask on Ethereum and that the time difference between ETH having something and BTC having it is perhaps less than you think.

As for sidechains, I would normally agree with you on their security risks but in this case the 1 to 1 peg and particularly the merged mining make it somewhat unique. If you trust the Bitcoin miners then you could theoretically trust Rootstock.

Tmac said:

Uh, I guess you’ve never heard of Steve Jobs…

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Torrid said:

Blizzard's entire MO was to copy and polish. They did fairly well.

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Two supremely ignorant statements trying to justify the total lack of innovation in Bitcoin as a fucking selling point. Just because you can't see how these companies innovated the market (is anyone seriously arguing instances weren't amazing tech for raiding? I'll fight you on it and win) doesn't mean they didn't.

Torrid said:

If Sovryn comes up with some good solutions, ETH devs will copy them in short order as well.

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That's exactly right, you should really think about this a lot.

EDIT: Took another look around the Aave website, still seems super simple on my end. Is it the "Connect" button instead of saying "Login"?

Torrid said:

I replied to your comment which stated that 'you can't do this on Bitcoin' and merely pointed out that you can in fact go onto that website and activate a wallet there and use DeFi on Bitcoin just like you can using Metamask on Ethereum and that the time difference between ETH having something and BTC having it is perhaps less than you think.

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Also, this is patently false. There is no comparison between Sovryn and DeFi in general. Sovryn is a shell of one component of one piece of DeFi at best, and I'm not sold it will ever grow beyond that. The rate at which new DeFi building blocks are implemented on Ethereum is so far beyond Bitcoin it's as laughable as suggesting $SAFEMOON is going to dethrone Bitcoin.

EQ had instancing in 2003 with LDoN, including raids. Somehow I doubt EQ was the first. Either way I hate instancing.

This is a great analogy, because Blizzard was actually the first studio to implement instances, and SOE basically tried to copy their homework but ended up delivering a fucking travesty of an expansion, you know, kind of like Sovryn.

Tmac said:

All I’m saying, and keep saying, is that there’s a BILLION real world examples of the best technicals and innovation not winning. Most often, other things are more important.

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All I'm saying, and keep saying, is that Ethereum is the superior blockchain technology and will be widely adopted around the world at a level that Bitcoin could never dream of sustaining. Anyone betting against that is an idiot.

Google telling me Anarchy Online had instances first, disregarding some ancient 90s game mentions. But anyway, try not to get too emotionally attached to your investment

Torrid said:

Google telling me Anarchy Online had instances first,

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Bitcoin had smart contracts first, in that case. You obviously didn't play Anarchy Online. And there was no investment, I mined Ethereum on my home computer because I understood that a distributed state machine is much more powerful than a distributed ledger and that Vitalik is a fucking genius. Maybe a few dollars extra on my electricity bill. Did you mine Bitcoin, or are you maybe too attached to your investment in an outdated technology?

All red. Gawd damn millenials cashing out in the weekend to buy beer.

Tmac said:

I doubt there’s a single person here that’s invested in crypto that does have both ETH and BTC.

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Anyone suggesting BTC will be the most widely adopted cryptocurrency is totally wrong and needs to be called out on it/made fun of. You can't just go around spouting off shit and then wonder wtf happened when the world moves a different direction.