no. Merge mining has existed for a long time in Bitcoin and other chains. Namecoin, for example, is merge mined. Drivechains require a miner-activated softfork for *blind* merge mining, which lets the side chain operate very independently, so you can have a chain that is denominated in Bitcoin but that uses completely different rules for state (one of Paul’s proposed side chain for his upcoming drivechaik-enabled Bitcoin fork eCash.com will use zk-Snarks to make a privacy coin).

I'm generally in support of anything that will give competition to the shitshow that is LN, as well as deossify the parasitic trusted third parties that have entrenched themselves at the expense of Bitcoin. This includes both BIP300+301 blind merge mining/drivechains, and covenants. I also think taproot should be deprecated and there should be no fee discount regarding witness.

Yes, a lot of people have a parasocial relationship with Odell because he runs a Bitcoin podcast and they like Bitcoin, and they hear his voice and see his tweets often enough that they think of him as a friend. But on Nostr he did nothing but fund Primal, which is a centralized garbage that censors people via its “caching service” which is named in an Orwellian fashion, as caches make things faster but it actually censors people they don’t like and algorithmically promotes their allies.

Similarly, in Bitcoin Odell now aggressively pushes Spark projects, and Spark’s claim to be noncustodial is essentially absolute bullshit. Everything Spark is running to a single ASN that can surveil and censor clients, and their claim of the ability to unilaterally exit is completely fraudulent:

https://x.com/francispouliot_/status/2075284584489439668

Odell harms Nostr, harms Bitcoin, and harms p2p rights. Everything he gets involved with, his money goes to his friends and allies, centralized censorware gets produced, and he moves onto the next grift. He is not your friend. He is not one of the good guys.

> the bottom line is that it is possible to have an asset that is not primarily used for MoE.

well of course, virtually no assets are used as medium exchange. I generally don’t pay for goods or services with equities, bonds, or real estate.

Gold is something that many people are evolutionarily attuned to irrationally desiring. Millennia of gold being the common store of value has an effect that is kind of like seeing the characters in The Treasure of Sierra Madre. It’s like teen strippers or cured pork fat, in that there is a deeply wired reward pathway that fires when you come in contact with it. You know that it’s something that you want. A sack of krugerrands calls to some basic ancient urge in most people in a way that a duffel bag full of banknotes or a balance in a database does not. I know because I have a fair number of them even though they generally give dogshit return longterm versus other assets. I can’t stop myself. There’s a magic to gold. Looking at it, running your fingers through piles of it. Bitcoin has to compete against gold on its merits, which, for most, do not include natural physiological responses honed from countless millennia of evolution governed by the autonomic nervous system and central amygdala.

yes, nobody calls Odell out, he grifts millions of dollars in the space, he took all the money earmarked for Nostr that Jack Dorsey gave OpenSats and made sure it all went to his friends to make useless fucking trash and centralized services. He’s a persistent, continuous poisonous threat to Bitcoin, to Nostr, to peer to peer/decentralized rights, all the things he claims to represent he consistently sponges up all the social support and venture capital for to line his pockets.

In the above post, it is especially relevant, because he was raising money for Samourai supposedly to defend the rights of tool makers and users for Bitcoin privacy, but they never went to trial. Meanwhile, Sterlingov was actually appealing and will determine the law for us all, and the money that Odell stole could have gone to the actual case that was going to judge what our rights are.

You would know all this if you read the post.

because he runs a podcast and is a giant grifter

Odell supposedly raised a million dollars for Samourai, but they pled out and it doesn’t cost a million dollars to plea. It doesn’t even cost a million dollars to go to trial, if your case is attempting to secure legal precedent. Somewhere Odell wasted 970k of people’s money. I’d like to know where, and you should too.

> monero-style ring signatures are weak because they're linkable over time

check out the coming FCMP++ upgrade, the era of monero having lesser theoretical security is coming to a close.

I’d also like to see the possibility for drivechains and covenants. I’m not a largeblocker but the stuff Bitcoin Cash has done that allow proper two-way pegs is excellent work. It would be better if all these alternative projects could just fuck off to their own side chain, that we could have the unit of account of all our stuff denominated in Bitcoin, allow infinite experimentation within the confines of the side chain, but not muddy node operators who don’t want to see or deal with the cost of this shit.

This stuff is endlessly shilled against even though they are completely reversible because there’s a whole ecosystem of vested interests that are making money off of completely broken lightning implementations or some kind of equally parasitic grifting and allowing for extensive sidechains would hurt their reputations and end their crypto grifting.

That being said, shitcoiners are on the board of Luke’s company, and they have a vested interest in making sure Bitcoin doesn’t have viable additional use cases as well. I think it is very difficult to see the truth clearly when your paycheck depends on you not doing so.

The original is true to the Thai creation. I don’t like it too much. The Red Bull exclusive flavors invented by Austrian food chemists working tirelessly in Fuschl am See seem superior. I heartily recommend the peach-nectarine flavor, in the burnt umber colored can. Do not confuse this with the white peach flavor in the pink can, which I think is solidly mid. Better than the original, but nothing to write home about.

The original Thai version of Red Bull, Krating Daeng is named after a hyper nationalist paramilitary. The exact years they were massacring libtard student protestors and journalists, at the peak of their murderous activities, Thai people slapped their name and logo on a can and started making it a cool and refreshing way to wake up after a night of drinking. The group was widely popular amongst the public, and was literally taken out for drinking and to the brothels by the Thai King. It’s like if Croatia had a drink called Ustaše or Germany had one called Schutzstaffel and it was beloved all around the world. Also the Austrian billionaire that carbonated it and brought it to Europe, Dietrich Mateschitz, was anti-vax and anti-immigration. Red Bull is the most extremely based thing you can possibly drink and it is basically international fascism in a can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Gaurs