Some additional observations:
- CSV essentially puts what is usually done in blockchain nodes into the wallet itself
- RGB wallets and contracts are cold and noncustodial, and use ordinary wallet keys
- RGB contracts can't hold bitcoin themselves, at least not yet. Think of them more like metadata about a UTXO, like, "This UTXO commits to data for an account. This account has 20 CATO and 10 PUPR coins. This account can also vote on PETDAO and their name is PurrPuppy89". This metadata can change according to specific consensus rules set within the contract that can be proven to be valid as the metadata is moved from one UTXO to another as the owned data is modified.
- RGB contracts have this concept of "global data"; it's not quite global in the blockchain sense, but it's more like, data that can be shared publicly, and it's immutable and defined at the time of contract creation. For RGB20, this would be supply (21,000,000), precision (8), ticker (BTC), description, (Bitcoin), timestamp, (1/3/2009), etc.
- RGB contracts also have the concept of "owned data", and this a reference to how RGB abstracts ownership from accounts. Owned fields are mutable, unlike global fields, and only by their owner. They can mutate any kind of data, not just account balance, and are tied to a specific UTXO single use seal.
- In some ways, this kind of makes a sidechain of a UTXO, capable of storing over 250,000 different contracts, and one UTXO corresponds to one user account.
- A single Bitcoin block would be sufficient to hold every Ethereum contract ever created.
In cryptography, timing can be incredibly important. Some things are made to be intentionally slow, like the argon2id cryptographic hashing function, to consume lots of memory and computation to mitigate brute force attacks.
Some things are made to be faster, like signature algorithms like secp256k1. This doesn't compromise security, but it does improve node syncing performance, and reduces hardware requirements.
Finally, some things are built to take a constant amount of time, especially when handling keys or other secrets, because certain inputs can reveal the secret depending on how long the operation takes.
Ensuring code gets executed in constant time gets complex and often this guarantee can be broken as compilers update over time. To humans, it looks like secure code, but computers just see inefficient code.
Cryptography is complex and there's a lot to know. This knowledge is built up over a lifetime. There's still a lot I don't know, perhaps some cryptographer is cringing even as I write this, but it's just what I've been able to gather so far.
I hadn't really taken the idea of aliens being real seriously up until just last week, and I know I should be skeptical of what the government says, but the government is made of lots of different people with different ideas of how it should be run, so who knows, maybe it's about time we know. I also do like the idea of us not being alone, so long as the aliens are nice. But ever since the UAP hearings, I sensed a rabbithole I was behind on. After watching Matthew Pines's excellent interview on WBD, twice, I bought Ross Coulthart's book, In Plain Sight, on my Kindle. I'm about 50 pages in, and I have to say, this is a really good overview. I like the format, it's a good way to get caught up on some of these official historical records.
I'm also getting caught up on the terminology... Writing things down. Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon. Non-Human Intelligence. Exotic Technology of Non-Earth Origin. Powerful terms. I'm keeping my eyes open and following closely. I'm not sure I'll be 100% until I actually see the aliens, not just spacecraft, but I think it's safe to say I'm pretty convinced, there might be something there, and I actually think that's pretty exciting.
I don't think they're a threat, though it's very possible the USG bungled first contact. If I had to guess, and this is just a newcomer to this space speculating, they wanted to avoid accountability and so they kept it a secret, along with help from the CIA. But after nearly 80 years, they got really good at keeping this secret. But perhaps strategically, they primed the public through science fiction, so we might have an idea for what we were in for. Or perhaps it was just filmmakers with sources on the inside who wanted to speak out in their own way. Or maybe it's just people's imaginations subconsciously following what might actually be a logical conclusion, we are not alone. It's hard to know without further evidence. So, I'll continue reading and evaluating. Fascinating stuff!
#UAPNostr #UAPHearing #UAPs
In a furry chat I started a while back, someone posted a hammer & sickle, or as I think of them, the "soviet swastika". I told them it was tasteless and the cause of much death and misery and I'd rather not have it in the chat. They pushed back, saying, hasn't the dollar done the same thing? Will you ban images of the dollar? And I thought about it for a moment, and I responded:
"I'm fine with that. It's well-known that debasement of the petrodollar is used to fund the military industrial complex to fight forever wars."
They weren't mad, in fact, they were impressed by my consistency.
I think many a Bitcoiner would be hard-pressed to disagree with me there, either. After all, we understand better than anyone, the dollar is not synonymous with the practice of capitalism.
In many ways, becoming a Bitcoiner lends a sense of perspective that transcends traditional politics. That said, if you want to add a new opcode to Core, things might get a little contentious.
So, a discussion came up in a popular community I'm a part of, comprised of individuals who are highly critical towards "crypto". I've typed up this explainer for them, and maybe others might find value in it, also, so I'm posting it here.
