After that decade ahead piece by Deutsche Bank in my previous post, let’s see the opinion of someone much more adept, Bitcoin Core contributor John Newbery. If you’re not aware, John works at Chaincode Labs, set up Bitcoin Optech, and helps organize the bitdevs NYC meetups, the Chaincode Residency programs and the weekly Bitcoin Core review club. He works on the Bitcoin source code daily. In other words, he’s a bonafide Bitcoin wizard.
Here is a great thread in which he outlines how he thinks several key technological initiatives being worked on in Bitcoin right now (namely the Lightning Network, Schnorr/Taproot, PayJoin, contracting) will coalesce into an even more robust, cheaper, more secure, more private protocol and will allow better user experience, more interoperability between wallets/services, and even more rapid innovation.
Of interest, John notes that all this technology is moving in the same direction: using the base layer block chain for what it’s meant to do—allow disparate nodes to arrive at consensus on the state of the ledger—while contracting and functionality are pushed up to layer two and beyond. This is a modular scaling solution, similar to what has worked when engineering other protocols (such as the internet itself) in the past. In this case, the idea is to keep the base layer (the main blockchain) efficient so as to preserve network decentralization (ability of individual users to run nodes and maintain the blockchain) and therefore censorship resistance (which is the entire value proposition of a cryptocurrency!), while adding advanced technology to alternate layers that interact with and settle on the base layer. This is the sophisticated approach to scaling Bitcoin while maintaining it’s value proposition (despite what shitcoiners may say).
Holy shit! It’s all coming together.
Link to the original Twitter thread:
Link to the thread compiled into one web page: