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Living on the edge!

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Dr Brian of London ✅
@brianoflondon
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4 min read

Tales from the interface between Hive and the Bitcoin and Lighting maximalists

My work on Podcasting 2.0 Value for Value, combined with the Podping Protocol which has also been developed under the Podcasting 2.0 banner, has brought me into view of the wider Bitcoin and Lightning communities.

Podping

Hive is the only backend for a system like Podping that anyone has actually built.

Rather than being happy about this, it seems a few of the Bitcoin aficionados, who have attached themselves to Podcasting 2.0, somehow feel slighted that their wonderful Lightning or Bitcoin systems weren't "chosen".

After my last appearance on the Podcasting 2.0 Podcast I received the following DM on Twitter from someone in the Bitcoin world with more than 3 times my follower count:

One thing not mentioned is platform risk

My strong suspicion is that Hive itself dies over time

https://twitter.com/skwp/status/1179013958092623872

I think lightning payments combined with non-monetized distributed messaging infrastructure (eg Matrix) is prob the way to go.

To which I replied, without even checking his bio:

"Build it"

After he pointed out the companies he's involved in (in non technical roles I should add) he continued:

My two sats is you'll waste your time messing with alts. Would be better to engage with Bitcoin entrepreneurs or build it yourself leveraging Bitcoin and distributed infrastructure. No token needed.

We are doing a ton with Adam and V4V, building the sats onramp for Fountain and others, etc.

DPOS (and any POS system) are always going to end in tears.

The following is a patched up version of my reply to him.

Ordinarily I've decided to stop trying to convince most people about what Hive is or what it represents, especially the story of its rather astonishing birth but I can tell you're a serious person so I won't be so flippant.

I didn't hold and especially didn't voice any significant opinions about Lightning until I worked with it. I'd say I've put in the hours on that front. I'm a few days away from a gateway for Lightning invoices to Hive to match my Hive to Lightning and streaming sats into Hive systems which are all working.

I'm actually responsible for adding more value enabled podcasts to V4V than ANYONE because every single video creator on @threespeak can receive Sats via Hive without having to do anything. I think I've added 300% or more of all V4V podcasts. This is because every Hive key holder can receive funds while they sleep without running a server or dealing with strange Telegram systems.

Until someone has really tried using a system as complex as these (and I mean trying to build with them, not just clicking like on a post or snapping a QR code) I'm not sure I'd take their opinion seriously.

So I'll pass on your Hive opinions for now and I will wait with baited breath to see what you come up with to match @podping's 5,000 transaction, 20,000 event per day system with infinite replay and which has cost barely anything to set up. Actually most of it was internally funded because the Hive community awarded me a grant from the DAO we funded with the proceeds of Justin Sun's failed Sybil and Money attack.

I have absolutely no malice or disrespect toward Lightning aficionados. I'm highly reserved in my opinions on how it will scale and what will happen when big money comes in but when it all shakes out the only thing I wish to see is sovereign people and crying censors.

For 9 months I've been told of better ways to do podping. The reason podping is in use is because I built a demo in 3 hours and the reason that was possible is because of unique characteristics of Hive which you don't know about because you dismiss it from a position of near zero knowledge.

I think I covered platform risk better in this essay.

Final thoughts

I don't actually think the wider Lightning and BTC crowd have fully grasped how revolutionary the streaming sats system within value for value for podcasts really is. The question will be whether the vast centralising forces of venture capital and other malign interests, already captured by and serving the central banks, will allow Lightning to remain what it is.

What these Bitcoin maxis also don't know is that Hive's fee-less chain would work though I feel that the eventual transaction volume we hope for would push and blockchain solution (even Hive). Remember: Lightning is not a blockchain system. It is a scaling system built onto Bitcoin but all transactions are essentially private.

Whichever way you think the future is going, there's no substitute for actually using and trying all technologies before pretending to be an expert in any of them.

Support Proposal 201 on PeakD Support Proposal 201 with Hivesigner Support Proposal 201 on Ecency