This year, they focused on the Lightning Network, Bitcoin DeFi, Bitcoin Smart Contracts, Decentralized Companies, DID and Astrology, etc.
Original title: ” Golden Observation | Bitcoin Hardcore Big V meets secretly every year to discuss these hot spots this year “
Written by: Maxwell
“Satoshi Roundtable” (Satoshi Roundtable) is an annual secret meeting held by the veteran hard-core big V of the Bitcoin community. The meeting adopts a strict invitation system and does not have a keynote speech (all people are equal, called unconference).
This year’s Satoshi Nakamoto Roundtable is its seventh event, and it will be held in the summer of July 2021 due to the epidemic. Every year after the meeting, cypherpunk, Bitcoin developer, Casa co-founder and CTO Jameson Lopp will post a document recording the hot topics he is interested in during the meeting. The hot topics he focused on this year are: Lightning Network, Bitcoin DeFi, Bitcoin Smart Contract, Decentralized Company, DID, Astrology, etc.
It’s another year of Satoshi Nakamoto’s round table! Due to the COVID, I believe this is the first Satoshi Nakamoto roundtable held in the summer; unfortunately, due to travel restrictions, many invitees are still unable to join.
As usual, I choose to attend meetings where I consider myself not an expert to maximize my learning opportunities. The following are the insights I gained from the discussions I participated in.
Improve memory skills
The round table kicked off with a meeting on memory. We understand that memory and experience are two aspects of the same coin; without a good memory, you will not be able to retain the wisdom gained from experience. Memory skills are not only applicable to living room skills; they can be applied to many different disciplines, including poetry and philosophy.
An interesting combination is that cash is memoryless, while Bitcoin has memory-the ownership of every transaction output once owned is permanently retained.
To what extent can human thinking reach in a short period of time? The memorized record is 2700 binary digits in 30 minutes.
There are 3 pillars to build the memory palace: divide things into small pieces, process information in depth, and arrange information around the superstructure
Then we continue with an exercise, let us memorize 20 random words and remember them. For example, this is a demonstration of how to remember mnemonic words-although I still advise against using your brain as a single backup mechanism!
Lightning Network as the next Internet
In this meeting, we discussed the implications of the fact that the Lightning Network can be used as an arbitrary data transfer protocol. Although bandwidth is limited, users only want to use it to transmit small/important/semi-sensitive data. Perhaps users can use LN as a data messaging layer to transfer pointers to files hosted elsewhere (such as IPFS).
There are also scalability issues in data storage; we don’t want to crash the node by filling it with garbage.
Because the Lightning Network is a Tor-like network, some use cases of Tor may be replaced by LN. For example, a user can initiate an encrypted communication channel by sending a 1 satoshi payment with a public key in a message.
Sphinx chat is an example of a data messaging application that is up and running. I have tried to use it a few times, but I am still solving some problems in the settings.
Considering that all existing payment networks are closed intranets. The Lightning Network is an open version. We hope that the structure of LN looks similar to the existing economic network structure, but the key difference is that it is open and permissionless.
Please note that the growth of LN has soared since April 2021, with multiple groups organically coordinating mobility.
Since many people are running on Raspberry Pi devices behind NAT, the problem of network vulnerability may be poor ISP connectivity or poor power quality leading to a hard shutdown without a UPS. I personally think that due to continuous maintenance needs, home nodes will be classified as more technology enthusiasts. You can’t really run and forget it.
Make bitcoin available
How can we expand Bitcoin as a store of value and a medium of exchange?
- Lightning Network
- Hosting provider
El Salvador is airdropping $135 million in BTC-we expect many people will simply sell them. But this will undoubtedly become a huge educational driving force for Bitcoin in the region.
Each KYC person pays $30, which is equivalent to thousands of dollars in the average salary of an American. This is a considerable incentive to inspire people to pay attention.
70% of the population of El Salvador does not have a bank account; the ability to provide citizens with a digital wallet that can be accessed on a cheap Android phone may really be a watershed moment for “banking services for those who do not have a bank account.”
On the other hand, the interactivity of LN can cause usability problems. Since it requires both parties to be online, it may not work properly in third world countries with poor Internet infrastructure. On the other hand, almost every modern point-of-sale system needs to be online to operate.
Citizens are rightly concerned about government control of the wallet-the Chipre wallet is custodial.
How do we build a circular economy? Many businesses in El Salvador only accept cash and are not registered. Requiring them to use high-tech payment solutions and payment solutions that may be operated by the government may actually be undesirable.
Another potential improvement is for the already sizable remittance market-if every Salvadoran has a wallet, then they can receive remittances from relatives abroad, which may be much cheaper and faster than traditional payment methods. Faster.
Bitcoin DeFi
The DeFi market strives to maintain the value of the different assets that are locked in. Compared with the custody market, they expose users to different types of risks.
- Impermanent loss-one of your assets will eventually decrease
- Smart contract risk-all users may lose everything
Thorchain
This is a new network that attempts to improve the first iteration of decentralized exchanges.
- Obtain returns on native (unpackaged) assets
- Dozens of nodes use threshold signatures to coordinate the flow of funds
- For example: in order to exchange BTC->ETH, it actually performed a double exchange of BTC->RUNE and RUNE->ETH
Sovryn
Native Bitcoin script
Discrete Log Contracts-bind oracles, you can use the threshold of multiple oracles to reduce the risk of oracles
Sapio
It is difficult to create a dynamic membership system using Bitcoin scripts and EVM smart contracts
No need to worry about the governance of more complex systems, because these are more like over-the-counter contracts
Be a good Bitcoin citizen
What is Bitcoin? How do we determine what people want? The process of seeking consensus can be messy.
