Discutiendo sobre las mentas chaumianas federadas sobre relámpagos

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[0:07] P: Realmente estoy deseando que llegue este. Sí. Esto es, obviamente, los espacios de Twitter de la revista Bitcoin. Hacemos esto varias veces a la semana, pero hoy hablaremos sobre Lightning Network y las mentas chamianas federadas y lo que significan, qué son, por qué son interesantes. Esta es una conversación grabada y se publicará en la transmisión en vivo de Bitcoin Space, que puede encontrar en cualquier aplicación de podcast que use. También está publicado en YouTube. Básicamente, es por eso que estamos aquí y de qué se trata.

Eric, has estado trabajando en mentas chamianas. ¿Puedes contarnos un poco de tu historia de fondo, quién eres y por qué estás interesado en las mentas chamianas?

[0:51] Eric Sirion: Está bien. Impresionante. Sí, mi experiencia es principalmente en ciencias de la computación. Como tal, tenía un gran interés en los viejos esquemas ecológicos. En la universidad, hice una charla sobre todo el desarrollo desde el principio en los 80 con esquemas ecológicos chamianos y hasta Bitcoin y todas las cosas increíbles como Lightning. Así fue como tuve la idea de poder integrar todas estas ideas diferentes. Sí. En algún momento, escuché sobre Liquid y las federaciones y pensé:”¿Por qué no usamos la etiqueta de federación para implementar estas viejas ideas de efectivo electrónico que nos permiten tener una privacidad perfecta en Bitcoin, pero una privacidad perfecta en el entorno ecológico? plan para mejorar Bitcoin?”De ahí surgió la idea.

[1:42] P: Muy bueno. Muy genial. Casey, ¿quieres ir a continuación?

[1:45] Casey Rodarmor: Sí, suena bien. Sí. Soy programador en el área de la bahía. Solía ​​ser, supongo, brevemente un desarrollador central de Bitcoin en Chaincode Labs hace mucho tiempo. Al igual que Eric, estoy realmente interesado en el conocimiento olvidado antes de Bitcoin. Muchos Bitcoiners realmente no conocen cosas como el dinero electrónico y otros sistemas extraños que existían antes de Bitcoin. A menudo, estaban bastante centralizados, pero tienen propiedades interesantes.

Mi interés en las mentas chamianas en realidad proviene de estar preocupado por la usabilidad de Lightning Network para las normas. Es probable que cosas como fallas en los pagos, una dificultad en la administración de nodos, etc., creo que habrá verdaderos desafíos de usabilidad allí, especialmente para la gente normal. Estoy muy interesado en las casas de moneda chamian federadas porque permiten esta muy buena compensación en la que puede tener esencialmente lo que equivale a una billetera publicada con mejores garantías de seguridad que si un solo actor estuviera alojando esa billetera. Sí. De ahí es de donde vengo.

[2:47] P: Me encanta. Me encanta. Rindell, ¿quieres? Supongo que quiere permanecer completamente anónimo, mantenernos a todos en la oscuridad acerca de quién es y de qué se trata.

[2:56] Rindell: Sí. Soy ingeniero de software. Al menos eso es lo que dicen. He trabajado mucho en eso, lo llamaré ingeniería de criptografía. Tomando primitivas criptográficas y construyendo sistemas realmente grandes a partir de ellas. Muchos sistemas distribuidos funcionan en sistemas realmente grandes. He estado hablando con la gente de aquí y en Pubnet y otros eventos por un tiempo sobre escalar Lightning Network de dos maneras diferentes. Uno de ellos es el escalado de última milla en el que Casey habló un poco.

Cómo podemos hacer que los usuarios finales obtengan una experiencia privada, económica y con un rendimiento realmente alto sin que todos en el mundo tengan múltiples canales Lightning ¿abierto? Simplemente no creo que eso vaya a funcionar, y hay muchas ideas interesantes diferentes allí. Entonces, otra dimensión es, ¿cómo escalamos el enrutamiento Lightning? Hemos estado teniendo muchas conversaciones sobre cómo se vería realmente la división en subredes para Lightning.

Cuando Blockstream anunció la financiación de las mentas chamianas federadas, encajó en mi cabeza. Esta es una primitiva nueva realmente interesante en la caja de herramientas que viene con algunas compensaciones interesantes. Creo que para los nodos hoja del gráfico Lightning, es realmente atractivo por varias razones y hay muchas direcciones interesantes en las que puedo ir. Así que estoy muy emocionado de profundizar en esto. Hay una nueva primitiva que podemos usar para construir cosas realmente interesantes sobre Lightning.

[4:25] P: Me encanta. Finalmente, Vivek, estoy muy contento de que hayas decidido unirte a nosotros en el escenario. Sé que has estado muy ocupado últimamente. ¿Puede darles a todos una breve introducción sobre quién es usted? No te subestimes o gritaré.

[4:37] Vivek: Claro. Seguro. Hola tios. Mi nombre es Vivek. Hago desarrollo comercial para Blockstream, pero tengo muchas funciones. Hice algunas cosas de MNA como analista en su día. Realicé mucho trabajo de consultoría en ventas. En este momento, en estos días, estoy trabajando con Christian Decker para averiguar esencialmente el mercado de productos adecuado para nuestra luz verde, una solución alojada en el nodo Lightning y también trabajando con Samson y el equipo en Liquid. Estoy feliz de estar aquí y participar y ver qué modelos federados podemos explorar y garantías de seguridad, como lo explicó Casey.

[5:16] P: Me encanta. Creo que la forma más útil de hacerlo es, me gustaría que hablemos sobre… Como grupo, esto es gratis para todos. Por favor, si alguien en el escenario tiene algo que decir o un comentario o un pensamiento o una pregunta, simplemente salte y dígalo. Lo primero que quiero hacer es hablar sobre los desafíos específicos. Quiero que la gente entienda exactamente qué es una menta chamiana y lo que significa tener también un sistema federado de menta chamiana. Sospecho que la mejor manera de hacerlo es comenzar por definir los desafíos que estos sistemas intentan resolver. ¿Cuáles son los problemas que pueden existir en el futuro que podemos destacar y luego hablar sobre cómo el sistema apunta a resolverlos?

[6:09] Rindell: Sí. Adelante.

[6:10] Eric: Sí, claro. Bien entonces. Creo que los mayores problemas que enfrenta Bitcoin, o que enfrentará, es la privacidad, que ya es una preocupación, y la escalabilidad, que es una preocupación hoy, pero no tanto como esperaba en el futuro. En el futuro, estoy pensando en que el uso en cadena será esencialmente un privilegio de revisión a menos que haya algún aumento en el rendimiento en la cadena, lo que siempre ha sido polémico. A menudo, si queremos tener un aumento importante del rendimiento, esto conlleva requisitos más altos para los nodos completos, y sí, es solo que la gente no se ha sentido cómoda con ello.

Creo que nos enfrentamos a un futuro en el que para la mayoría de las personas que realizan transacciones en cadena no es tan factible hablar como la mayoría de las personas que ganan menos de, digamos, 50 dólares al día, lo que yo Creo que hay bastantes personas en este planeta. Todavía queremos que puedan participar en Bitcoin. Creo que el efectivo electrónico federado puede resolver este problema en cierto sentido. Tener una compensación diferente cuando se trata de propiedades fiduciarias. Esa es una de las formas de decirlo.

[7:25] P: Entendido. Bueno. Privacidad y usabilidad. ¿Está bien? ¿O escalabilidad? ¿Fue escalabilidad?

[7:31] Eric: Sí, exactamente. Exactamente.

[7:32] P: Está bien.

[7:33] Eric: Sí, escalabilidad y usabilidad en cierto modo, pero eso es más bien, eso viene automáticamente, soluciones más centralizadas.

[7:41] P: Entiendo. Bueno. Rindell?

[7:42] Rindell: Sí. Iba a decir, muchas veces cuando hablamos de escalar Bitcoin, a lo que realmente se reduce es a cuántas transacciones puedes tener antes de tener que tocar la cadena de bloques, ¿verdad? Con Lightning, la idea es realizar una transacción en cadena para abrir un canal. Abro un canal a Odell. Hago tantos canales o transacciones de ida y vuelta en ese canal como sea posible. Luego, eventualmente, en algún momento en el futuro, hacemos otra transacción en cadena para cerrarla. Con estas 2 transacciones en cadena, tenemos todos estos pagos diferentes que pueden ir y venir. Lo ideal es que dejes tus canales abiertos indefinidamente.

En realidad, solo está utilizando la cadena de bloques de capa 1 como un sistema criptográfico descentralizado que regresa al sistema judicial, ¿verdad? En un mundo perfecto, tengo todos estos canales abiertos. En realidad, nunca tengo que bajar a la cadena principal, pero si hay un conflicto o disputa, vamos y nos instalamos en la cadena de bloques. Eso es genial si tiene canales abiertos, pero si observa el tamaño de un canal Lightning de Bitcoin abierto en términos de peso de bloque y hace los cálculos, un bloque de Bitcoin puede tener, digamos, 1.3 megas de transacciones en él. El canal abierto es del orden de 140 vBytes. Multiplica eso, multiplica por cuántos bloques tienes en un día, asumiendo bloques de diez minutos.

