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Comment by eterps | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit strange that the EVM doesn't even get a mention, despite its popularity in the crypto financial world today [1].

> Lightning Network Protocol (LNP) and the Bitcoin Protocol (BP) are often compared to TCP/IP.

Apparently LNP/BP is determined to be the be-all and end-all without further consideration?

[1] https://cryptofees.info

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The author is a Bitcoin advocate/developer, but of course the argument wrt privacy would be as valid for Ethereum or other blockchains.

Yeah I realized that, but still it feels sloppy or disingenuous when you consider the extent of the subject matter.

It's supposed to be an article about Freedom, Privacy and financial communication, not specifically about Bitcoin (or is it?).

> Yeah I realized that, but still it feels sloppy or disingenuous when you consider the extent of the subject matter.

> It's supposed to be an article about Freedom, Privacy and financial communication, not specifically about Bitcoin (or is it?).

Dergigi is a Bitcoin maximalist

Here's their book: 21 Lessons: What I've Learned from Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083L93MJ7/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_ZN4ZBQ...

Keeping the Bitcoin maximalist ideas aside, I feel the core of the article still holds true.

Like you can have the exact same text and replace BTC with XMR and it is equally valid, if not more.

I went into this article assuming it was about the recent Tornado Cash sanctions, the Bitcoin maximalism twist was a surprise

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars

Just like TCP/IP, there will be only a single winning protocol for money and value transfer.

And yet in the modern world there's tens of them. There was no single winner, and why would we want one? I've never heard anyone advocate for merging VisaNet with the Mastercard network with the Discover network with the UnionPay network with the Swift network with the EFTPOS network with the Interac network.

This sounds like... centralization.

Those are payment networks, not base layer protocols.

Same thing. They're private protocols. People build on top of VisaNet you know. There's this company, Stripe, you may have heard of it.

Not same thing.

Please explain clearly where you think the delta is.

In layered systems, there's a hierarchy of layers. Bitcoin is a layer 1 money protocol. Visa is level 8 (not literally), i.e. it is built on top of layers upon layers, which are built on top of US dollar and even that might not be the base layer yet. If we were in a gold standard, gold would be the base layer for US dollar, and the systems on top of it.

Layered systems tend to naturally converge into a single base layer, and the higher layers are more sprawling and dynamic.

Bitcoin is built on top of several other layers too, the community has just arbitrarily called it 'L1', that's not the point. Thanks, though.

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