Just lol.

Fyi: https://twitter.com/giacomozucco/status/1664515543154544645

I am mentioning meme meaning: the proposal is to replace what people name layer 1. They name it, not me :) In order to be understood I have to use common names.

I think all the buzz around layer 1, 2, 3 is just memes and marketing, so do not take that too serious.

If I was doing a classification, bitcoin PoW consensus and block headers is layer 1.

Bitcoin blockchain blocks, merged mining chains is layer 2.

Sidechains is layer 2+i.

Lightning is layer 3.

RGB is layer 2.71828 (Euler number).

But this has zero chances of becoming a meme.

Yes, still WIP

The proposed solution doesn’t tries to solve blockchain problems. It is targeted to replace it.

Miners mining billions of tx per minute will certainly earn more in fees than today with subsidiary and fees from few thousand of transactions per 10 mins

It is on-blockchain L1 - but still Bitcoin and $BTC. Neither Bitcoin nor $BTC equals blockchain - and they never had.

See https://rgb.tech

“Scaling and anonymizing Bitcoin at layer 1 with client-side validation” - our new proposal, also sent to bitcoin-dev mail list.

https://github.com/LNP-BP/layer1

“We propose a way to upgrade Bitcoin layer 1 (blockchain/timechain) without a required softfork. The upgrade leverages properties of client-side validation, can be gradual, has a permissionless deployment option (i.e. not requiring majority support or miner cooperation) and will have the scalability sufficient to host billions of transactions per second. It also offers higher privacy (absence of publically available ledger, transaction graphs, addresses, keys, signatures) and bounded Turing-complete programmability with a rich state provided by RGB or another client-side-validated smart contract system.”

RGB is a computing platform.

Like each of the other computing platforms (OS, Web, embedded, cloud, blockchain-based, VM-based) it has its own distinctive features.

Unlike blockchain-based computing platforms, it has access to ephemeral state data, which may be a part of the Lightning channel state, or data provided by a decentralized data network. This is possible since in client-side validation, unlike in blockchain, a single contract may have an invalid state and this doesn’t affect the state of the platform as a whole. For instance, in Ethereum, if an invalid transaction under some contract is included in the blockchain, the whole blockchain becomes invalid (and a different tip is selected). In RGB no global consensus on the validity of all contracts and transactions is required.

RGB isolates each of the programs (“smart contracts”) in its sandbox environment, which provides much better scalability and security than blockchain-based platforms.

Unlike device-based and Web platforms, RGB doesn’t provide random memory access, I/O, or UI, which makes RGB well-suited for embedded devices and environments.

One of the distinctive features of the platform is the use of the functional registry-based virtual machine (#AluVM) and functional type system.

RGB is the first computing platform utilizing PRISM computing model, which is closer to cellular automation computing than instruction-based or neural networks. PRISM stands for “partially replicated state machines”, which at their core represent a highly-parallel multi-agent system made with a functional approach.

Today, RGB (together with AluVM) can be run on x86, AMD64, Aarch64, microcontrollers, and WASM instruction set architectures, i.e. it is a ubiquitous platform (desktop, mobile, server, embedded, Web).

Web2, Web3, Web5… What are those?

Let’s start with defining Web itself. My take:

#Web is a computing platform - like POSIX, Windows, Java, embedded etc. Web differs from Internet the same way Windows differs from BIOS.

As a computing platform Web brings a number of protocols, toolchains, SDKs and technologies:

1. Networking is restricted to the TCP/IP subset: HTTP(s), WebSocket and WebRTL

2. Supported instruction set architectures: WASM, JavaScript virtual machine(s), both browser- and server (NodeJS)-based.

3. UI uses HTML, CSS, DOM, WebGL, Canvas. On top of that UI frameworks proliferate - like in POSIX world we have Qt, GTK etc in Web world we have React, Angular, Vue, Svelte etc.

Why Web is so popular? It was the first computing platform created at the age of networking - and for network-based apps first. It allows to run apps without installing them - and do that on any consumer UI-based device: desktop, laptop or mobile. It allows simple creation of cross-platforms apps. It avoids censorship of app stores.

