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Issue #960: DLCs, scaling sat streaming, & Tesla contributing to FOSS

Issue #960: DLCs, scaling sat streaming, & Tesla contributing to FOSS

Mar 30, 2021
Marty's Ƀent

Issue #960: DLCs, scaling sat streaming, & Tesla contributing to FOSS

It's been a busy day for your Uncle Marty, so this will be a bit of a scatter brained issue that highlights a few things that caught my attention over the last 24-hours.

First up, we have an update from our friends at Suredbits pertaining to how the use of multiple oracles for specific Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs) works in practice. If you've been following the work Suredbits has been doing on DLCs, this blogpost is extremely informative and illustrates just how robust, low impact, and private these smart contracts can be. For those of you who may be new to this dirty part of the Internet, a DLC allows individuals to construct smart contracts that automatically distribute funds to one party or another based on the outcome of a certain event.

via Suredbits

The parties involved in a DLC get to choose an information oracle that feeds information about the outcomes of events to the contract, which dictates who the sats within the DLC are distributed to. To mitigate the centralization risk of using one oracle who may feed bad data to the DLC, which would move funds in a way they shouldn't be moved, parties can choose multiple oracles feeding data for the same event. The example used in the blogpost is a bet on the price of bitcoin at a certain point in time with three oracles being used to verify the event. If you want to know how the oracles are chosen, how their data is compared, and which source gets chosen as the ultimate oracle within the contract go read the blog. The stuff that is being built out is extremely well thought out and groundbreaking.

via Bottle Pay

Next up, Joost Jager wrote up an analysis piece that dives into the scalability of Lightning Nodes taking the use case of streaming sats to podcasters into consideration. At the moment, my experience getting sats streamed to me via Podcasting 2.0 compatible apps like Sphinx Chat and Breez has been phenomenal, but can it scale? Joost attempts to quantify just how much Lightning nodes can scale given the current nature of the network with much consideration on transaction throughput and disk storage requirements. In his analysis Joost compares different implementations and node set ups. Needless to say, there is still some work to do in terms of ensuring the Lightning Network can scale to billions of users. However, it's great to see smart individuals like Joost focusing their time and attention on these problems.

With that being said, this was one individual running a test in a particular way. Olaoluwa Osuntokun aka roasbeef ran a similar test on his hardware and produced different results. Something to consider when dissecting this particular analysis.

Last, but certainly not least, we had this pleasantly surprising development hit the market today from the BTCPay Server project:

Tesla is REALLY leaning into Bitcoin. The news of them purchasing $1.5B worth of sats earlier this year was a huge development and endorsement from an innovative company in the public markets. To many, this move alone was all Tesla had to do, but they didn't stop there. Not too long after they announced that they would accept bitcoin as payment for their cars and hodl the bitcoin they received on their balance sheet instead of converting it to cuck bucks. Pretty dope. When they announced this, they also said they decided to build their own bitcoin payment processing software in house as opposed to leveraging a third party vendor. Trending towards epic.

Well, Tesla's foray into Bitcoin may have officially entered epic territory today after the world became aware of the fact that they disclosed a bug and helped in contributing a patch to BTCPay Server open source software project. Leading many to believe this is the software they leveraged to build their in-house payment processor. What a beautiful thing to see. Free and open source software is a beautiful thing. And this move by Tesla highlights how powerful open source software can be, especially when it becomes systemically important like the Bitcoin network is becoming today.

The utility of Bitcoin attracts the Teslas of the world with its hard monetary properties and distributed nature which protects those properties, and Tesla brings its engineering talent to inspect and improve the network and the ecosystem growing around it. Once you have skin in the Bitcoin game, you are highly incentivized to make sure the network survives and thrives. Expect more and more of this to happen as Bitcoin becomes more systemically important in our global economy. Bitcoin is not only going to suck in capital from every other asset class which will inevitably push its price higher. As it does that it is going to suck in human capital in the process, which will work to make sure the financial capital is secured. Bullish.

(This turned out to be longer than expected. sry not sry)


Final thought...

Early morning playground rips are good for the soul.


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