I had the very distinct pleasure of appearing on the illustrious Shitcoin TV with Andreas Brekken to talk about all things Dash, crypto, and sound money. Shitcoin TV is the YouTube channel of Shitcoin.com, a deceptively deep project which reviews cryptocurrency projects extensively, compiling from the source code on up, thoroughly testing all its features for a final review.
We began by talking about my personal journey to cryptocurrency, starting with a grounding in precious metals and a move to New Hampshire for the Free State Project. We covered how I discovered and started living off of Bitcoin, going fully unbanked, and running into issues with the block size limitations and resulting scaling problems. Finally, we went over my switch to Dash, its distribution and various benefits, as well as its long road to listing on Coinbase Pro, and subsequently Coinbase, significantly expanding its reach to new users, and of course Dash’s fast confirmation functionality InstantSend and its ChainLocks anti-51% attack feature.
The answer to the great conundrum: what’s Lightning’s future?
We then focused on Bitcoin’s Lightning network, of which Shitcoin.com used to be the largest node. We covered the off-chain solution and how well it works, or rather, doesn’t work, and how its challenges have led to using trusted and centralized solutions, including Andreas opining that Blockstream’s Liquid network is better than Lightning and will receive more business, even though it’s more centralized. I pointed out that Lightning may never succeed long-term as a scaling solution, not directly due to its technical issues or limitations, but because it represents a solution to an arbitrary problem that is the ability to scale without increasing the block size, and as such will always seek to address those very specific needs, rather than the general need to scale more broadly and focusing on user experience.
The full interview is available and included above.
