I've long been a skeptic of the non-fungible tokens craze. Your Uncle Marty hasn't picked up the joysticks since college, so he hasn't been exposed to the ever expanding world of gaming skins that seem to be a big hit amongst the youths. I will admit, there seems to be a market for these in-game assets. However, the focus of today's letter won't be whether or not NFTs are actually a thing that should have value or not. (I still think they're stupid.) The point I will be attempting to drive home is the fact that - via scaling in layers - Bitcoin can support use cases that many altcoin scammers have tried to say it cannot.

If you freaks don't recall, I once begrudgingly wrote about cryptokitties and how they clogged up the Etherium blockchain in December 2017. (I highly recommend you go back and read that post. This rag is proving to be a nice little running journal of the things that have happened in this space and a crazy person's initial reactions. I was much feistier back in the day.) At the time, Ethereum was promising the world a world computer that would be able to accomplish everything at the base layer. The emergence of cryptokitties made it very apparent that this was a terrible protocol design decision. Even though the foray into NFTs on Etherium proved to be cause for concern, many jeered Bitcoin due to it's inability to provide such a use case. Despite the fact that Counterparty did NFTs on Bitcoin many years before cryptokitties came to Etherium.

Here we stand less than three years later, and it seems like this use case has been brought back to Bitcoin in a scalable way via the Liquid sidechain. Whether or not they gain popularity or accrue significant value is yet to be determined. The fact that matters is that this type of thing is possible to build on top of bitcoin via layering. This isn't the only use case that Bitcoin has been made fun of for not being able to service that will eventually come to Bitcoin via second and third layers. Smart contracts are on the way in the form of discreet log contracts that leverage the Lightning Network. Web3 is being built out on the LN as well. These are but a few examples of use cases that altcoins are attempting to bring to market that will be brought to the market via the Bitcoin stack in the long-run.

Don't let the siren calls of altcoiners confuse you. Bitcoin's slow, methodic, modular scaling solutions are proving to be advantageous in comparison to what other projects are pushing. Patience is key. This will all take time. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Final thought...

I miss live music.