| Hey Jimmy - I hope the bitcoiners that eventually read this thread can get both sides, as many project teams have received some version of the "do it on bitcoin with sidechains/lightning/liquid/rsk" refrain. I think in practice it's more complicated than that. First - I tend to think an idea with clear similarities being tried before and failing is default a non-negative (sometimes good) sign: shows us what didn't work, and deepens everyone's understanding/validation of the problem space. I would also say that it's more similar to Bitcoin than most people would think. Looking at the software, I think it's pretty cool that handshake's first implementation is a fork of a bitcoin implementation that has seen production usage for years (bcoin), one important change is the addition of opcodes to support covenants, so that blinded vickery name auctions can be done fully on-chain. Basically, Handshake can build on top of the security and reliability that Bitcoin-like systems have validated for us over the last few years: namely, UTXO systems, proof of work, user knowledge/habits around self-custody. I think Bitcoiners could consider looking at Handshake from this perspective: there is a lot of core technology, architecture decisions, and spirit that is similar. Perhaps if you believe in the potential of public blockchains like many early Bitcoiners do, the solution might not be things like sidechains (which are mentioned as a potential scaling option in the design notes), but extending the core technology in a minimal, single-purpose way (to support auctions)? Perhaps it is possible that Handshake goes down as one of the best examples of an ambitious new project actually "using Bitcoin" (albeit in a way most Bitcoiners would not immediately agree with) instead of creating "yet another token"? ---- p.s. I've been a fan of yours for years and your content was some of the first I ran into when I was entering crypto full-time. I guess at the end of the day I'm simply curious what you thought of the other projects so far (including Namecoin and ENS) - do you own any names on other decentralized naming systems? What do you think prevented Namecoin from getting sufficient traction from your perspective? |