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While I'm hardly objective, I've thought about it a lot, from numerous perspectives throughout my life, and perhaps others might find value in mine. I know not everyone here wants to read this (TL;DR), and that's fine, nobody is entitled to anyone's time, this is not really the place for this discussion, and yeah, people will call me crazy or shout me down and that's fine, I'm used to it, but hopefully someone here might learn from this or find it valuable, and in the very least this can ease my conscience knowing I've tried my best to explain.
So, the thing to know about "crypto" is, anything that calls itself cryptocurrency is a scam. We know who the founder is, they've allocated a significant amount of funds to themselves and insiders, the exchanges are in on it, and then they prey on unsuspecting retail investors. The other thing to know is that Bitcoin is different, in the whitepaper that presented it to the world, it didn't call itself "cryptocurrency", but a "peer to peer electronic cash system". There's a lot one has to learn in order to put money into it in a safe way, and if you don't know that, there's a very good likelihood you will lose your savings. This article is worth reading to better understand this:
https://www.swanbitcoin.com/bitcoin-vs-altcoins/
They'll also refer to themselves as "altcoins", or alternatives to Bitcoin, that offer more features than Bitcoin, and so you should give them your money instead, since it's better than Bitcoin and theirs will instead go to the moon. They'll also peddle things called "stablecoins", sold as something that can't possibly lose money, and might even "earn yield" (spoiler, you are the yield), and there's been a number of instances of these, none of them trustworthy, because they all require trust of some kind. All of these things are what Bitcoiners call an "affinity scam":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud
Bitcoiners are essentially the doomsday preppers of the financial world, or monetary gun nuts ("right to keep and bear funds", "separate money from state"). I think it's also fair to call Bitcoiners religious zealots, there's a few good parallels; the message in the genesis block which implies Bitcoin's politically-motivated nature, as a response to the global financial crisis, there's also the prophet who "went nym for our sins", and an eschatology known as "hyperbitcoinization", a situation in which all other stores of value hyperinflate against Bitcoin (a furry came up with this term in 2014, btw).
This is the original article on hyperbitcoinization by Cosmos Stag:
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/hyperbitcoinization/
What we're preparing for is the possibility the central bankers might one day be really bad at their jobs. They seem to be doing a decent job so far, and I hope that continues well into the future, because I don't see Bitcoin as a "get rich quick" scheme. Some of us have turned to religion as a way to keep ourselves from losing our minds, for any number of reasons that hopefully seem quite obvious from those outside the community with a sense of empathy for people doing something they truly believe in.
For more on the perspective that Bitcoin is a religion, I very much recommend this highly critical piece on the community of Bitcoiners:
https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1666294372537606145
Regardless, if the central bankers screw up, especially the ones managing the supply of the global reserve currency, there's the possibility of what's called "financial repression". This is most common in currencies in developing countries, and it's basically a way to pay off debts denominated in their own currency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression
I'm not an economist, and this viewpoint runs counter to prominent, mainstream economics, but a theory has been put forth that money as a store of value can be compromised through monetary expansion, and debt issuance is a form of monetary expansion (as money that didn't exist before that's good to spend now). Think, mortgages, credit cards, student loans, car loans, corporate debt, treasuries, etc. In a system that's based largely on debt, with something like 97% of our money supply issued by private banks, and given guarantees on that debt by central banks, there's a possibility that things can go haywire and the Federal Reserve will have no choice but to financially repress the global reserve currency, which has never happened before (at least in recent times) and might result in chaos, or things might turn out perfectly fine. What it would cause is a massive wealth concentration into big banks, which is already happening now that big banks are earning very high interest rates on US government debt, treasuries. Another thing to know is that federal deficit spending is a form of monetary expansion, and the Federal Reserve is currently insolvent, using money they don't have to discourage big banks from lending (and further increasing the money supply, leading to monetary debasement and commodities price inflation). That said, I'm not predicting the system will collapse anytime soon, since nobody can know whether it will or it won't, or when. This is a good article for more information on this:
https://www.lynalden.com/broke-federal-reserve/
The best I can do is, try to build the technology needed to scale this system that automates away the role of central banks in a way that can safely serve the needs of everyone who might need it. For anyone with questions on how to put money in Bitcoin safely, I recommend reading the Swan blog post which was the first link above:
https://www.swanbitcoin.com/bitcoin-vs-altcoins/
Again, apologies for the long post, but thank you for reading, and I hope this was helpful to you in some way.
#bitcoin #orangepill #toximaxi
If you want a simple explanation of #RGB to share with your friends, I've put one together. Feedback appreciated.
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RGB is a generalized smart contract system built on #Bitcoin and #Lightning.
It's scalable and private because it keeps contracts off the blockchain, and the parts of a contract that can change are anchored to a little piece of a bitcoin called an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO).
When this piece of a coin is spent, it can never be spent in the same way again, so we know, that part of the contract has changed. This is similar to a tamper-evident single use seal, like a bag with a zipper that can only be zipped once.
