Jack Mallers' Atlantis speech: This is why Solana and other shitcoins don't work

[highalch]

Well, in case you missed it, one of the best presentations on Bitcoin Atlantis. (see: https://twitter.com/jackmallers/status/1765546075455115717 )
Kudos go to Jack Mallers, who explains how important was for Satoshi to create bitcoin's own time.

He goes for the argument that without the right difficulty adjustment people were incentivised to create more and more blocks in a given time window, thus speeding up bitcoin's clock. That said, bitcoin would eventually run so fast, nodes had a hard time agreeing on transactions due to physical limitations on data transfer speed.

Mallers points out that PoW and the difficulty adjustment are together the solution and even says: "This is why Solana and other shitcoins don't work"

To my understanding, most non-PoW blockchains have their own take on difficulty adjustment though. If you share the views that most other blockchains are destined to fail, please explain like I'm five why verifiable delay functions or other cryptographic takes will not do.

[thecodebear]

Well Solana in particular is kinda a joke since they can't even keep it up and running all the time. That network has gone down so many times the past couple years it could never be used for anything more than just being a toy. It's market value is also proof that the average crypto investor doesn't care about how good a blockchain is, outside of Bitcoin its just all pure speculation.

And yeah of course there are a lot of things about Bitcoin that make it unique.


I don't know I'd say most blockchains are destined to fail, they are just destined to never be anything important. They may keep existing, but that doesn't mean they are ever going to be used for anything beyond trading. With how centralized altcoins are, and how the creators do premines and sell off all the tokens, these companies that run the altcoins can keep paying people long after they've lost any relevance, as long as their are speculators in the market just trying to trade them. So I think these things will keep existing, they'll just never have any real useful economic activity. It has yet to be seen if even Ethereum will ever gain any real usefulness, or if its just gonna be where people make little crypto experiments. There will probably be enough activity to keep these things going, but just Bitcoin is going to keep growing into being a global currency while all these altcoins are just gonna stay as little experiments that sorta exist solely in the own crypto world, without making much dent on the external world. Unless, of course, someone comes up with "the next Facebook", or whatever, in the form of a crypto app, and specifically for some reason choose to use Ethereum or a random altcoin instead of Bitcoin. Hard to imagine such a crypto app becoming the next whatever though if it isn't built using Bitcoin.

[blckhawk]

Well Solana in particular is kinda a joke since they can't even keep it up and running all the time. That network has gone down so many times the past couple years it could never be used for anything more than just being a toy. It's market value is also proof that the average crypto investor doesn't care about how good a blockchain is, outside of Bitcoin its just all pure speculation.

I'm not a fan of Solana although I did invest in them because they seem promising but I didn't know this part though, kind of seems to me like they're doing all of this projects and hackathons but they can't maintain a network that doesn't die on their users? The worst thing that I can think that would happen is if you've got a lot of Solana and it suddenly spikes in price but then the network died and then when it goes back up, it's too late to sell because the price have stabilized and a lot of people have already sold their Solana. Man, that's an awful thing especially if you really need the money that you'd profit out of it for something. It's admirable though that they're trying to get out of what bitcoin and bitcoin network can do because it's really difficult when the eclipse is so big.

[yhiaali3]

There is no doubt that adjusting the difficulty of Bitcoin mining to obtain an almost constant time to create each block is one of the many things that indicate Satoshi’s genius. This makes Bitcoin last a long time while maintaining scarcity, which is one of the most important factors that gives the coin its value.

But of course, it cannot be said that blockchains that do not rely on Proof of Work (PoW) will inevitably fail. There are already successful chains that are still working efficiently even now, even though they do not rely on (PoW), but it can be said that they cannot be compared to Bitcoin and will not achieve the level of security and success that it has achieved Bitcoin network.

[mk4]

Well Solana in particular is kinda a joke since they can't even keep it up and running all the time. That network has gone down so many times the past couple years it could never be used for anything more than just being a toy. It's market value is also proof that the average crypto investor doesn't care about how good a blockchain is, outside of Bitcoin its just all pure speculation.

Funnily enough, most of retail doesn't care much about tech, and they do use it "seriously". Networks like Solana have had decent usage in 3rd world countries simply because they can move USDT/USDC almost instantly and very cheaply. A network outage that only goes down 1/2/3 times a year is already a huge godsend to them.

[headingnorth]

As a layperson I don't think 99% (or probably more like 100%) of people have any clue what actual value Solana and Ethereum have in the real world beyond being a platform for scam tokens, meme coins, NFTs, etc. in other words just a platform for pure gambling and speculation on crap that doesn't have any real world value.

The influencers who peddle this garbage on Youtube can never tell you what their real value is beyond pure speculation of the price going up and down.

I can never invest in anything that I can't understand. To me bitcoin is simple to understand that anyone can understand. It is just a store of value that is superior to gold in every way but without all the numerous deficiencies of gold. If you can't explain it in simple terms that the average Joe can understand they will never invest in it and it will have very limited adoption.