Why Bitcoin Doesn't Need Smart Contracts... But Bitcoiners Do

06 Sep 2020

A Bitcoin Mutant

Bitcoin doesn’t need “smart contracts” for the same reason your bathroom scale doesn’t need to exercise. Both are there to provide you with an objective standard. If you are having difficulty with that standard, it is you that needs to change, not the standard.

Unfortunately, right now, we are having difficulty. Our diet has been very poor. Bitcoin offers us a nutritious and balanced diet of privacy, self-custody, and censorship resistance… and we have been snacking on Coinbase cookies and Binance bars.

Going on a diet is never easy. It takes self-education and self-discipline. It also takes access. Poor people in developed countries have much higher rates of obesity than the wealthy. If it is too expensive or too much effort to eat right, most people don’t. Right now, in Bitcoinland eating right is way too expensive and inaccessible. There are a handful of decentralized exchanges, like Bisq and HODL HODL, built by smart, dedicated coders. The maintainers of these platforms are saints. Unfortunately, the platforms are extremely limited. They are slow, expensive, difficult to use.

Meanwhile, in ETHland, there has been an explosion of DeFi innovation, producing an ever growing and ever improving set of decentralized trading, lending, borrowing and derivatives products. One of these decentralized trading venues, Uniswap even sometimes has higher trade volumes than Coinbase Pro. ETHland is like a hippie farm, churning out high-quality, organic, locally grown produce that should make a Bitcoin nutritionist weep with joy. Unfortunately, there is a complete absence of the most important ingredient: meat. Worse, they jump on whatever silly fad happens to be in vogue. Yesterday it was Augur crystals, then it was polka dots and Tie-DAI shirts and now, for whatever reason, it’s YAMs and Sushi.

Boys, it’s time to put meat back on the menu. Bitcoin is the cornerstone of any healthy diet. It goes best with a side of defi services instead of the centralized crap we are currently shoving our bitcoin into. So I propose we learn from the crypto-vegans and improve upon their methods, with the science, industriousness, energy and scale that is characteristic of red-blooded meat eaters.

Now, I know that some of you reading this are finding it highly offensive. The mere suggestion that there is anything to learn from vegan hippies, sends you into a hysterical apoplexy. That’s cool, you can @me.

The rest of you, who have less delicate stomachs, let’s continue shall we? Good artists copy, great artists steal. Great empires steal your weapons and then also beat you over the head with them. The Roman Empire was built on the principle that if anyone dared invent anything that might prove to have even the slightest usefulness, they would steal it and then show you how a proper man uses it. They stole warships from Carthage, war elephants from Macedon and the Galdius from the Iberians. Many Bitcoiners fancy themselves Spartans, you know the stubborn guys who were massacred to the last man at thermopylae. Well, thanks to their refusal to adapt and adopt, the Romans wiped the floor with them. Choose your heroes wisely, I prefer for us to be Legion.

Recently a new meme has taken hold: Bitcoin Mutants. I like the idea of a Mutant Legion marching into the barbarian Altcoin hinterland, pillaging what is valuable and salting the earth behind us.

Are you not entertained?

My plan, as a humble legionary of the Bitcoin Empire, is to steal the moderately useful defi technology built by the vegans, adapt and improve it and show them how a Bitcoiner uses it. Which is to say, with meat.

I owe a debt to the cypherpunk wizards, smarter than me, who have been working on making Bitcoin sidechain technology possible. In particular, Sergio Lerner should really be getting way more credit. He is the inventor of RSK, a Bitcoin sidechain that is designed to be EVM-compatible. His invention allows us Mutant Legionaries to pick and choose the most useful bits of code from Ethereum, port them to RSK and convert them to Bitcoin-native defi tools, with very little effort. The only difficult part is cleaning out all the reiki crystals and granola crumbs… making sure that the decentralization is real, not just theatre.

Very soon we will launch Sovryn, which we hope will be just the first among many powerful, easy-to-use, Bitcoin-native defi apps. Then it will be time for us Bitcoiners to think seriously about going on a diet…. Cutting out all that unhealthy centralised crap and dramatically reducing our KYC levels. That stuff can clog your arteries. I wouldn’t be surprised if very soon after, Bitcoin defi eclipsed Ethereum “defi” in terms of scale, liquidity, diversity and decentralization.

Bitcoin after all, is the standard.

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