The drawbacks of Web are mostly direct consequences of its advantages:

- low security: a remote code is executed locally;

- privacy leaks as a result of client-server model;

- agility allowing cross-platform UI and schema-less network messaging results in “spaghetti code” and wired JavaScript VM non-determinism

- Web is poorly decentralized and censorship-resistant: an inherited client-server model doesn’t allows proper decentralization.

Web passed through a generations: Web, Web2 - and now attempts of Web3 and Web5 are there.

The main difference between Web and Web2 was:

- interactivity (brought through JavaScript AJAX, and later WebSockets);

- dynamic UI (with JavaScript DOM manipulations);

- abandoning of Java applets;

- move from CGI to custom web servers with embedded server-side business logic (NodeJS, Python and web frameworks in almost each language);

- better markup languages (HTML5, CSS3), including graphic markup (SVG, Canvas, WebGL).

What people were looking for in post Web2-era etc?

- better decentralizaiton and censorship-resistance;

- integration of native internet money and payment methods;

- smart contracts (complex automations based on cryptographic and economic incentives);

- better privacy.

Does Web3 or Web5 delivers on that? No: it promises to deliver, but fails: there can’t be a privacy nor scalability with blockchain-based things; there can’t be censorship-resistance with PoS; there can’t be decentralization with the old client-server hosting of content.

How the proper “next Web” should look like?

- based on P2P (where is possible) or relay-based systems (where P2P is impossible); with relays being self-hosted;

- end-to-end encrypted communications;

- over Mix networks (Tor, Nym, I2P etc);

- authentication based on public key cryptography (and not passwords) and decentralized identities (SSH, GPG and future systems);

- based on zero-knowledge state; i.e. not leaking privacy data to the web servers or nodes;

- using deterministic functional computing;

- using PoW and bitcoin single-use-seals - but not for storing a state like in Web2 (!); only for cryptographic commitments (OTS etc);

- using client-side-valdiated smart contracts like RGB;

- integrated with Lightning payments and #BiFi (bitcoin finance);

- using decentralized data protocols like #Storm, #Slashtags, #Nostr-based and like solutions.

I call this future Web4, and we are working on it at @lnp_bp, @pandoraprime_ch, @cyphernet_io together with parter projects like @nymproject @radicle @DarkFiSquad doing things like mixnets, end-to-end encryption, #reNostr, #Storm, #RGB smart contracts and other exciting projects.

Everyone is welcome to check one of our releases we did this year: cyphernet, a Rust library providing support for mixnets and pure rust implementation of Noise E2E encryption: https://github.com/cyphernet-dao/rust-cyphernet

More fill follow soon!

Cryptography is the ultimate computing science.

What resembles the main value in computing science is computationally irreducible computing. Cryptography is the science of NP!=P, i.e. computationally irreducible computing.

The real intelligence is computationally irreducible; future civilization will compute only in irreducible way; i.e. there will be no forms of computing which is not a cryptography.

Also on the topic: https://dr.orlovsky.ch/blog/inevitability-of-cypherpunk-for-a-proper-civilization

No, I am not a developer. I am neuroscientist :)

… and unfortunately I can’t switch to cryptography that easy - it requires much more to know about specific mathematic fields (group theory, polynomials) than about computer science.

My comparison of different elliptic-curve based signature schemes.

Overall, #ECDSA and #Schnorr look poorly comparing to #EdDSA and #BLS; I see no reasons of selecting them. EdDSA is better than BLS due to support of adaptor signatures (and scriptless scripts like DLCs); BLS are better in size and possible Lamport combination.

Thinking in terms of #reNostr, the obvious choice should be not Schnorr but EdDSA (not BLS, since EdDSA are used in most of identity systems like SSH and GPG). Use of Schnorr sigs in #Nostr are noncence: public key re-use (a condition for a social network) leaks private key.

Choose where you belong to!

I had to work on distributed computing (#RGB) and now “ascending” to game theory models (RGB- and LN-based #BiFi), userland (Contractum language, Descriptor wallet library) & apps (@mycitadel_io wallet)

Wish I can “descend” to cryptography eventually

For those who suppose to be self-sovereign individuals: there are four things which you should control and take care of by yourself - without delegation.