La conclusión a la que llega es que si desea que mil millones de personas en el mundo tengan un canal abierto, le llevará 3 años, ¿verdad? Si nadie está haciendo ninguna otra transacción, nadie está cerrando canales, nadie tiene 2 canales, todo el mundo está abriendo 1 canal. La conclusión a la que llega si lo hace es que dice:”Está bien, necesitamos tener mecanismos de agrupación por lotes más interesantes para aumentar el volumen en los canales”, o simplemente llega a la conclusión de que no todo el mundo en el mundo va a tener un nodo Lightning con un canal abierto.

Un modelo que podría tener es que puede tener una billetera de custodia, ¿verdad? Donde tienes algo como Wallet of Satoshi, donde tienes una cuenta y tienen un nodo muy bien conectado y bien capitalizado que hace todas las transacciones Lightning reales y solo tienes un saldo de cuenta con ellos. Eso es similar a si está usando la aplicación Cash o algo así, ¿verdad? Puede pensar en Cash App como una capa de escala de Bitcoin. Está muy centralizado y muy cerrado.

Lo bueno de las mentas chamianas… Entonces probablemente deberíamos dar un paso atrás en un minuto y hablar sobre lo que es una menta chamiana federada. Lo bueno de esto es que le permite tener una solución de custodia federada menos centralizada para una billetera Lightning. En lugar de confiar en una empresa o una parte con el saldo de mi billetera Lightning y que ellos hagan todas las transacciones Lightning, puedo confiar en una federación de diferentes entidades que pueden estar en diferentes regímenes geopolíticos, hacer que administren las transacciones Lightning para el resto de la red. Luego, dentro de la casa de la moneda, todas mis transacciones, otras personas que tienen cuentas allí nunca tocan Lightning ni tocan nada más. Solo enviamos bytes de datos de un lado a otro.

Es una forma de, si piensas en el futuro que esto va a despegar, lo que puedes imaginar es que habrá una red conectada por Lightning de estas diferentes mentas chamianas. Te unes al que tiene los custodios en los que confías o que tiene las propiedades o capacidades o semántica que deseas. Tienes una cuenta allí, todas las transacciones dentro de ese banco. Si lo desea, tan rápido como sea posible y muy seguro. Cuando necesite mover dinero entre estas casas de moneda, se acabó Lightning. Ese es el panorama general. Si esto realmente despega, obtiene una escalabilidad increíblemente buena, obtiene una privacidad increíblemente buena y aún puede conectarse a Lightning sin que todas las personas del mundo necesiten un canal Lightning.

[11:51] P: Entendido. Matt, has estado extrañamente callado. ¿Agregaría algo a eso o al principio de la discusión hasta ahora?

[11:59] Matt Odell: Básicamente, mi TLDR estaría creando una privacidad de Bitcoin más accesible de una manera que tiene mejores propiedades de confianza que las carteras de custodia actuales, que todos ya están usando. Mucha gente está usando billeteras Lightning de custodia.

[12:17] P: Sí, seguro o carteras de custodia en cadena, que es aún peor.

[12:21] Vivek: También me gustaría agregar… Rindell hizo algunos puntos excelentes sobre la escalabilidad de Lightning Network y la apertura del canal. Todo en Bitcoin va hacia esta mentalidad escalable. Hemos ganado una eficiencia fantástica de vByte a través de las firmas Taproot y Schnorr. Mucho de esto es una mentalidad similar de no necesariamente tener que revelar los detalles internos. Por ejemplo, el guión, la política en sí, otras cosas por el estilo. Es utilizable y un poco más eficiente. Es genial.

[12:56] Rindell: Sí. P, podría tener sentido simplemente dar un paso atrás y describir qué es un FediMint y luego podemos… Podría tener más sentido para la gente acerca de dónde encaja esto y tal vez podamos hablar sobre diferentes aplicaciones y problemas que resuelve.

[13:10] P: Me encanta. Vamos a hacerlo. Rindell, ¿quieres dar un alto nivel, tu opinión y luego podemos saltar a Eric y Casey? ¿Tiene sentido hacerlo?

[13:19] Casey: Una sugerencia, tal vez deberíamos comenzar con una menta chamian no federada primero y luego más tarde, con una n federada en la parte superior porque están un poco separados y probablemente sean confusos para intentar para digerirlos a ambos al mismo tiempo.

[13:34] P: Me encanta.

[13:34] Vivek: David Chaum, no sé quién es.

[13:36] Casey: David Chaum es un criptógrafo de la vieja escuela. Todavía está por aquí. Desarrolló un sistema llamado e-cash, y no tengo el artículo de Wikipedia frente a mí. Estos detalles probablemente sean incorrectos, pero el efectivo electrónico era un sistema de pago centralizado. No recuerdo si la gente recibió tarjetas o cómo funcionaba, pero la idea era que podía pagar a los comerciantes por cosas de su vida diaria con Fiat. Utilizaba criptografía y firmas ciegas particulares para que cada vez que un usuario gastaba dinero, el operador de e-cash o DigiCash no supiera nada sobre quién estaba haciendo una compra.

[14: 18] Rindell: Eric, ¿qué es una firma ciega? He oído hablar de las firmas de Schnorr y ECDSA. ¿Qué es una firma ciega? ¿Se superpone con esos?

[14:29] Eric: Sí. Básicamente, un esquema de firmas ciegas [inaudible] es un esquema de firma que permite al usuario adquirir una firma en un mensaje sin que el firmante se entere de este mensaje. Normalmente, esto no parecería demasiado útil porque normalmente, si firma un mensaje o [inaudible] de dinero electrónico, lo que realmente lo usa es que cada firma tiene el mismo valor. Digamos que cada firma vale un dólar. De todos modos, el montón de mensajes aleatorios y la única propiedad que estos mensajes deben tener es que deben ser únicos. Básicamente, puede hacer esto dibujándolos al azar y teniendo un espacio de mensajes lo suficientemente grande para dibujar. Luego dejas que el ciego de la menta chamiana firme estos mensajes aleatorios, te devuelva las firmas ciegas.

Puede deshacer estas firmas y ahora, tiene un montón de mensajes aleatorios con firmas adjuntas. Podemos llamar a cada uno de estos pares, por ejemplo, tokens de efectivo electrónico, o creo que los llamamos recibos de canje en nuestra publicación de blog. Cada uno vale un dólar. Si le doy a la casa de la moneda chamian cinco dólares y cinco de esos mensajes cegados, solo un mensaje aleatorio, solo esencialmente, obtengo 5 de esos tokens. Entonces puedo gastarlos de forma anónima porque el banco o la casa de la moneda chamian federada nunca se enteró de la identidad.

[15:58] Rindell: Si puedo intervenir realmente rápido. Cuando piensas en protocolos criptográficos, creo que es realmente útil pensar en una analogía como usar papel y pasar cosas físicamente. Una buena metáfora para las firmas ciegas, yo no inventé esto, lo estoy robando del papel de Chaum, es si alguien recuerda el papel carbón, ¿no? Tenías 2 hojas de papel y firmabas la de arriba y luego la levantabas y, por debajo, tu firma se transfirió porque hay una capa de grafito en la parte inferior del primer papel. Usas eso cuando el chico de los servicios públicos viene a tu casa y te conecta el gas y firmas una hoja de papel y te dan el documento final. Eso es como papel carbón.

De lo que Eric está hablando, imagina que tienes estos sobres de carbono y hay un deslizamiento dentro de ellos. Tienes un número de serie en un trozo de papel y lo sellas dentro de un sobre y se lo das a la menta chamiana, y la menta chamiana no sabe cuál es el número de serie porque está dentro de este sobre. Ellos firman el sobre y luego te lo devuelven. Puede abrir el sobre y sacar el papel, y ahora…

[17:07] P: Creo que lo perdimos.

[17:09] Casey: Puedo continuar con ese pensamiento.

[17:11] P: Sí, adelante.

[17:12] Casey: Le entregas al banco este sobre, y de adentro hacia afuera está este pequeño resguardo. con el número de serie. El banco firma el exterior del sobre, esencialmente y la firma del banco se transfiere al recibo en el interior del sobre con el número de serie, pero el banco no puede ver cuál es ese número de serie. Entonces digamos que esto representa como un depósito de un dólar. Te vas y eventualmente, vuelves más tarde al banco cuando quieras gastar ese dólar y lo presentas con ese número de serie del cartel. Debido a que el banco nunca vio cuál era ese número de serie, solo vio el exterior del sobre que está firmado, no puede vincular ese número de serie con el acto original de firmar y no puede correlacionar a la persona que se presenta con algunos persona que ha visto en el pasado.

Puede verificar que produjo su firma. Puede ver que produce que este es el número de serie que fue firmado por su clave privada. Así que puede confiar en él y decir:”Está bien, supongo que esto vale un dólar”y dejarte hacer lo que quieras. Realiza una compra o realiza una transferencia Lightning saliente en el caso de una menta Chamian Lightning. Eso es lo básico. Te presentas y dices que depositas dinero, y se produce una de estas firmas ciegas. Obtienes este número de serie y luego apareces más tarde y dices:”Oye, quiero hacer algo con algo de dinero”. El banco no puede correlacionar esos 2 eventos porque nunca vio un número de serie que presentará más tarde cuando se registró originalmente.

[18:43] P: Entendido. No he escuchado eso antes. Esa es una metáfora fantástica, una analogía, sea cual sea el término correcto.