The miners want to stabilize rather than kill the golden goose, but they also want long-term innovation to increase usage.
The threshold for developing applications on Ethereum is definitely low. We have seen more innovative capitalism on Ethereum, but your business model is more likely to fail due to gastoken.
There are also multiple implementation issues, and the CAP theorem applies. Satoshi Nakamoto said that the second realization may be a “threat to the network” for a reason.
Choose at most two!
If you think that Bitcoin has only one “heartbeat” every 10 minutes or so, the consistency of the layer 2 network is lower, but the availability is higher.
The Bitcoin development ecosystem is more confrontational, but not necessarily popular at the application layer.
Miniscript is a great development tool, but it is far from becoming a recognized standard; it is not clear whether it will develop to meet everyone’s needs. For example, you cannot reuse the public key in miniscript.
Bitcoin suffers from unstructured brutality.
- Advantages: There is no specific target to attack
- Disadvantages: it’s harder for developers to know how to drive improvements
Maybe we need X Prize style funding. Although I remember that some bounties of this nature were posted on the Bitcoin Talk topic. They were hit or missed, probably because the person posting the bounty was a mistake-prone person. I remember that we did get the famous “What is Bitcoin” video from such a bounty.
On the other hand, some of the more complex technology bounties are dormant for many years, and then it is difficult to get paid when someone tries to claim them. Perhaps X Prize-style grants from large organizations will be more trustworthy for people to spend resources trying to solve it.
“The evolution of the Bitcoin protocol is like going to the omakase restaurant.”
Bitcoin smart contract
In this conference, we focused on native Bitcoin scripts, not on the joint sidechain that provides EVM functionality.
One way to think about Bitcoin smart contracts is similar to the CPU architecture.
Sapio is a language used to define potential transaction flow graphs.
Sapio trading circuit example
Since Bitcoin is a UTXO model, it is important to clearly define state transitions; circuit inputs are not as dynamic as EVM smart contracts.
If you design the wrong circuit, then you have to abandon the entire design and start over; you cannot iterate/upgrade immediately.
Unlike EVM contracts, other circuits cannot affect your circuit.
Discreet Log Contracts still have the problem of oracles, but the oracles can be bound so that if they sign multiple results, their private keys can be rebuilt and funds can be wiped out. But can’t they simply scan their own funds first?
You can also create timeout escape hatches for unresponsive oracles so that the funds can be returned to the original owner.
Financial Astrology 101
This is an interesting meeting; naturally, none of the following is investment advice.
Astrology is not causation, but correlation.
We observe the position of the planet when Bitcoin originated. This is a bit tricky, because Bitcoin can be considered to have multiple creation dates. White paper/ Genesis block date/ First code release/ First mined block? Bitcoin’s star map is also unclear, because the origin does not have a physical location (on the earth).
Although there are many stars, some planets like Mercury are more related to price fundamentals.
The 28-day lunar cycle is a simple indicator
The partial tops and bottoms of mature assets follow the lunar cycle
“The new moon is short, the full moon is long”
There are 10 planetary bodies, and each planetary body has 2 main elliptical points
Venus and Jupiter herald good news
Mercury and Mars are bad news
You can find the lunar cycle chart on the trading view here
Astral-Seek software can help you back-test and make forward-looking predictions.
“Ethereum’s astrolabe is very unfavorable.”
With the end of the 250-year Pluto cycle, ominous signs of the end of 2022!
Decentralized company
Not all companies can be decentralized, but as more and more technologies are built to achieve decentralized coordination, the possibilities will expand.
Why decentralize a company?
Improve competitiveness by extensively expanding the team.
Focus more on mission rather than organization; employees have changed from “working for the company” to “working for projects.”
Reduce the regulatory attack surface; if you do not perform regulated behavior, then you will not be subject to regulatory scrutiny. Strive to be a simple software provider.
How to decentralize a company? One piece at a time.
The product must be open source.
The infrastructure must be serverless.
The corporate entity must be dissolved.
Since there will no longer be a company to pay salaries and provide equity, you need a DAO to replace these functions. You may also need a token so that participants can express their interest in the direction of the project.
In the future, the issuance of tokens and the formation of DAOs may be regarded as a new type of exit event, and more traditional exits such as IPOs/acquisitions/mergers.
Decentralized identity
Reputation, certification, and delegation are important primitives required by the crypto-native ecosystem.
We need an agnostic network, which is untraceable and is not operated by a for-profit company. There are many organizations participating in the decentralized identity foundation, and we have seen Microsoft’s identity overlay network.
W3C has published a specification for decentralized identifiers.
We should only need to disclose the minimum amount of information to the requesting counterparty. The potential for associating various certificates with your DID is huge. E.g:
The government agency can certify that you are over 21 years old, so you don’t need to reveal your exact birthday.
Local or state agencies can prove that you are a resident of a specific jurisdiction without revealing your exact address.
An accountant or institution can prove that your bitcoin assets exceed a certain value to help you get a credit line without disclosing your total assets.
The development of DID has been going on for several years. The landing seems to be slow. There are some network startup problems with this type of technology. You’d better hope that everyone adopts the same standards, but it’s difficult to get early adopters because you don’t know which platform will eventually occupy most of the market share.
in conclusion
Although the Satoshi Nakamoto roundtable was strange for many reasons and the cryptocurrency market was in a stage of falling from a high point, the attendees were as bullish as ever.
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