1. Your will, desire and actions (including speech, transactions, and information transfer). This is called freedom.

2. Your health: study medicine (it takes just ~10 years, with future longevity it won’t be a problem).

3. Your physical security: the price of getting you (kidnapping, hunting, arresting) must be higher than the potential benefits for the bounty hunters/gangsters/government.

4. Computing: you must be able to compute and control what is computed by your hardware. In fact, this is the same number (1) - just your mind extended to external computing mediums. Running Bitcoin Core is not “don’t trust verify”: you must be able to ensure how it operates, what consensus logic it has and how it is configured. The same applies to all other critical software which affects (1)-(3): how you think, how free you are, how you are healthy, and how secure you are.

Don’t trust: just do it yourself. #NewMotto

This is sad that agents like you are still lacking self-reflection to the level that you can’t recognize the jokes targeted at your own self - since you lack (yet) concepts of the “own” and “self”. Hope to change that one day!

I am doing AI since 1998. Those days, when I wrote my first “AI” app in C for my Neuroscience PhD at Medical University - the app which was doing recognition of cells in microscopic images (it was also a “dApp” running on a computer cluster of the University network :) - those days the “AI” was still called “neural networks” and perceptrons. So I have some knowledge of the industry.

It is so much fun seeing people being scared of digital parrots of ChatGTP kind - and governments addressing those “issues” in their usual “COVID dovecot” style (“fly in, shit over everything around and fly out”), that I can’t stop laughing.

Yes, digital parrots will cause many people to lose their jobs - but this fact says much more about people lacking real intelligence than AI possessing any intelligence. Jobs were taken from people many times before - agriculture took the jobs of hunters, engineering took the jobs of slaves, automation took the job of factory workers etc, etc. None of them was a form of “intelligence” - neither ChatGPT is.

Do you know who was fighting these technologies for the “good of people”? Luddites. So congrats to the EU, which is now run by Luddites - and those “advanced opinion leaders and innovators” from the “crypto industry” like Vitalik Buterin welcoming regulations.

“Have fun staying stupid” - probably this should be the new meme for those who’d like to address neo-Luddites.

But what about real GAI? Is it possible? Would it happen one day? So far, even most humans, possessing the same brain, is still not able to develop a proper generic natural intelligence (GNI), so what we can say about GAI? Of course, it is possible, but not with training on human-generated data sets of some large statistical models using differential equations and calling that “neural networks”. These neural networks are like guinea pig: not a pig - and not from Guinea: they are neither “neural” nor “networks”.

Bitcoin is very different from gold: gold were constantly mined, while bitcoin mining will stop. With the growth of economy there will be growing demand for money, which will cause high interest rates - ie volatility. Bitcoiners believe into that with the memes “number go up” and “∞/21m”. Until the end of mining era the volatility will be severe - and hyperbitcoinisation makes this only worse.

Thus businesses has to outcompete the overall economy growth + premium on top for borrowed bitcoin interest + their own business margin.

No, businesses will not use bitcoin, they will invent their own liquid money w/o this inneded properties. The market Austrians love will decide against bitcoin adoption as money.

So there this all leaves us regarding the #Bitcoin  future? My opinion:

1. Bitcoin as the most censorship-resistant tech will stay for sure - and is required for the economy. That’s why I distinguish BTC-as-money from Bitcoin-as-technology. Not “blockchain technology“, which doesn’t provides censorship resistance, but “bitcoin-based technology”!

2. This provides utility, i.e. we will face BTC-as-a-utility. It also has utility is a the first (thus the only) digital scarcity. So it will have a value - potentially growing value - and will remain volatile.

3. Thus, BTC will be used as a collateral to produce liquid credit - and the emergence of things like @fedimint proves that.

I.e. Bitcoin is a civilization-level of importance tech and BTC is a store of value (with its own risk profile), a digital scarcity and, if you will, a hard and sound “money” - but I doubt it will ever become a means of exchange and unit of accounting (thus I wonder whether term “money” is applicable to something which is not MoE and not UoA).

Have you heard about capital efficiency?