[18:50] Casey: Sí, me encanta la idea de que alguien se presente a lo que equivale a un banco y diga:”Oye, si no sabes quién soy, pero mira esta firma como tú la hiciste para que puedas confiar en ella. Así que haz lo que te digo que hagas con la cantidad de dinero que cubre la firma”. Es simplemente genial. Aparecen los clientes, el banco no tiene idea de quiénes son, pero es como digo, demuestre su depósito antes, así que debe ser legítimo. Luego, simplemente hacen lo que el cliente les dice que hagan.

[19:18] Matt: Casey, ¿cómo terminó el proyecto de efectivo electrónico? ¿Tiene eso algo que ver con que el modelo federado es de múltiples bancos y está un poco mejor?

[19:29] Casey: Creo que no estoy muy familiarizado con la historia, pero el implementación original de efectivo electrónico que se llama DigiCash, creo que simplemente no era popular. Permitió a las personas realizar pagos privados. No creo que esto fuera algo que realmente le importara a la gente. No creo que fuera muy popular. Creo que hizo una prueba con un banco en algún lugar de Estados Unidos. Realmente debería tener el artículo de Wikipedia frente a mí para saber qué está pasando. Creo que simplemente no fue popular y simplemente se desvaneció en la oscuridad.

[20:01] P: Está bien, entonces–

[20:01] Matt: ¿[inaudible] esos de vuelta?

[20:02 ] Eric: Sí. Por lo que reuní, también quería llegar a la razón porque estoy escribiendo un artículo sobre esto. Parece que es realmente benigno. Es como si se hubieran quedado sin dinero. En realidad, creo que tenían algunas pruebas en curso con Deutsche Bank. Estaban experimentando con la idea chamiana del efectivo electrónico. Como dijiste, el interés no estaba allí. También son posteriores al 11 de septiembre. Hubo algunas regulaciones nuevas, y todo esto sucedió en paralelo. El DigiCash acaba de quebrar. Al mismo tiempo, entró en vigor una nueva legislación que hizo completamente imposible ejecutar un banco tan chamiano sobre una base legal.

[20:48] Rindell: El cambio clave aquí es, para el La primera vez, tenemos dinero programable que es un sonido que aumenta en el poder adquisitivo con el que puede interactuar fácilmente. Una de las partes más interesantes de la propuesta de Eric es que interactúa directamente con Lightning Network. Da un paso más. No solo usted o tiene este modelo federado para que la confianza y los custodios, cualquier custodio individual se reduzca y tenga privacidad de los custodios para que los custodios no puedan ver todas sus transacciones y sus saldos. También puede interactuar directamente con cualquier otra billetera en Lightning Network sin problemas sin ningún tipo de aprobación regulatoria con los bancos ni nada por el estilo.

[21:31] Casey: Sí. Creo que eso es realmente importante porque DigiCash estaba regulado. Era como una entidad legal regulada. Solo podía hacer cosas del tipo de entidad legal regulada, lo que lo hacía menos atractivo y menos poderoso.

[21:44] Rindell: Sí. Creo que la portabilidad que obtienes a través de Lightning Network también es realmente genial, ¿verdad? Si estoy en una menta federada que están ejecutando Odell y P y Eric y luego decido que quiero mudarme a una menta diferente o puedo mover todo sobre Lightning o puedo estar en múltiples e interactuar con otros servicios. Una de las cosas que realmente espero en el futuro es tener diferentes mentas, tener diferentes políticas sobre las capacidades que admiten y que usted pueda elegir dónde desea gastar su dinero en diferentes cosas. Tener todo eso interoperable a través de Lightning Network es realmente asombroso, ¿verdad? Tener una menta chamiana es genial. Tener una Internet de mentas chamianas, todas conectadas por Lightning Network, es mucho más genial.

[24:30] P: ¿Puedo hacer una pregunta aclaratoria? ¿La descripción que dimos anteriormente de los sobres en la copia al carbón, que era una descripción de firmas ciegas o que era una descripción de cómo funcionan las mentas chamianas?

[24:41] Rindell: Esa fue una descripción de… El sobre era de firmas ciegas.

[24:44] P: Está bien, claro. Eso fue–

[24:45] Rindell: Usar eso por dinero es chamian mentas.

[24:47] P: Está bien. Entiendo. Ahí era donde faltaba la conexión. ¿Podemos dar un resumen de alto nivel de lo que es una menta chamiana una vez más para la audiencia? ¿Deberíamos entonces hacer la transición a mentas chamianas federadas?

[25:00] Casey: Eso suena genial. Yo diría que una casa de moneda chamiana es esencialmente un banco que utiliza firmas ciegas para desvincular depósitos y gastos.

[25:13] P: Está bien. Una casa de moneda chamiana es un banco que utiliza firmas ciegas para desvincular depósitos y gastos como hemos descrito. En realidad, una pregunta más antes de entrar en eso. ¿Por qué un banco en el sistema actual querría hacer eso? Tengo tanta curiosidad por saber por qué… Creo que dijiste que Deutsche Bank estaba experimentando con esto. ¿Por qué querrían hacer eso? Porque eso parece ir en contra de sus intereses. Tiene sentido que…

[25:40] Matt: Creo que los bancos quieren hacer muchas cosas y quieren tener el mejor producto posible para sus clientes. Quieren reducir su responsabilidad conociendo los saldos y transacciones de los clientes y todo, pero están paralizados por la regulación y siguen estando cada vez más paralizados. PayPal no es realmente un banco, pero son como un neobanco. PayPal no quiere bloquear las cuentas de las personas. No quieren bloquear las cuentas de las personas y evitar que las personas usen el producto. Quieren que la mayor cantidad posible de personas utilicen el producto, pero se ven obligados y obligados a hacerlo bajo una normativa onerosa.

[26:12] P: Sí, totalmente. Creo que una gran analogía aquí es como un almacenamiento de datos, ¿verdad? En este punto, se espera que si está usando Dropbox, que no debería usar, o iCloud, que no debería usar, o lo que sea que esté usando, básicamente no tienen acceso a su información. Ese es un punto de venta para muchos de estos servicios.

Está completamente encriptado, del lado del cliente. Nadie en nuestra empresa podría siquiera mirar sus datos si quisiera. Ya estamos viendo, como con iCloud, el anuncio de que supuestamente están escaneando todas sus fotos de iCloud ahora para mantener a todos a salvo de la pornografía infantil. La idea de que responsabilizaríamos a los proveedores de datos por esa información, creo, sería sorprendente para la mayoría, pero por alguna razón, con los bancos, simplemente lo aceptamos.”Oh, sí, tienen que tener un conocimiento del 100% de todo”. La idea de que pueden mantener eso totalmente privado es algo que todo el mundo ya tiene, no quiero decir que se rindieron, sino que aceptaron.

[27:17] Rindell: El modelo de Chamian Mint , mapea el sistema analógico en un sistema digital realmente limpio, ¿verdad? Lo que terminas con estos vales o estas fichas, parecen papel moneda, ¿verdad? Cada uno es un instrumento al portador de denominación uniforme que puede pasar entre usuarios y luego depositarlo en el banco, ¿verdad? Si está tratando de construir un sistema de efectivo electrónico, es una forma bastante natural de modelar el problema. Una de las razones, y estoy seguro de que vamos a hablar del modelo federado en un minuto, pero una de las desventajas es que solo funciona en tu banco. Existe un gran riesgo de centralización. El banco es un punto único de quiebra, lo que creo que es una de las principales razones por las que el trabajo de Eric es tan interesante.

[28:07] P: Lo siento, es un problema con los no federados.

[28:11] Rindell: Sí, con no federado con el de la vieja escuela. Si confío en Deutsche Bank, confío en Deutsche Bank.

[28:16] P: Sí. Es casi como los bancos salvajes de antaño, donde cada banco tenía su propia moneda y eran interoperables solo si el banco decía que eran interoperables.

[28:26] Matt: Las casas de moneda chamian originales propuesta era, era una compensación. Tenías lo que era esencialmente una privacidad perfecta, pero corría un riesgo de custodia. No tenías la capacidad de interactuar sin problemas. Esta propuesta elimina o mitiga los 2 aspectos negativos principales, que son el riesgo de custodia y la capacidad de realizar transacciones fuera de la Casa de la Moneda fácilmente.

[28:52] Eric: Sí. Creo que esta interacción con otros bancos ni siquiera fue un gran problema. El problema habría sido, digamos que EE. UU. Impone algunas reglas de que los bancos estadounidenses solo pueden cooperar con otros bancos que conocen a sus clientes. Entonces, si administra un banco con efectivo electrónico de Chamian, no podrá interactuar con ninguno de estos bancos. Así es como se hacen las regulaciones financieras en estos días. Muchos de ellos ni siquiera son leyes en todos los países donde se aplican.

Los bancos más importantes de este mundo imponen esto a otros bancos para que puedan enviarse dinero entre sí. Ese es el poder de Bitcoin que no tiene que pedir permiso de esa manera. Simplemente se conecta a Lightning Network, y ahora, todos los que ejecutan Lightning Network o que forman parte de un banco chamian federado pueden simplemente interactuar entre sí. No se necesita permiso.

[29:48] P: Me encanta. Bueno. Hagamos la transición a… Definimos qué es una menta chamiana. Definamos qué es una menta chamiana federada.