Even better, only the person who owns the bag with a single use seal can zip it. And like a bag, it can contain multiple items.
Multiple tokens can be anchored to a single UTXO, and when they're spent, the ones you're not spending are sent back to yourself, to another UTXO you own.
Because contract data is kept off-chain, decentralized storage protocols like Storm and Carbonado are used to keep and communicate contracts reliably.
This is then used by wallets to do things like mint, transfer, accept, and verify on token contracts. There's not really a need for an RGB node, even in web browsers, since the code needed to validate contracts can be built to run in browsers.
This is what is meant when we say client-side validation (CSV); only the wallet needs to know about the contracts, and only peers that interact with each other need to know the contract data.
This allows for privacy and scale in a number of ways:
- Contracts are not put on-chain
- Contracts are not executed on nodes
- Multiple contracts can anchor to a single UTXO
- The UTXOs are very small and look like ordinary Taproot payments
If you request a payment from someone, nobody can see what other tokens you have, even if they have the contract. This is because a really big number is added to the UTXO to make a blinded payment.
Nobody can know which UTXOs have tokens by scanning the chain on an explorer, and there's no way to send someone tokens if they don't request and accept them.
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I hope this is a good start towards understanding RGB! A great way to understand it even better is to actually try it out on any of these wallets:
https://mycitadel.io
https://iriswallet.com (not to be confused with iris.to, or IRS wallet)
https://beta.bitmask.app
So, this video by @skdh affirms a bit of a theory that I've been thinking about... I'm pretty sure the galactic community Satoshi hails from doesn't use radio waves to communicate, it's just too archaic, slow, and unreliable at interstellar distances.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-jIplX6Wjw
It's very possible the "no-communication theorem" isn't a fundamental limitation of physics, like the speed of light, but just a limitation of our understanding of quantum physics. It could be very possible that faster-than-light communication could just be a protocol problem of some sort, and we're not very good at quantum protocols, because we don't have decent quantum computers.
But what if Satoshi gave us the concept of Bitcoin, not only for us to become a postscarcity civilization by incentivizing Humanity to harness more energy than we need, it also provides a profit incentive to invest heavily in quantum computing. There'll be a land grab to repatriate bitcoins held in P2PK addresses.
In this case, we're going to need a soft fork to add "P2QR" addresses, Pay-to-Quantum-Resistant address keys. I'm thinking something based on FALCON makes sense. FALCON signatures are definitely larger, maybe by about 10x, but the additional security would be worth the additional bytes, imo.
If there ever was a galactic community of peaceful extraterrestrials who, out of kindness, gave us a nudge in the right direction at a time we could not only make use of it, but also truly need it, I think it'd be mighty clever to give us Bitcoin. If bitcoinization does usher in an era of economic and technological prosperity and expansion, a Bitcoin Renaissance, as it were, maybe with the incentives built into Bitcoin, we'll be well-prepared for the big moment where we can meet Satoshi's kind and thank him for what he did for us.
Remember: Everything is good for Bitcoin. Even hacking addresses via quantum computers, and meeting aliens, it all hardens the protocol.
- The Exophiles, Datalinks
Although some have disagreed, I'd describe a Bitcoin layer as an open protocol that uses either the Bitcoin blockchain or Lightning payments network for settlement or consensus. For example, RGB uses an L1 UTXO for consensus of ownership over an asset, and it also makes use of LN to form a system of token channels.
An open protocol could be defined as software capable of being self-hosted that has an interface that other applications can make use of. This could be accessible by either RPC, REST, or embedded APIs.
One might be tempted to split layers into separate payments layers and application layers. But if one sees Nostr as Cash App, Venmo, or Strike (social payment platforms) but just in a protocol that other applications can build upon, in what traditionally would been used an API, then in every case where a layer has a financial application, it too can be a payments layer, so such a distinction doesn't make sense for the prior definition of layers.
Further, anything worth doing can have a financial application of some sort, especially if built into a protocol. Many protocols don't use money, or worse, they use their own fee token, and this inhibits their capability to scale and mitigate against bad actors.
So, I think it makes sense to call things like Nostr, Fedimint, Cashu, LNBits, Carbonado, etc., L3s. Another interesting case is the future Lightspeed Network (LSN), which builds on RGB... I would still classify it as an L3 payments network, since it helps scale Lightning with even more performance and smaller denominations of a sat. Perhaps in the bitcoinized future, LSN will be a better analog for point-of-sale Visa payments than LN, which would probably be a better analog for something like interbank FedACH.
Indexes like Electrum usually fit between L3s, so they could be considered L2s. The Ordinals index currently has no off-chain payments capability itself, so it could be classified as an L2. Non-fungible assets in most cases can only really be settled on the base layer since there's not enough liquidity for routing between multiple payment channels.
