Nostr Web Client

Protocols win. Nobody knows this better than Nostriches.

Several connections just clicked for me. I was in the process of writing a lengthy article about this, but due to a client bug, I'll spare you the million-word version...

Tokens are fun and inspiring. There's not a kid who hasn't drawn up tokens at some point to play with friends. Tokens have also long been big business. Loyalty schemes captured billions of dollars long before Bitcoin was invented. However, each scheme - each token - required its own loyalty card. They were not transferable, even before AML became a thing.

In 2015, ERC-20 was created - a protocol to issue, transfer, and redeem tokens. At the time, I dismissed it because people were putting things on the blockchain - the wrong blockchain, even - that were better done in an SQLite DB run by the issuer. The issuer could provide a public API, sign every change, publish the full change log, etc., and you would have the same security properties minus the immense costs of a blockchain. Still, ERC-20 took the tokenomics retards world by storm! Refined standards were developed. Other shitcoins copied the standards over to their chains, and now we live in a world with more than 500k such tokens, with the top ten combined being valued at over $130 billion.

Back then, I had argued that if only we agreed on an open protocol on how to do tokens with SQLite databases, we could have skipped the use of a blockchain, and almost all the tokens would have worked the same.

Only later did I realize that ERC-20 was such a success because it was an open protocol tailor-made to be integrated into an ecosystem that needed to somehow validate its raison d'etre. Hundreds of ETH wallets jumped at it. Millions of users had the creation of tokens at their fingertips.

Now, Chaumian mints are the open protocol to do tokens with SQLite databases. They are the standard that Bitcoiners might be able to rally around to do tokens as they should have been done from the start. The main piece of the puzzle missing is a way to mint arbitrary tokens - the ERC-20 of Chaumian mints.

Leo Wandersleb 1y ago

I'm not sure if such a protocol is compatible with Chaumian mints but I guess it could be:

I want a way that I can issue tokens that the mint can then transfer while I'm offline. I understand that the mint could inflate the supply but my wallet could hold proof of such facts, should people ever come to me to redeem their tokens in excess of the issuance.

Say I forgot my wallet and Alice pays my bill. I could give her 4350 LeoCent tokens to keep track of the debt. If Alice sells my debt to Carol and the mint sells it to Eve, too, my wallet could prove the debt was settled to whoever comes second with token redeem transactions from the mint. As both Eve and Carol would have to also have a reference to the issuance - whatever my wallet signed at issuance - there can be no doubt about this being other $43.50 I might have issued.

A cinema could sell Bob a ticket as a token and should Bob sell it to Dave with Dave arriving at the cinema with the seats taken, the cinema with the mint could prove that the seat was not issued twice, proving that the mint inflated tokens.

I guess this could be done in a way that the mint never learns labels or issuance contracts but in above example, my wallet could have sent Alice the contract and only the hash to the mint. Maybe my debt tokens bear interest. Alice' wallet would equally send the full contract over to Carol etc.

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