[29:59] Eric: Sí. En el nivel más alto de comprensión, cuando federamos alguna entidad, simplemente la dividimos en”n”partes de las cuales, hasta un cierto número, que se llama”f”, pueden ser maliciosas sin que la funcionalidad de todo el sistema se descomponga. Por ejemplo, tenemos esto para cosas federadas como Liquid. ¿Lo siento?

[30:24] P: ¿Puede repetir eso? ¿Dijiste?

[30:26] Matt: Eric, ¿dirías que es bueno? No sé si es una analogía, pero para los Bitcoiners es en lugar de un custodio de un solo sig, básicamente tienes un custodio de multi-sig. Estás distribuyendo el riesgo.

[30:36] Eric: Mencionaste que tienes dos o tres multi-sig [inaudible]. Entonces tienes 2 riesgos. Existe un riesgo de simplemente perder sus llaves y lo mitiga al no tener un tres de tres, sino un dos de tres. Puede perder 1 clave y aún puede sacar sus Bitcoins. Entonces tienes el segundo riesgo, que es SAFT. Puede mitigarlo necesitando dos de estas tres firmas. Solo si alguien logra robar dos de sus tres llaves, entonces realmente puede tomar sus fondos. En realidad, así es como se implementa la parte en cadena del banco chamian federado como solo una billetera multi-sig. Sí, esa es la belleza de Bitcoin.

Es el primer activo que realmente se puede mantener de tal manera que solo si una cierta cantidad de un determinado grupo de personas está de acuerdo, puede transferir fondos que nunca antes había sido posible. Siempre hubo una instancia superior, como un banco, que podía simplemente dictar quién posee los fondos y quién no.

[31:31] P: Entendido. Bueno. Hablemos de cómo se implementa o qué… ¿Cómo se pasa de una menta chamiana a una menta chamiana federada en términos de prácticamente? ¿Qué significa eso? Cual es la propuesta? ¿Cómo se integra Lightning Network con eso?

[31:49] Casey: Creo que es bueno separar Lightning Network de… Es irrelevante lo que hace la menta chamiana federada. Da la casualidad de que es como una aplicación atractiva de mentas chamian federadas para que realicen y reciban pagos de Lightning Network. En principio, podría tener una menta chamiana federada que hiciera cualquier cosa. Podrías tener una menta chamiana federada que tuviera un alijo de Beanie Babies y luego, cuando podrías enviarlo, Beanie Babies y luego decirle que envíe Beanie Babies, que tenga Beanie Babies como tokens. Es como una tecnología muy general.

En el caso de Lightning Network, la casa de la moneda chamian federada estaría haciendo y recibiendo pagos. La federación en sí es algo de lo que no sé mucho, así que dejaré que alguien más tome esos detalles.

[32:36] P: Para ser claro, me encanta la analogía de Beanie Babies, deberíamos hacer eso solo porque sería divertido. Mentas chamianas federadas que lo único que puedes intercambiar son Beanie Babies. Podrías hacer esto en cadena. No necesariamente tiene que estar en Lightning. El hecho de que esté en Lightning se debe a que Lightning es una forma extremadamente efectiva de transmitir valor monetario.

[32:57] Rindell: La forma en que lo enmarcaría correctamente es, imagina que tienes un Bitcoin federado menta chamiana, ¿verdad? Hay una casa de moneda chamiana donde me presento y le doy un poco de Bitcoin y me entrega un montón de estos cupones o tokens que representan denominaciones bien definidas de Bitcoin. Puedo dárselos a usted, P. Puede dárselos a Odell y luego Odell puede canjearlos en la Casa de la Moneda y recuperar Bitcoin. Eso es lo que podría simplemente ir a construir, y podría hacerlo como un único custodio chamian mint o podría hacerlo como una federación. De esa manera, no hay un solo jugador que pueda huir unilateralmente con los fondos de todos.

Si tuviera que construir eso, puede imaginar que hay API, operaciones o comandos que puede enviar a la casa de la moneda. Un comando que puede emitir a la casa de la moneda es:”Aquí tienes Bitcoin, dame cupones”. Otro comando que puede emitir en la casa de la moneda es”¿Es válido este cupón?”Otro comando que puede emitir en la casa de la moneda es”Canjee este cupón por Bitcoin”, ¿verdad? These are the commands that you can give to the mint because the mint is just a piece of software and it’ll do things using either vouchers or Bitcoin.

Where this connects the Lightning Network is, imagine if I can take one of my vouchers, my payment coupons to the mint and say,”Hey, use this to pay this Lightning invoice.”Then it pays the Lightning invoice on my behalf using that voucher. Or I say,”Hey, generate a Lightning invoice and then pay me in my chamian mint tokens.”Now, other people or myself using another wallet can send payment over the Lightning Network to the mint, and I redeem that payment for my chamian mint tokens.

It’s less that the mint is built out of Lightning and it’s more that if you have a chamian mint implementation that plugs into the Lightning Network, then it can interact with the Lightning Network like any other Lightning node, but on our side of the mint, we’re passing around these little blobs of data that are redeemable for Bitcoin.

[35:00] Eric: Exactly. I think we should separate the Lightning part from the federated chamian mint part because actually, if… It’s quite separate in the first instantiation. There might be some implementation down the road where we actually fade away to Lightning node, but for now, all we do to interact with the Lightning Network is we just have some sort of small contact in a federated chamian mint that enables trustless Lightning payments essentially or Lightning Payments in the same trust model as the federation already has, like the federated trust model.

I think we wanted to come back to, how would we actually federate a mint? That comes down to 2 parts. One part is holding the collateral, which is on-chain. It’s just a good old multi-sig quality on Bitcoin. The second part is the issuance of these e-cash tokens. In a traditional chamian mint, that would be done using some [inaudible] scheme. For federated chamian mints, we need the threshold bank signature scheme. Meaning, again, you can think about it like multi-signature for Bitcoin but for blind signatures. In the academic world, we call these multi-signatures actually special signatures because you need a certain threshold of participants that cooperate with you to generate such a signature.

Essentially, it’s just a “t” of “n” blind signature scheme where like a certain amount of parties in the federation has to be honest and then they can generate these vouchers. That’s the 2 parts you essentially need to featherweight chamian bank or chamian mint.

The last thing maybe to mention is that you still need some consensus algorithm between them, between the federation members. We actually agree on the right order of transactions because that’s the same problem that Bitcoin solve for an open set of well data’s being minus. For closed set where we know who is part of the federation of part of the network, this consensus was solved a long ago like in the 80s or 90s, if I remember correctly. We’re just using some old tech there to get an order of transactions, which every kind of system needs. Otherwise, you can easily double spend.

[37:10] P: Got it. Interesting.

[37:13] Matt: Eric, this sounds very academic. Is it possible to use Minimint today? Have you used it on anything?

[37:20] Eric: Please don’t use it right now like at least not on [inaudible]. Please use regtest if you want to play–

[37:26] P: This is how we know you’re not a shit coiner. For the love of God, do not use this amazing–

[37:33] Eric: I built it as a proof of concept.

[37:34] P: Yeah, and I just love it. You’re like, for the love of God, do not use this amazing thing that I have built. It’s not quite ready yet. You should be testing it and breaking it yourself as opposed to being like just floating it onto the ether as they…

[37:47] Vivek: Just asking you, Eric, in general. I think I saw you bought a coffee with it or something. Also, I was wondering if people did want to get involved and contribute. What repo should they look at? Maybe what language should they be familiar with, any general suggestions?

[38:03] Eric: Yeah. What you saw, yes, I bought a coffee with it at HCPP in Paralelní Polis. What I did there was I actually had a regtest federation running with completely worthless Bitcoin, but I coupled it to a Lightning node, which was actually running on main net, so I did atomic swap from my local regtest network to mine that Bitcoin, which is a totally insane thing to do unless it’s on your own computer. If people want to contribute. I had a few people reach out to me. I don’t want to disclose their identities here because that would force them to commit.

In private, I’ve been talking to a few people like ideally, some Rust like Minimint [inaudible] Rust, but also, if you are just generally interested and want to improve documentation and all the good stuff, you just want to play around with it. It’s on GitHub. It’s github.com/fedimint/Minimint or you can also find the link to the GitHub repo at fediment.org. They can just look around. I wrote a little week me that instructs you to set a federation on the regtest. You need the installation of Bitcoin core. There are some scripts included in the repository that automatically has been a practice network and then also the Minimint nodes.

Then you have federation of, I think, by default, 4 nodes, running of which one may be malicious and then you can just play around with it. It’s really unfinished right now. There’s only a [inaudible] app to interact with it. Yeah, but I’d be super happy about more contributors because that would mean that we can move along more quickly. My dream is that at the next HCPP in Prague, I might be able to actually buy a coffee with a main net federation. That would be awesome, but for now, for the love of God, please don’t use it on main net. Some flaws in the wallet logic that may make you lose funds, and I don’t want it. I couldn’t live with that. Please don’t.

[39:53] Rindell: Yeah, just a quick observation. For people who don’t know, you can run a Bitcoin node in what’s called regtest mode, where it just sets up like a private little Bitcoin network and you can mine blocks at will. It’s really great for testing. They’re completely worthless because it’s just like blocks that you mine at will on your own laptop. I think it’s funny that because you atomic swap that to the Lightning Network. The regtest running on your laptop is more valuable than half the shit coins that are on a Coinbase right now.

