bitcoin is still a young protocol in every sense. These teenage years are arguably more formative than any other period in its short history because the stakes are already high for an innovative project with less than two decades of testing and growth. As I've watched new investors, developers, users and marketers flock to bitcoin over the past 18 months, the fundamental reasons why the so-called bitcoin Renaissance is important seem to take a backseat.
During this period of time I have been asked countless questions like “What do you think of this new L2?” or “Will this new L2 really work?” In almost every case, my response has been, “I don't know.” Building on bitcoin is difficult and many people don't know how to do it. Therefore, it is difficult to know exactly what someone is building, much less whether it will work, if they themselves don't know what they are doing. But this reality certainly hasn't deterred founders and investors from trying to make a profit.
In short, this new era of bitcoin activity is largely defined by marketing rather than actual innovation.
Engineering first, marketing later
My academic and professional background is in mathematics and cryptography, not marketing. I understand the importance of developing a strong brand for a winning product or protocol, but marketing alone is at best not enough and at worst very dangerous. Innovative ideas need solid foundations, not nonsense. Satoshi's latest forum post began with the words every bitcoin builder should take to heart: “There is more work to do (…)“Marketing-backed bitcoin projects are doomed to fail and harm their users, investors, and the community as a whole.
One symptom of this dynamic is the simple lack of technical documents. While these documents are often boring and seem optional to most people, white papers are intended as a tool to explain new ideas as clearly as possible to generate criticism, imitation, and actual implementation. But well-written whitepapers seem to be an afterthought for most of these new projects that claim to be based on bitcoin. Instead, the industry landscape has been defined by marketing materials.
The signs of this type of project are easy to spot. Rhetoric such as “bitcoin-powered,” “bitcoin-aligned,” or “bitcoin hybrid” is often used. In many cases, this language is communicated to hide the fact that these protocols are not actually built on top of bitcoin. In other cases, this marketing is used to distract from the reality that no one (not even the founders) knows what they are building, but wants to leverage the bitcoin brand anyway.
What comes to mind when I consider this unfortunate reality is a principle from the world of cryptography called security through obscurity. In short, this idea means that no one knows how a certain thing works, so it might actually be safe. To be clear, this is not something a serious engineering team can aspire to.
At Botanix Labs, we are building an EVM equivalent layer with a testnet running on bitcoin at the time of publication. Instead of launching with a new token and searching exchange listings, we focused on building a simple and secure protocol. Instead of playing marketing games, we focus on building an ecosystem of autonomous applications that people want to use.
We begin conceptualizing Spiderchain in late 2022.
We launch a testnet in November 2023.
We plan to launch the first version of our mainnet this summer.
We believe building is the best way to help bitcoin succeed.
We are the watchers
Examining new bitcoin projects is not an activity that only the most experienced software engineers and cryptographers can undertake. Anyone using bitcoin can and should ask simple questions, such as:
- “Who has the keys?”
- “Is this Sybil tough?”
- “Can operators execute a hostage attack?”
- “What are your basic security assumptions?”
But all these questions should already be answered in simple language in a white paper. Any project without a clear design, without clearly documented safety risks, and without a clearly written analysis of its trade-offs and objectives is part of the problem. Unfortunately, this seems to have quickly become the norm in bitcoin's second-layer landscape. At Botanix Labs, we carefully articulate our protocol design, attack vectors, and more in our whitepaper, which is available on our Homepage.
Cyperpunks write code. But the rise of new second-layer bitcoin protocols (many of which do not deserve that title) has forgotten this simple truth. Regulators and auditors cannot and should not be trusted to correct this. We, the bitcoin community, must remain focused on the long-term mission and ignore short-term gimmicks.
What someone builds should matter more than how they market it. And for any serious bitcoin-based project, marketing is never more important than security. Normalizing this principle in all corners of the bitcoin industry is a responsibility shared by every person at bitcoin.
The fight against fiat
bitcoin is a movement, not a money grab. And I believe we can and should do better than the ideas and projects being offered to the market in this ongoing bitcoin renaissance. Don't stay silent. Don't accept this behavior. Don't expect the market to weed out these bad actors on its own.
We are in a fight against a fiat regime that desperately needs us to fail in building a decentralized, permissionless financial system that will run on bitcoin for centuries. But most new bitcoin-branded projects don't think more than 12 months into the future.
How does this improve the world or achieve our shared mission?
Satoshi Nakamoto exited the bitcoin world writing: “I moved on to other things. (bitcoin) is in good hands.” Those hands are our hands, and everyone who cares about the future of money must be vigilant to ensure they remain good.
