UTXOS.org is the hangout of BIP119 and the home page title should send alarm bells ringing across the Bitcoin community.

‘Next-Gen Smart Contracts for Bitcoin’ – as far as I am concerned if you want smart contracts use Ethereum or some other Alt coin. Bitcoin has no need for additional smart contracts, it is already highly programmable especially with the continued development of the lightning second layer. For an overview of why BIP119 is such a BAD idea start with the broadcast by Andreas M. Antonopoulos below.

The main argument against BIP119 is that it introduces more complexity into the Bitcoin programming environment, more complexity means more risk to the security of Bitcoin. Other blockchains illustrate what can go wrong with flexible programming environments. Ethereums DAO roll back. More recently the Solana blockchain was offline for more than 7 hours.

For a more detailed look at BIP 119 take a look at the following

36.00 Jimmy Song overview of BIP119

40.00 Tone Vays nails it – 2 main issues

41.09 nvk – Speedy trial is a terrible idea for Bitcoin. Hard forks only! Not UASF

45.00 Stop f**king with my money

47.00 Adam Back. Risk is counter intuitive…Innovation is NOT a metric of success.

54.20 Don’t f**k with my money

59:00 Bitcoin mechanic

1:00:00 Malicious softfork

1:06:00 ‘How do I get my upgrade into Bitcoin’ – You can’t – that is the defualt

1:09:00 Jedi mind f**k. ‘Wash my car’

1:11:00 Bitcoin default should be ‘no change’

1:14:00 The systemic risk of Covenants

1:14:00 Jimmy Song : Covenants are ALREADY in Bitcoin

Fuzzy property boundaries are NOT good in economics or socially

1:25:00 First do no harm

1:26:00 nvk ‘when in doubt nothing happens’

Need I go on – BIP119 is a very BAD idea for Bitcoin

Further reading as too why complexity in programming is a bad idea read the following

The Mythical Man-Month : Fred Brooks

–>especially–>

The second-system effect

Main article: Second-system effect

The second-system effect proposes that, when an architect designs a second system, it is the most dangerous system they will ever design, because they will tend to incorporate all of the additions they originally did not add to the first system due to inherent time constraints. Thus, when embarking on a second system, an engineer should be mindful that they are susceptible to over-engineering it.

The tendency towards irreducible number of errors

See also: Heisenbug

99 little bugs in the code.
99 little bugs.
Take one down, patch it around.
127 little bugs in the code…^[2]

The author makes the observation that in a suitably complex system there is a certain irreducible number of errors. Any attempt to fix observed errors tends to result in the introduction of other errors.

Or perhaps

The Art of Computer Programming : Donald Knuth

BIP119 is a very BAD idea : Don’t f**k with my money

Bitcoin, El Salvador, the British Museum and NFTs

A weekend away to London began innocently enough from Lime st station in Liverpool down to Euston and then tube to Baker st. Along the way to my weekend apartment at Gloucester Place I purposely missed out the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Bakers st and came across the Salvadoran Embassy on Dorset Square.

I was tempted to ring the bell and enquire about residency

Max Keiser provides the latest information about El Savador and Bitcoin

Later in the day I explored Room 68 of the British Museum; the history of money around the world traced back through 4000 years. Disappointing Schoolboy stuff that just about mentions Bitcoin.

The usual guff : “Bitcoin is an online electronic cash system that has no central issuer or owner. These tokens are not themselves currency but, once the hologram is removed each one includes a code for a digital Bitcoin. The Bitcoin system has been criticised by some people for facilitating money laundering, since payment transfers can be conducted anonymously.”

But someone is dragging the British Museum kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

25th November – 28th November

cf21-2

Solana is fast becoming the goto blockchain for minting NFTs providing a platform where you can mint NFTs for pennies NOT hundreds of dollars in direct competition with Opensea.