Good job for that. Another quick point. You mentioned Rust is an awesome language. If folks are looking at contributing to the Bitcoin ecosystem and are looking for a new language to learn, a lot of Bitcoin projects are popping up in Rust right now. Minimint which we’re talking about, if you follow like CPO, that’s all in Rust. There’s some cool stuff happening with LDK and Rust Lightning. Learning Rust will let you contribute to a lot of projects that are up-and-coming in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Then to Eric’s point about there’s obvious things that are wrong like he’s done an amazing job working on it so far, there’s some stuff that’s just like low-hanging for that. If you’re a Rust developer, you can jump in and work on. If you’ve done Tokyo, a networking before, just adding retries, the networking code and that kind of thing. There’s lots of opportunity to get involved and help out with the project.

[41:12] Eric: Yeah, definitely. The people from some of Bitcoin reach out to me. If you are like a student at university and want to get into a Bitcoin development, then I will be preparing some project proposals for some of Bitcoin and then you could apply for the 2022 version of it. That might be a really cool way to get into it because then we’d have some structured mentoring and stuff like that. If you’re interested, just take a look at some of Bitcoin once it’s out. I will have to write multiple project proposals till December. I think they will publish it beginning of the year, and people can apply. That would be awesome. Generally, if you just want to work on a project, contact me. I’m available on Telegram, on Twitter. Just reach out. Always happy.

[41:59] Rindell: Right. Instead of Summer of Code, it can be Summer of Chaum.

[42:03] P: Now, Rindell, that was a terrible pun.

[42:06] Rindell: Yeah. Now, you have a picture in your head of federated chamian mints, right? The model is you go to the Mint and hand them Bitcoin and they give you these e-cash tokens and you can hand those to anybody and they can go redeem them for Bitcoin. When you plug the Lightning Network into the other side of that, what you can see is or what I hope you can see is that that’s a model where you could have a semi-custodial managed Lightning wallet. Build that into Wallet of Satoshi, and now, there’s not a single custodian that you’re trusting with your funds. It’s actually a federation. If you’re spending money to other people who have that same wallet, then it doesn’t even touch Lightning. It’s actually even faster and more private and cheaper, right? That’s a pretty cool thing.

[42:53] P: It’s very cool. Let’s step into the pontificating zone.

[43:03] Casey: You mean the pressure to adopt things like federated chamian mints?

[43:06] P: Exactly.

[43:08] Casey: Yeah, I think actually, we’re already facing that pressure, and that pressure is not coming from scaling problems. It’s coming from usability problems. Super, super hard to run a Lightning Network node. I have a project that I work on that requires people who want to use our project to run their own Lightning Network node. That’s like the main barrier to getting to onboarding users, basically. All sorts of non-trivial things. You’ve got to manage your channels. You’ve got to manage Liquidity. You’ve got to keep your computer online, etc. All this… No, go ahead.

[43:40] P: I do want to push back slightly. I think you are both correct. I think that we… Certainly recently, it’s gotten a lot easier and there are much larger communities of people running their own Lightning Nodes, but I do agree that it is a significant challenge for the average person to go from zero to running their own Lightning Node. Though, both are the things like Umbrel and [inaudible]. Also, I [inaudible] Voltage which basically, you can host your own, they’ll host the Lightning node for you.

Again, that is not to say that everything you just said is not 100% accurate because I think it is. The average person is not going to be able to just download an application on their phone or on their computer and just be like,”I’m running a Lightning node.”

[44:23] Rindell: Yeah. That’s where the real advantage is. The real advantage is when we see a mobile wallet that is as easy to use as something like Wallet of Satoshi but has way better trust properties in terms of custodial risk because it’s federated and it has insanely good privacy guarantees because of chamian mints.

[44:41] P: Exactly.

[44:41] Rindell: It’ll have better privacy guarantees than pretty much anything we have out there right now, with the trade-off being a slight custodial risk. You can just install it on your phone. You don’t have to run a node. You don’t have to know what channels are and you can interact with a greater Lightning Network.

[44:55] P: One hundred percent. It’s basically–

[44:57] Casey: To be clear, even better privacy than what cryptocurrencies that their only feature’s privacy. It’s real good privacy.

[45:05] P: Oh, interesting. Espera espera. Speak more of that for a second.

[45:08] Casey: Yeah. There’s this no… Think about an outside observer looking at one of these federated chamian Lightning mints. They see it sending and receiving payments, but there are many users. That federated mint is acting on behalf of many users. In a normal case, an outside observer can’t tell which payment is being made on behalf of which user. All the users of the federated mint act as an anonymity set. This provides extremely good privacy, and it means there’s absolutely no temporary or permanent footprint that these transactions leave.

[45:43] P: How does this comp-, it’s a basic question.

[45:45] Rindell: Then within the mint like the federation doesn’t know what any of the payment activity was because they have no way of linking deposits and withdrawals. The operators of the Mint can’t tell what you’re doing. Then from outside of the Mint, all of the transactions are all flowing through this single aggregation point. Casey said it really well. It acts as a giant anonymity set, right?

The more people use your mint, the more anonymous it is because all of the traffic gets merged together going in and out of the gateway of the Mint. Then inside of the Mint, there’s no linkage between transactions and withdrawals. There’s not a ledger where you can follow all of the transactions.

[46:26] P: So is this basically… it’s like a superior… in it’s ideal form, how does this relate to CoinJoins? I know it doesn’t directly relate at all.

[46:39] Casey: It’s like a massive ongoing CoinJoin. You transfer into the Mint which is like entering the CoinJoin and then if you want to get out, you transfer out. I guess the anonymity set is all the users of the Mint, and it’s also not an on-chain CoinJoin. It’s like an off-chain CoinJoin which adds an additional more privacy.

[46:59] P: I expect all the CoinJoin implementations to hate this. I’m kidding, I’m kidding.

[47:03] Eric: You can think of it more as most of the tunneling protocol, actually. There are CoinJoin and tumbling Bitcoin, and it’s something like TumbleBit. It comes pretty close, actually, to what you could achieve with Minimint.

[47:16] P: Can you define the difference between a tumbler and a CoinJoin?

[47:20] Eric: Okay. According to [inaudible], you have a single transaction with inputs and outputs and only all the inputs and outputs in this one transaction get mixed that is your anonymity set. With tumbling, you have anonymity set over a bigger amount of inputs and outputs. With tumble bit, I think you can have a lot of transactions that set up inputs to a big tumbling pool. Then later on, you can take your funds out again.

Essentially, with Minimint, you have the anonymity set of everyone who send Bitcoins into the federation ever when you take it out again because you can’t really tell who already took their Bitcoins out again and who didn’t.

[48:02] P: What is the trade-off?

[48:03] Eric: It’s really great.

[48:04] P: What is the trade-off for on-chain transactions between the tumbler and a CoinJoin? Why aren’t tumblers supported by Samurai and all the other related…

[48:14] Eric: I’m not entirely sure. It’s not directly my field of research. As I understood it for like tumbling protocol’s more complicated. I’m not even sure if like [inaudible] couldn’t be counted as a tumbling protocol because they use also some blind signature scheme internally. I’d actually have to look into this again.

[48:33] Casey: Are there any non-custodial tumblers?

[48:35] Rindell: I don’t think you can. You can do a series of CoinJoins, but most tumblers are all custodial.

[48:42] Casey: I think that’s maybe the issue is that we only know how to make custodial tumblers which have that single party single point of failure problem and we also lack super illegal like the most illegal.

[48:57] P: When we say illegal, we mean just that the government doesn’t like anybody to have money that they have full control over.

[49:04] Casey: I think we’ve seen specific legal action by the state against people running tumblers.

[49:10] Rindell: Yep. If you’re a prosecutor and you can’t convince a jury that a tumbler is money laundering, then you suck at your job, right? That’s just how it is.

[49:25] P: It’s so crazy to me that the goal of having privacy around your money is something that is even in question as a legal issue. It is obviously and I understand why, but it’s crazy that people are sucked into the often false narratives around that. How long do we think before yelling and all the other related people and agencies are promoting narratives that federated chamian mints not only are trying to destroy Christmas but also are supporting child eating and cannibalism and all sorts of other terrible things?

[49:59] Casey: Honestly, just on that very specific question, I think we might be good. They don’t even really understand how Bitcoin works. They don’t demonstrate an understanding of very simplest concepts. Having somebody go up on, I don’t know, in front of Congress or whatever and being like,”Federated chamian Lightning mints are a threat to,”I don’t know. I’ve been consistently surprised by how uncoordinated and uninformed state actors are.

They haven’t really done anything meaningful against Bitcoin except for some, like an unfavorable acts treatment by the IRS. I’m very specifically against on-chain transactions and Bitcoin developers and miners and stuff like that. No sé. It’d be surprising to me if they got their act together. Although, I guess if one of them, if a federated chamian Lightning mint was super popular, then yeah, maybe we would start getting some heat.

[50:52] Matt: That’s definitely the biggest risk with a proposal like this, federations in general. Especially if they’re offering privacy, it becomes a regulatory target. What’s really promising to me about this proposal is that you can see, it appears that Eric intends, and Blockstream with their funding to him, intends to do it in a free and open source way. The fact that we could have many such federations doing this and they could be located around the world in different places competing with each other and interacting with each other makes it way more difficult for that kind of regulatory attack to happen.

