OK! Some Liquid impressions and thoughts.
So, today I stumbled across a ridiculous arbitrage opportunity. Using some android decentralized trustless exchange apps I was able to buy L-TUSD and sell for L-BTC and make a fairly nice little profit. Rinse and repeat until the liquidity provider had no more to sell.
But this had me doing LBTC and Tether transactions... A LOT of them. So just some thoughts on Liquid.
++Liquid is FAST! During dozens transactions from one wallet to another, by the time I switched apps the transaction was both received, AND confirmed. I never had to wait for just about anything. This was true for both LBTC and LTUSD moves.
++The privacy is strong. Here is one of the transactions. Can you see what I was moving. From where to where? The amounts of any of it/ The amounts of the sending UTXOs? NO, No, and No. You can see some addresses, but you do not know for sure which is the receiving address and which was for change. As far as I can tell this privacy is Monero Strength (just the CT part, Monero is still MUCH better overall) and no one including Federaion member have ANY idea what I am doing, really.
https://blockstream.info/liquid/tx/6a08693544181255b1f079ffd0a5ae5f149aa212fca2d96a3475be3aaf6ae7f3++Transaction fees are cheap. But not really much cheaper than the Bitcoin network. They make these scale. I was spending about a dime for every transaction.
++Blockstream has broken bitcoin so they can rip off the miner. Just kidding. I wanted to turn into a BSV conspiracy theorist for a sec. BUT Blockstream *is* taking 100% of these fees, and has built a powerful Bitcoin sidechain that might make them some pretty serious money. They are basically positioning themselves as a modern day payment rail like Visa or Amex.
++The programmibility is quite excellent. Obviously the "Dex" stuff is trailing ETH and Solana et al a little. But it IS WORKING. on a pure BTC sidechain... AND it is WAY CHEAPER than those other chains. AND it does not leave a bunch of useless data on the base BTC chain.
++When doing this activity I had to get used to keeping a teeny little pile of L-SATs behind to act as transaction fees nomatter what asset I was sending. This is analogous to ETH Gas or Gwei or whatever they call it. Except it's like 11 cents.
As far as I understand ALL of my trades happened trustlessly on the Liquid blockchain at little to no risk to me whatsoever. No third parties, or at least a blind distributed federation making it possible. I really think Liquid is still a sleeper. And I also think, since it is opersource it will be the foundation that will allow lots of nice competition in the whole "smart contracts / DeFi" world, while making the better tradeoffs.
In fact, I think the ONLY thing ETH has over this is devshare and network effect, which honestly are pretty important. But the incentive for smart developers to come over from weighty sharding base layer chains, and to develop on a BTC sidechain might be enough to inherit Bitcoin's own network effect, and possibly (I hope) leave all the mistakes like ETH in the dust.
I lost badly at the little underground poker room I go to from time to time last night... It was a terrible night. *BUT* this little arbitrage opportunity completely recouped those losses and more. Hooray for all the ways of being a degen! Wait did I say *I* did all that above. I take it back. It was someone else!