Solsea provides a new stage for NFT enthusiasts of any type. Due to the high fees on the likes of Opensea and others using the Ethereum blockchain the Solsea platform is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Below is a screen grab from today : Monday 15th November 2021

And below is my foray into the world of NFTs

Zilliqa mainnet is down and has been for the last 24 hours due to problems with memory management and contract processing. This state of affairs begs the question…….’How can a decentralised network be closed down’

Mainnet down to my mind IS a big deal but for the Zilliqa team it seems not…

Not a mention on the main website (https://www.zilliqa.com/) a brief Twitter post and this Reddit

Moonlet my wallet of choice at the moment for easy staking all things Zilliqa has the following notice

This notice is conspicuous by its absence when using the chrome moonlet extension.

Aside from today’s problem I have had a minor issue with Moonlet. I have been staking with Moonlet for a while but had not staked my rewards, which had been stacking up. Unfortunately I had not been keeping an eye on my account and did not have enough unstaked Zilliqa to pay the fees in order to claim my rewards.

No problem : as I was thinking of buying more Zilliqa anyway I went to HitBTC and bought a bit…..only to find that withdrawls were locked.

I then realised that instead of buying more Zilliqa to transfer to my Moonlet account I could just used SWAP. That is swap gZIL for ZIL and be able to pay the fees to claim my rewards and compound my stake.

Since writing this post the Zilliqa transactions on the mainnet are now up and running…albeit very slowly. Although this is a knock in confidence for Zilliqa I am still optimistic that this is a just a blip in a project that has massive potential upside. Consequently I shall be experimenting with Zilliqa in the following areas.

Unstoppable domains

Liquidity Mining using ZilSwap

and NFTs

Non Fungible Token(s) are here to stay. At the moment the market may be in a bubble but that is only because this technology is scratching the surface of a global network of buyers and sellars. Although this sounds like a contradiction I believe that the market as it stands is going to fragment into many siloed exchanges, each with their own specialisms.

Currently NFTs are confined to digital art, audio, video or pictorial, in essence it is only a unit of data stored on a blockchain (ledger) which cannot be replicated. The artwork itself being digital can copied, and distributed anywhere but the NFT can only exist as a unique entity.

NFTs can revolutionize the way artists are rewarded for their work, this is especially true for pictorial artists who can reclaim the scarcity of their work. This in turn will increase the value of their work and create new revenue streams. NFTs cannot prevent plagiarism of a digitial artwork but it can prove provenance and ownership. The various NFT exchanges prove that the market for these collectables exists and that the potential has only just being recognised.

“Everydays – The First 5000 Days” by @beeple selling for $69 million at Christie’s momentarily catapulted NFT technology into the public consciousness only to be forgotten weeks later. This ’15 minutes of fame’ belies the fact that the NFT market is growing exponentially.

According to analysis by DappRadar the market(sales) for NFTs for the first half of 2021 was $2.5 billion compared with the same period last year of (only) $13.7 million. From millions to billions within a year.

All indicators point to a thriving NFT environment that will likely see the market to continue to expand at a rapid rate with innovative and idiosyncratic use cases to continue throughout 2021.

Useful NFT primers and explainers

Material Art to Crypto Art: An Overview of NFTs

Are NFTs The Future Of Fine Art Collecting?

The Line Between NFTs and Fine Art Gets Even Blurrier in New Auction

HOW TO LOOK AT NFTS

FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY & NFT

A list of NFT exchanges such as Opensea , Rarible and KnownOrigin can be found here

There are curated meme’s such as CryptoPunks and The Bored Ape Yacht Club but also examples of fine art such as CryptoArt by Michele Petrelli.

Finally NFT exchanges reflect an infinite range of artistic expression from the mundane to the extraordinary.

I am an avid Strava user, free version of course. Recently I was reviewing my activities and came across this infuriating glitch.

Key elements of my data were missing and only the field names were displayed. After numerous google searches for a solution I decided to put up with the problem convinced it was an underhand ploy by Strava to get me to use the ‘paid for’ version.

By chance today I used Firefox to review my activities on Strava and ‘hey presto’ the glitch had magically disappeared. This proved to me that the problem was with Google chrome and not Strava.

The above did not work….. so went for the nuclear option…. log out of Google and using the Advanced option from settings Reset chrome.

By logging back into Google and resyncing chrome the glitch with Strava was resolved.