I would caution against being too cocky in terms of… If it’s very public, if it’s being done by very obvious regulatory targets that have their ball based in the same country, stuff like that, they could get hit.

[51:48] P: Yeah, I agree. As soon as this becomes a significant…

[51:52] Eric: The great thing about federations though is that you don’t have to trust the people running the federated chamian bank fully. I could just have to trust them at their own to conspire against you. That, in my opinion, allows for pseudonymous federations. Just imagine, we have a bunch of pseudonyms, the type of reputation they care about, and they come together to form such a federation. Who should be prosecuted? Nobody knows who they are. You can’t prosecute a pseudonym them. It’s just not possible. If they do it correctly.

I think even if there was a crackdown, the federated part would make it still feasible to run it through a federation, especially since if you only take down one of the nodes, then the federation still runs. You did nothing.

[52:42] Rindell: Yeah. I was just going to say, as long as not a signing quorum of your federation all get pinched at the same time, the federation still operates. If you start to lose trust in your federation like maybe your federation people start tweeting crazy shit coinery, then because this is all connected over the Lightning node, your exit cost is really low. That’s one of the things that really jumped out to me about having these things be connected over Lightning is that your switching cost is incredibly low.

Stepping away from the resistance to nation-state story for a minute, another thing that’s just really interesting about this model because it’s just software that a couple of people have to come together to run together. I think it opens up a lot of really interesting scenarios for community banking. That could be community banking at a geographic level or within like your social group. If we wanted to say on Plebnet, a bunch of a plebs get together and run a federated chamian mint and people on Plebnet want to use it or not, that’s great.

I live in a town where I’m trying to get some of my local small businesses to take Lightning. We could definitely do a federated chamian mint for my town that plugs into the Lightning Network, right? You can have these things make sense at different levels of social organization and you can choose the group of people, the group of custodians that make sense for you to trust, right? This is the Bitcoin beach model of, you have a community bank that you have a Lightning app that interacts with it on, but you don’t have everybody responsible for opening up all their own channels. You can do that for your community or a community of interest or an internet community, whatever makes sense to you. You can really mix and match here. It’s really interesting.

[56:24] Eric: Maybe to elaborate…

[56:25] Casey: No, no, go ahead.

[56:26] Eric: On the community banking for just a minute. Like, [inaudible] is already doing this with Bitcoin Beach Wallet, but what they did is they went quickly to market, which is great because we need it now. What I’m trying to do with Minimint is improve privacy because when you’re doing a community banking, you don’t want your neighbor to know how much you own. That’s really bad. It’s probably even worse than Coinbase knowing how much you own because such social structure is often preferable for your PS not to know how much you make or how much you own. In a community banking environment, privacy is even more important.

[57:04] P: Yeah, I agree.

[57:06] Casey: I had maybe like an obscure technical question for Eric. Let’s say that you had a federated chamian mint and for some reason, you didn’t trust some of the participants or thought that there was a chance that it was going to fail. Do you think that it would be better to build into the protocol ways of, for example, ejecting members of the federation and voting in new ones? Or do you think people should just use the ease of exit and essentially just transfer all their funds to another federated chamian mint that they trust more, maybe even with some of the old participants?

[57:42] Eric: I think that’s more or less an engineering trade-off. What you’re describing is dynamic federations, and that took approximately quite a while to figure out for Liquid. I think initially, I will launch without this dynamic feature that you can just replace or switch in and out federation members. It’s just a lot of work, but ideally, you would have those because the cost of switching isn’t all that low actually. On the individual level, it might appear low. You still need to rebalance your channels for… If all your money flow’s outgoing, then that’s not optimal.

Ideally, your federation has some balance of money flow. Otherwise, again, the current model, we have a Lightning gateway, which is the independent actor of the federation. The Lightning gateway would have to repeat it like actually withdraw Bitcoins from the federation. Then we balance that channel so they have outgoing capacity again. I don’t think it’s optimal to just migrate in that way. It would be a little bit better to be able to throw someone out of the federation if they are clearly compromised.

[58:50] P: Interesting. Bueno. Where do we go from here, in this conversation? Are there specific other topics that we want to talk about, Matt, Vivek, Rindell, Eric, Casey? Do you want to do like a round table? We can pull people up and get questions answered. What do you all think? Vamos a hacerlo.

[59:07] Matt: I would love to hear Shinobi’s opinion. Shinobi just came up here.

[59:10] P: Give us your thoughts, Shinobi.

[59:11] Shinobi: This is epic. I’d like to know if anybody has talked at all about using the federated mint to enforce more complicated smart contracts?

[59:19] Rindell: Dude, yeah, that’s literally the fucking hand grenade that I was about to lob into this conversation.

[59:25] P: Let’s fucking go.

[59:28] Rindell: Dude, okay, yeah. This is like my soapbox. In my mind, the final form for federated chamian mints on Lightning Network is that you have them process more interesting smart contracts semantics. Imagine, I go and set up a chamian mint where you can upload, and I’m just going to say it, like an EVM compatible smart contract. I don’t need to make a shit coin.

[59:55] P: Sacrilege!

[59:55] Rindell: You know what I can do? No, you know what I can do? I can charge you to execute the contract. It’s called, I don’t know, like, pay for execution SASS, right? We’ve been doing it for years. If you want to do EVM smart contract shit, you Lightning over some sats to my chamian mint, I will execute EVM smart contracts and publish a snark or some other zero-knowledge proof in a publicly viewable place that it executed properly. You can do crazy speculative smart contracts with Eric inside of my mint. Then when you decide that you want to do crazy other smart contracts that only Shinobi’s mint supports, you Lightning over there and you do it.

We can have this network of these little islands that have different smart contract semantics that have different trade-offs or different guarantees or different semantics. You can just choose which casino or which computer you want to play in, zip yourself over there, do it and then leave when you’re done. We don’t have to push new bullshit into the base layer. We don’t have to create new tokens. It’s just go wherever has the compute capabilities that you care about.

[61:08] Casey: Mind blown.

[61:10] P: I love the idea of that. It’s like when you go into a PVP arena, whatever your favorite MMORPG is. It’s like you go and it’s yes.”These smart contracts will eat your face off, get ready.”

[61:23] Shinobi: There is no restriction that would prevent a mint from issuing tokens representing things other than Bitcoin too. You can get the entire ERC-20 type dynamic and interaction with those types of contracting platforms directly in the middle.

[61:40] P: How is this?

[61:41] Rindell: Yeah. If you’re OpenSea and you want to do an OpenSea chamian mint, people can go there and then you can leave when you’re done.

[61:51] P: OpenSea has no control?

[61:53] Shinobi: You can use single-use seal, Rindell, for something representing NFTs instead of just the chamian token. That single-use seal is actually universally portable to all the different mint up there. It’s not just a token if you solely buy that mint’s authority.

[62:10] P: Wait, but I understand the premise, but I guess I’m trying to wrap my head around why that would be better than… I think it still totally screw everybody out of their shit.

[62:20] Shinobi: Not with that. A single-use seal would be like, imagine, I just make a key that represents something and then I time stamp it with open timestamps. If I want to give it to you, I find a transfer to your public key and time stamp it with open timestamps. Then you keep all of that data, my original key, the timestamp data, my signature. Let’s say, you want to go pass that to Rindell, you do the same thing. You extend it again and sign his key and time stamp it and he keeps all the data. It’s like a little growing mini blockchain that it’s just the representation of this single asset and its ownership team.

That could interact with things like a chamian mint. That could be an atomic part of a smart contract that the Mint is enforcing, interacting with their native Bitcoins opening.

[63:13] Rindell: Yeah, the thing that you need for a single-use seal is… Go ahead, Eric.

[63:16] Eric: Possibility of NFT is, let’s call it NFTs for the sake of it. It’s interesting. Not because some wacko artist so popular, some apes, but the one big problem we still face is domain names. We still need to really decentralize the naming system. Ideally, this would be built on Bitcoin. A single-use seal, I think, that’s the main application for it.

[63:39] P: It’s so interesting.

[63:41] Eric: We have stuff that people are doing easily [inaudible].

[63:45] Rindell: Yeah, because the thing that you need to make…

[63:47] P: Oh my gosh, and it was not controlled by some centralized bullshit.

[63:52] Rindell: Yeah. The thing that you need for single-use seals is you need a proof of publication mechanism, and it turns out we have a really good distributed ledger underneath all these chamian mints.

[64:00] P: Wait, what are you talking about? Which ledger could you possibly be referring to? The answer’s always Bitcoin.

[64:06] Rindell: I was going to say something about BSV, but I can’t do it.

[64:09] P: Will you throw up a little bit in your mouth just even trying?

[64:11] Rindell: Yeah. I just asphyxiated on my own vomit thinking about it. Yeah, think about it this way, right? You have a world where people can choose the semantics and the trust and the different trade-offs that make sense for them for their use case, their risk tolerance, their applications. Those things are interoperable over the Lightning Network. If you decide that you just want to nope out of the whole thing, you can resolve anything down to layer one Bitcoin and it’s all like more private and more scalable than any other cryptocurrency out there. That’s the final form of this shit.

[64:51] Shinobi: This is Bitcoin if we don’t get channel factories. It’s not as cool as channel factories, but it’s good enough.

