The NFT mania that gripped the crypto industry earlier this year shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. Interestingly, this section of NFT helped introduce a new group of users to the space. It also led to the development of several rival blockchains like Solana, competing for Ethereum’s top spot in NFT games.
However, during this madness, many seem to have forgotten that Bitcoin is missing in the field, according to developer Dennis. Through a long string on Twitter, the developer expressed his displeasure with the notorious owner of the dark web network Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, who used Ethereum to issue NFTs to fund his release from prison.
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Noting this decision “will trigger a check on Bitcoiners,” Dennis said:
“NFT is an OG concept in Bitcoin. However, we failed to develop the functionality and instead implemented junk removals which they call misleading or meaningless “right-click copying”.
While the Bitcoin network itself does not lack any smart contract functionality, Layer 2 rollups such as Lightning Network and Stacks enable NFTs to be secured with the Bitcoin blockchain. Dennis believes that these developments around Bitcoin are often overlooked as its value is only viewed as digital gold, triggering its use as a “post-apocalyptic bunker facility”. He added,
“The subset of bitcoins that only accept digital gold as the only bitcoin use case is a current anomaly. Such people did not exist in 2013. There were a lot of interesting things going on with Bitcoin back then. ”
Another reason for such a lack of development in the Bitcoin space is the low monetary incentives developers receive compared to those built on top of Ethereum and other such networks.
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He also noted that those who transfer their BTC to ETH to participate in this euphoria do not realize that the value of Bitcoin cannot be transferred “to another chain”. In particular, Ethereum since the ETH “Design compromises have not made it a serious competitor as a valuable asset”.
Dennis also discussed the resilience of the Bitcoin network and that building on it doesn’t break the chain in any way.
The responses to the developer thread express frustration over the idea of using Bitcoin as anything but a holding asset. It’s worth noting here that a number of networks have experimented in this area to allow Ethereum to monetize.
One example is Stacks, a decentralized open source network built on top of Bitcoin that seeks to expand Bitcoin’s potential as a programmable base layer. The Stacks NFT market is relatively new but already has a trading volume of several million dollars, with its native cryptocurrency STX gaining a new base due to growing demand.
The platform has several existing projects such as Sathoshibles and Bitcoin Birds, while many more are in the works. In fact, it should be noted that some of the first encrypted digital assets were minted and sold on Counterparty, a third-party Bitcoin protocol, back in 2012, before the birth of Ethereum.