It seems Taproot works on the Bitcoin blockchain. It might be similar to ETH’s smart contracts &/ or NFTs. I don’t know. Colour me cynical, but the explanation I read at Xverse seems to use the Java programmer’s trick of inventing new jargon for concepts that already exist. I had to learn about Bitcoin Ordinals to help me understand better what Taproot does.

Anyhow, I recently decided to empty my Metamask wallet of some Tether, and I was deeply irritated<SUP>[1]</SUP> by the process of transacting on the ETH blockchain. How does transacting in USDT on the Bitcoin blockchain work? Is it the same as USDT on the Ether ‘chain in that you have to pay fees in BTC?

Regardless, I hope PAXG starts to offer this. I would love to see a PAXG/BTC trading pair.

[1]: The source of this irritation being the concept of “gas”. I was sending USDT, but I had to pay the gas fees in ETH. I couldn’t grasp the idea that I couldn’t somehow say “send all my USDT by deducting ETH X for gas and send the balance”. I had to first swap some USDT for ETH to use as gas. My brain rejected this crap as unreasonable and inefficient. So I got on a metamask support chat to someone and proceeded to wind up this poor person with my refusal to accept that this was the norm. The support guy also annoyed me by saying that on the Bitcoin blockchain there are also “gas fees”. Strictly speaking there are not.

I don’t have the time to properly flush out aspects of this topic… that said, it is my belief that while multi-faceted certainly, the Interbet of Value will depend on ‘rails’. Rails, such as, TCP/IP or IP analogies. I have always considered Ethereum to be a research project, however, in 2014 when I said this, I did not forsee how much money there was in ‘research’. I see tokens, such as, Layer 1 networks /tokens to be the only entities of interest. These would include:

– Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash
– Doge (becuase Musk will enable it with StarLink and Tesla phone.. note Intel’s crypto chip)
– Hedera (HBAR)
– Ripple (XRP, XDC)
– Stellar (XLM)

I tend to think, the crypto token with the most liquidity/utility will be valued more.

Sure, these are contentious comments in space such, as this. I have looked briefly around Mark’s site, and it appears that the site is focused Bitcoin market data. I think market data is missing the point today… protocols, protocols, protocols.

At this early time in the crypto space standards are needed. I expect that Ripple Net (yes, I know people will fuss about branding… but it is Ripple who is the sole developer, the rest is make belief for the SEC) will be the rails. Etherthing else is a wrapped side chain token.
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Well, you can see where I am coming from. I have been in the crypto space since 2011. Compiled and run Bitcoin and Ripple nodes for fun. Wrote an Azure Agent that gathered Price/Volume data from 50 or so global exchanges every ten (10) seconds… and made the blob available to an iOS app. Later, found that it was toooo dificult to move real money to support arbitrage. It was an experiment and I learned a great deal. Wells Fargo wanted the arbitrage app to cash out into real money at set intervals.

I could say more… I will send to Mark, information about myself.

Hello to all !