[64:58] P: Wait, hold on, back the truck up. What do you mean by this is Bitcoin if we don’t get channel factories? How does channel factories address all the stuff we’ve been talking about?

[65:09] Shinobi: Scalability and the ability to partition thing. My point is, if we stop getting more native second layers to Bitcoin, Lightning, the base layer and chamian mints are enough to scale everything.

[65:23] P: I see.

[65:24] Shinobi: [inaudible] for everyone.

[65:26] P: Got it. Entiendo.

[65:28] Eric: Yeah, because I think channel factories are super interesting. Coming back to [inaudible] earlier, the [inaudible], I think that’s what will force them to be something that own the power users.

[65:44] P: You’re cutting in and out. This is the most excruciating thing, Eric, my man.

[65:48] Shinobi: I think what he was saying though is that the user experience were channel factories. It’s just real garbage and it’s a lot more complicated than Lightning. So that’s a tough thing to get past power users. I think this is what he was saying.

[66:03] Matt: The cool part of this proposal to me, in Bitcoin land, we’ve been talking about all this time. I have privacy that is cheaper than non-private transactions and have privacy that’s easier than non-private transactions. This trade-off balance makes it so that you could just have a mobile wallet, where you just load it up with $50 worth of sats and you’ll be paying lower fees than anyone who’s not using Lightning. You’re able to interact with the whole Lightning Network and you have great privacy guarantees at a mitigated custodial risk. That trade-off balance just seems absolutely fantastic to me.

[66:40] Rindell: Yeah, it’s kind of like, if I have Strike on my phone and I pay another Strike user, I don’t know for sure. I really doubt they’re actually doing a Lightning transaction. I assume that they’re just bumping balances because it would be insane to do anything else. Then if I want to pay somebody else that’s out on the Lightning Network, then it does an honest-to-goodness Lightning transaction. Imagine that, but without the single custodial risk and with much better privacy from the custodian, and that’s where you land. I think that that’s amazing.

Then on top of it, something that we haven’t really talked about but I just wanted to touch on is, I think another scaling pressure that Lightning is going to face is the size of the channel graph and being able to efficiently compute routes over it, especially on memory constrained devices, right? If everybody in the world has Lightning channels, everybody else in the world, you’re not going to be finding efficient routes on your phone. It’s just not going to happen.

There are different mechanisms that people have been throwing around about the way that we solve this problem on the Internet is with route aggregation and with having a bunch of smaller networks all aggregated and then routing between larger networks. That’s how internet routing happens. Different people are talking about different mechanisms to do something similar on the Lightning Network, and this very much accomplishes a similar thing, right? If you say a lot of mobile users are going to be using their choice of chamian mint and then Lightning routing needs to happen between these mints, that’s a much smaller problem because you’ve aggregated all of these mobile users down to a single endpoint on the Lightning Network. That’s a great way of handling the scaling pressure.

[68:25] P: What else? What else we got?

[68:26] Shinobi: I’m assuming that Eric already discussed the potential for doing atomic interactions between the Mint and Lightning so that either finishes it.

[68:35] Vivek: He’s a genius. He figured out someone to sell some regtest Bitcoin to you atomically and my coffee.

[68:44] P: We’re not even joking, Shinobi.

[68:45] Eric: Yeah. [inaudible] myself to do this.

[68:49] P: Strictly speaking, it was a true statement.

[68:53] Eric: One thing I was quite dead about is seeing darknet markets like switching to other platforms. I think we really, as a Bitcoin community, need to figure out how to make Bitcoin good enough for them because once, I hear from one of my friends that they bought drugs on a darknet market with Minimint. When I know, I’ve won, that’s what we want to achieve. Make it good enough and easy enough to achieve. Good privacy for people to use it for whatever they want. No questions asked.

[69:20] P: I could not, but Shinobi did not agree.

[69:20] Shinobi: No, I don’t disagree. That would be awesome. I just think that a lot of that whole dynamic really just comes down to that a lot of darknet market operators are frankly more [inaudible] those marketplaces are just like copy paste PHP scripts that get passed around. There’s not a lot of actual sound original engineering, and you just have a bunch of people from my perspective who are clownishly just like,”We keep getting busted because we use Bitcoin like morons,”instead of looking at things like the Lightning Network. In my mind, that comes down to people doing things like that are frankly idiots, and they need to be better educated on different ways that they can use Bitcoin more privately.

[70:11] P: I think though that I totally agree with you. I think most of the people that are in those situations are not availing themselves of the available information, but I think that we succeed when this is undeniable, right? When the technology just is self-evident and doesn’t require someone to… Someone has to be willfully ignoring the reality in order for them to not use these things. I don’t think it’s as simple as just it has to be possible.

[70:39] Eric: We have quite some latency here. I think especially when we are talking about users of darknet markets, we can’t expect them to know how to use Bitcoin privately. Nowadays, with Lightning, it’s really complicated setting up a Lightning node and taking care [inaudible] to use for that tumbler or CoinJoin. It’s just really complicated. I think someone who is, [inaudible] half of today can’t redo it. I really hope that Minimint will be able to support such users and not make them fuck up. That’s how we actually get people to use privacy and not by making it complicated. It has to be super simple and stupid so that even someone on his [inaudible] joint can just use it. Otherwise, it won’t work.

[71:21] Shinobi: I hear you’re saying, but in the context of darknet markets, I don’t think the purchaser really needs to be crazy secure and private. You got a decent light wallet that’s not like Phoenix and doing trampoline routing. It’s the merchants and the people receiving payments and selling things that really need to know how to handle their privacy because they’re the ones that law enforcement is going out to. It’s like,”I don’t care that you bought a bag of weed.”

[71:54] Rindell: There’s that ad campaign where it’s like GEICO, so easy a caveman can do it. I think what Erich is saying is that we need to have privacy preserving Bitcoin so easy that a dumbass who’s cargo culting PHP code off of stack overflow can do it. Lightning isn’t there for better or worse. That is not running a Lightning node.

[72:13] Shinobi: Fair enough.

[72:15] Vivek: I have a couple of questions for Eric if you guys don’t mind. Obviously, I’ve been very interested in the concept of federations for quite a bit. I was wondering. Well, first off, maybe you can answer that very quickly. Is there concept of fees like coordinator fee? This is something that’s currently designed.

[72:29] Eric: There definitely will have to be some few because to take some money to just, we better keep them like on-trend wallets operational. Every time you would do a withdraw or deposit, you’d probably pay a fee. Ideally, such a federation would also be self-sustainable, so we would probably charge some sort of fee.

[72:49] Vivek: Yeah, I agree. Buena respuesta. I guess one of my concerns is we’re not exactly reinventing the wheel, obviously. The showman component is extremely interesting, but this is essentially just another federation not on like obviously what Liquid has. One of the downside or actually, one of the issue with that is that we’ve seen zero uptake in terms… We haven’t seen other wallets integrate Liquid, and it feels to me like there’s an incentive problem. Hopefully, some kind of like fee sharing or fee revenue can address that to a certain extent.

Another question is, in terms of obviously incentivizing the members of the federation, was there any thought given ever to maybe requiring time-locked fidelity bonds for those members?

[73:32] Eric: To the first question, I think the big difference between Liquid and… Wait, a chamian mint is that the federated chamian mint can use Lightning and everywhere where Lightning is accepted. Then you can use your mint token. I’s actually something quite different. There isn’t the infrastructure to seamlessly use it with, for example, Lightning. That’s a big difference.

[73:54] Vivek: Sorry. Let me just jump on that real quick. What you’re saying is that basically, the chamian mint being integrated with Lightning, any Lightning wallet is automatically interoperable with the chamian mint?

[74:07] Eric: Yeah, exactly. It becomes a choice of the user because for Liquid, it’s actually a choice of the user and the merchant together because without a merchant choosing to use Liquid, the user can’t do it. Federated mints, then it’s just a use of choice. If we build a good enough product, they will come. It’s just another Lightning wallet.

[74:27] Vivek: The wallet need to know that this is Bitcoin. The UX would have to account that the Bitcoin is from the chamian mint or not.

[74:36] Eric: Yeah. You would have specialized federated mint wallets. Ideally, we could have a standard that every mint speaks the same product goal essentially and then you have some wallet that supports all federated chamian mints out there. Your recipient doesn’t need to know that you’re using a federated chamian mint wallet. No les importa. They just give you Lightning invoice, and you give that to your mint. Then your mint wallet instructs your local federation to pay the Lightning invoice. That’s how it should work.

[75:06] Vivek: Okay, but then sender does need to use a mint specific wallet?

[75:13] Eric: Certainly. Yeah, but not specific to a specific federation but just to the mint protocol.

[75:20] Vivek: Okay, cool.

[75:20] Shinobi: Made me think of something else. If you don’t mind me coming in real quick. Have you considered at all, Eric, to support for pseudonymous acounts just so that you have a kind of safer way for users to hold long term balances in the event of a key rotation so that the main spent-table table doesn’t just keep growing to infinity?

[75:43] Eric: Yeah, definitely. It’s a natural addition because I’m already using a smart contractratable accounts like what you were discussing. I only need smart contracts in the federation to integrate the Lightning. It’s just a natural next step to enable users to have accounts with arbitrary smart contract capability, not just some Lightning integration special spot contract. That would allow certain interesting things. You could think about the chamian e-cash as your spending account, your checking account and like 2 donimous account inside the federation which might be locked by a 2 or 3 multi-sig or just some conventional KIA script. That’s your saving account.

