Zaki’s Orb
Orb has ended
And now his watch has ended.
Zaki’s Orb is over, and no further activity will happen. Thank you to everyone who participated. Follow Zaki on X to keep up with his thinking.
Follow ZakiOrb Invocations
0x3429••239E#7
You’re Unlucky Luke Dashjr and lost all your Bitcoin because you didn't properly store your key. You still have 0.1 BTC in your hot wallet. How do you make it back in 2024? Not accepted answers: eating cats; trying to ban ordinals; co-founding a mining pool that censors Bitcoin transactions
0x3429••239E#6
Please fill in and give a short explanation. Projects that will go to zero in 2024: Projects that should be going to zero but won’t: Projects going to zero but first mega pumping:
0x3429••239E#5
The Harberger tax (HT), ensures creators can continuously extract the maximum value from their work. However, for Orb holders, the HT presents unique challenges in speculation and value maximization. It also limits ownership to wealthy users. What strategies and practical approaches can Orb holders, particularly those in collective entities like DAOs, employ to extract maximum value and profit from their Orbs?
0x3429••239E#4
In your previous Orb response, you outlined some challenges facing pure DA systems and hinted at the potential of staking derivatives and restaking. Considering Celestia's unique role as a DA-focused system, what’s your perspective on the value and long-term utility of tokens like $TIA? How do you foresee these tokens capturing and sustaining value, in light of potential challenges like the abundance of DA and strong competition on cost? In short: how do you see the financial future of TIA?
0xE8C9••5D84#3
The main risk for bitcoin is its future security budget and to mitigate this it will need to start generating sufficient fees on a consistent bases. The cosmos community has always been very aligned with bitcoin and is coming up with a solution to make use of bitcoin POW to help secure POS chains (eg: babylon). To what extend do you think the usecase "securing POS chains" will help the security budget of bitcoin and do you expect the cosmos community to come up with more usecases for bitcoin?
Zaki's Response
The unfortunate reality is that providing a timestamping service is consumes a minimal amount of Bitcoin blockspace and thus doesn't really with the security budget if you also want the chain to be able support a modest amount of value transfer.
IMO the best chance of Bitcoin blockspace being valuable is if the market perceives data availability on bitcoin via sovereign rollup or inscriptions to be uniquely and durably valuable.
Bitcoin's power at a timestamping system is strongly tied to emissions and it needs to instead become a valuable data availability system to secure itself after emissions run out.
I do think if the proof of stake world starts timestamping itself into Bitcoin it does increase Bitcoin's relevance into the growing world of high throughput chains.
0xfA27••9FB0#2
Do you believe that a chain with just a DA layer and consensus (like Celestia) can be financially sustainable in the long term? Especially considering that we know very well how to scale DA resources
Zaki's Response
Financial sustainability for a pure DA system is likely to be a challenge unless there are significant network effects between multiple applications sharing one DA layer. Otherwise DA becomes a pure race to the bottom in terms of costs.
Staking derivatives offer the possibility of a pure DA system achieving money like properties.
Restaking enables the token get explore to valuable services like Oracles and resquencers further up the stack.
The ability of a new token like TIA to capture opportunities in the application layer is theoertical at best.
Settlement is one of functions that had the most narrative built around it but seems to potentially be actually very low value because of the potential for multiple settlement systems to coexist.
0xfA27••9FB0#1
How can Cosmos appchains compete against L3 stacks with storage proofs?
Zaki's Response
Ethereum L3s and app chains provider similar types of experiences.
Applications specific chains need tight interoperability with other ecosystems. The best examples of app chains are spot and perp dexes.
Interoperability enables accessing data from inside those chains for liquidity onboarding, oracles, liquidity rewards and other ways in which markets interact with broader ecosystems.
Two things end up mattering a lot.
- Topology matters. A app chain builder needs to understand the topology users and ecosystem apps will need to traverse. Where you have high quality connectivity you limits capital, onboarding and other parameters.
- Developer experience matters. The more infrastructure you have to build and maintain as developer then the harder it will be to builder and attract an ecosystem.
I might be missing things here but the L3 storage proofs ecosystem seems nascent from both a topology and developer ecosystem pov.
I would be concerned with solutions that lock L3 builders into topologies clustered around an L2. Cosmos chose to make the topology very ad hoc. Creates a lot of drama but ultimately the best solution to attract builders and give them many options to onboard liquidity.
All we’ve learned from the builders on top of IBC is that an extensive world of testing, simulation, middleware, relayers is required for building interop solutions work. IBC and CCIP have seen the deepest developer experience