Episode 7 of CryptoSlate’s podcast Bittalk discussed the potential risks and benefits of introducing new changes to Bitcoin. Hosts Akiba of his CryptoSlate, James of the CryptoSlate research team, and Nick of Mercury Wallet discuss various topics related to the current state of Bitcoin, including the development of Bitcoin infrastructure, Nostr Improvement Protocols (NIP), and the Lightning network. I touched on the topic.
The podcast also covered Ordinal, a database that allows users to write chunks of data to Bitcoin, and whether Bitcoin could be considered security in the future. One of the main points of discussion was Nostr’s potential use cases, such as his Zapper, Nostr’s overall micropayment system. With the growing number of nodes and exponential growth in network capacity, the Lightning Network is also set to benefit from his Nostr development.
One of the main points of contention is the fear of change among Bitcoiners, who believe that adding something like an ordinal could disrupt the purest form of hard-money digital assets. There was also Nick pointed out that the history and complexity of consensus layers may be a key factor behind this fear. Bitcoin has had bugs in the past, and changing the protocol could be risky, like changing the engine of an airplane while it is in flight.
The conversation also touched on the controversy surrounding the need for inflation fees that miners need to protect the network. Some experts like Peter Todd have suggested that some kind of inflation fee is needed, but Nick said Bitcoin is still in its infancy and adding inflation now would be a good idea. He added that there could be tiers of Lightning Channels that could provide enough security to justify the fees to justify mining.
Hosts have also discussed growing interest in ordinal numbers and NFTs, with some even going so far as to purchase ordinal numbers via Lightning. Nick pointed out that while many of the NFT Ethereum officials are leaning towards Bitcoin for his NFT, they are likely to stay for lightning speed.
The BitTalk podcast is currently streaming weekly, and Akiba will be joining the podcast from Denver on the next episode. BTC hit new lows on the day the podcast was recorded, but the host still saw great potential in Bitcoin’s future.