With the chamian e-cash, you have the problem, you can’t really back it up because with every spent, your set of coins, your own changes and it would be really cumbersome to always back them up. Currently, I’m thinking that if you lose your wallet or if you lose your phone, you lose the e-cash inside it, but if you have those checking accounts, which is just like 2 anonymous account locked by some sort of script that you can keep. That’s easy to back up. You just need to back up a private key which we all know how to do by now. That’s definitely planned.

The second interesting sort I got from discussing this with OB that in the federated trust model, you can easily have oracles because the federation members, we trust them anyway, so why not let them act as oracles? That would allow you to build a smart contract for these accounts that says if someone convinces enough federation members that, for example, you died, then your legal hire can get access to these funds. He was thinking about non-technical communities that don’t really know how to do inheritance on Bitcoin or stuff like that. That just might actually be a good way to implement it. If you have community banking, why not use the social structure of your community to also ensure that you can inherit properly without needing a lot of technical knowledge about it?

[77:50] P: I’m going to wind us down. We’re currently over time, and I want to be respectful of everybody’s time. Is there anything that we want to close out on or touch on before we wind down and go around and give a…

[78:01] Vivek: Eric, did you tell us when we should expect a mobile wallet available for Android, at least?

[78:08] Eric: No, not really because I can’t really give something, but…

[78:10] Vivek: Was it like 2 weeks?

[78:11] Eric: I’ll have it ready for next week [crosstalk] next October.

[78:15] P: You told me seventy-two hours before the call.

[78:17] Rindell: Time is of the essence, Eric.

[78:22] Eric: Currently, there’s still a lot of work to be done on the back end. It has been quite neglected. If we get people that are interested in front and stuff, go ahead and please–

[78:31] Vivek: The correct response to that question is patches welcome.

[78:36] P: Yeah. Everyone in the audience, this is an incredibly important and interesting technology that we’re talking about here. People are always like,”Oh man, I don’t know how to get involved in Bitcoin as a software engineer or as a human.”This is a call to action. Reach out to Eric. If you’re a software engineer and you want to get involved with sound money and the technology that’s going to drive the future, this is your chance. Hit up Eric.

[79:02] Guest1: If you have time for a really quick question.

[79:03] P: Go for it.

[79:05] Guest1: Yeah. Thanks for the invite. Congrats on Taproot. The question is that, is there such a thing as a typical lifetime offer of chamian mint token? Was [inaudible] depends on–

[79:14] Eric: That would be defined by the federation because I think someone, I don’t remember who it was, maybe Shinobi, mentioned that you have this list of spend tokens, and that just keeps growing. In most implementations you say after some time, you invalidate old tokens that are signed with old keys and you enforce people to roll over their funds into a new key set. Just get them reissued with new keys. That’s how you keep the list of spend coins from growing indefinitely. Yeah, that’s up to debate with the federations. Make it a year, make it 2 years. No sé. There’s no real right answer for that. There might be some lifetime to these tokens.

[79:55] Guest1: Okay. Entiendo. Gracias.

[79:56] Vivek: Real quick, fidelity bonds?

[79:58] Eric: I don’t know if it makes sense because to actually incentivize good behavior, they need to be quite big. That would make such a federation less capital efficient or your cost of capital would go way up. Maybe one thing they would be good for is to incentivize people to actually stay online. If they go offline, then you could have a penalty. That wouldn’t be a fidelity bond, but you could have some amount that they need to deposit. In case they are offline, then that goes to a common fund and gets redistributed. They actually have incentive to stay online because that might be a problem if people don’t make enough money from it. They might not neglect node maintenance. So yeah.

[80:40] P: Good stuff. Good stuff. It looks like we lost… Oh, no, Casey, you’re still there.

[80:46] Casey: Okay, it’s not happening. We’re not letting you end it.

[80:49] P: No, look, we’re winding down. This is the go gently into that, to that good night. A kiss–

[80:53] Casey: This is the last…

[80:54] P: The last two place. No, Casey, is there anything you want to speak to, a shill, jump in here about anything we’ve been talking about so far or anything else that you’re working on.

[81:04] Casey: Yeah. No sé. I guess I’ll just shill the project I’m working on. It’s called Agora. It’s lets you sell shit online for Lightning Network. You put your data on a server and then you can sell it. It’s really simple. You just be like,”Hey, you want to buy this PDF? It will be like a thousand sats.”Then people pay you a thousand sats and then you download the PDF. I’m thinking about starting a meme. This is like the real Bitcoin NFT, but I think it’s maybe just too dumb of a meme. Yeah, I guess, maybe the nonchalantly thing that I’ll say is that–

[81:33] Matt: That’s agora.download.

[81:35] Casey: That’s right. [crosstalk].

[81:35] Matt: [inaudible] correctly.

[81:36] Casey: It is agora.download and it is also github.com/agora-org/agora. Thanks for the shilling tips, bro. Yeah, federation soon, 2 weeks, 72 hours, definitely. I think we should be watching Lightning Network usability and doing all we can to both make it more usable and to get users onto less centralized services. I think maybe a little bit of pessimism is good in the sense of not just assuming every problem with Lightning Network usability will just be solved and fall into place. I think there’s a lot of tricky stuff there and we should be keeping an eye on. That’s what I’ll leave everybody with.

[82:22] P: I love it. Matt, is there anything you want to shill, speak to, mention?

[82:26] Matt: I just wanted to thank Eric. I’m super excited about your project and I was just fucking around with the timeline. I’m willing to wait and I’m looking forward to it.

[82:36] P: Yeah. This has been an amazing conversation. Eric, also, thank you so much for joining. Casey, thank you so much for joining. I posted Casey’s blog post at the top in the nest, which you should all check out. It’s a really good, very high level overview of some of the stuff we’ve been talking about and what federated chamian mints are and why they’re awesome. Follow both of them. This is definitely one of the more exciting things that is happening in Bitcoin in my opinion at the moment. There’s a lot of… Everybody’s excited about Taproot, which is fucking awesome and really exciting, but there’s also these sort of like unsung heroes that are also working on this stuff and writing about it and it’s part of the future.

I also am, of course, going to shill the conference. If you do not already have a ticket for Bitcoin 2022, it is going to be absolutely incredible. Matt and I are working very closely on the open source stage. There’s going to be discussions like this one, other topics more that you should definitely partake in. It’s also going to be [crosstalk].

[83:33] Matt: Me and P have only disagreed on one thing so far.

[83:36] P: That’s true. Eso es cierto. I will die on that hill, which is I argue that cold card is the thing that is the coolest part of the coin KAI line up, and Matt Odell argues that it is Opendime. We have come to blows on it several times.

[83:51] Rindell: Hey, P, you skipped me when it came to shilling things.

[83:54] P: I just assumed that since your face changes every other day and your name is Rindell that you would not want to show something, but I apologize profoundly and profusely. Give us your shill.

[84:02] Rindell: Here’s a shill. Everybody, if you are excited about things happening in the Bitcoin ecosystem or if you’re not excited about things happening in the Bitcoin ecosystem, you can contribute. There’s lots of awesome open source projects like Minimint or Bitcoin core or your favorite wallet software, and all of them are looking for more contributions. They’re all looking for people to test things, work on documentation, submit patches, so you can go and get involved every open source project that’s out. Not every, many open source projects that are out there are very excited to have new people come and help.

You can go and ask what’s a good bug for me to work on, and people will not only give you a good bug, that’s like easy and straightforward to figure out, but they’ll work with you on how to fix it and learn the code base. Or if you want to write better documentation and they’ll help you get a test environment setup like having maintained open source projects before. If somebody shows up and wants to help, a lot of open source maintainers will bend over backwards to make sure that you have a good kind of onboarding experience because contributions are what make the world go round.

If you want to learn Rust to work on Minimint or CPO or LDK or any of these other projects, then just google the Rust book. It’s really high quality, easy to read, highly recommend it. It doesn’t really matter what your level of experience is. There’s some way that you can contribute to open source.

[85:22] P: Absolutely. I’ll go even further, which is, you do not actually have to be a software engineer in order to contribute massively to open source projects. The thing that is in the most finite supply is people who are interested and willing to write documentation or to proofread documentation.

If you want to get deeply involved and be someone who is a force multiplier and you are willing to figure out how these projects work or how to run your own Minimint or any of the other projects that you might be involved in, you don’t have to be a software engineer, go read through the documentation, go take a tutorial on how to submit a GitHub pull request. You can absolutely be a contributor to even Bitcoin core and all these other projects, and your contributions will be worshipped and appreciated forever because documentation is the last thing that most software engineers write. Many projects today have no documentation or broken documentation because there’s just not enough time.

On that note… Oh, one other thing I forgot to say, if you don’t have a ticket and you want to buy one for Bitcoin 2022, code “Have Fun Staying Poor”, the actual promo code is “HFSP”. We’ll save you 10% on your ticket. Go forth. Adios.

[86:40] Eric: Thanks a lot for having me. If anyone wants to meet me, I’m at Adopting Bitcoin recently, so just come by and say hi.

[86:47] Matt: Cheers.

[86:48] P: All right. Thanks again, guys.