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CATEGORY: lightning speed


Lightning Speed: Taro Wants To Abolish Cross-Border Payments, Disrupt The Market

Author: Eduardo Próspero
United Kingdom
Aug 13, 2022 04:55

Lightning Speed: Taro Wants To Abolish Cross-Border Payments, Disrupt The Market

Have you heard about Taro? It’s an improvement proposal for the Lightning Network that Lightning Labs introduced in April. “Taro makes Bitcoin and Lightning multi-asset networks,” the company claims in the latest edition of their newsletter. They also explain in simple words what the protocol does, how it does it, and the implications of its implementation. “In a world of omnipresent communications connectivity, nobody says “cross-border messaging” anymore. Taro promises to do the same thing to “cross-border payments” by decentralizing the entire global FX market into a protocol that can run on a Raspberry Pi by anyone, anywhere.” Is the Lightning Labs exaggerating? Or is Taro the protocol that will bring the next billion people to the Lightning Network? “The opportunity provided by Taro bringing assets like stablecoins to the Lightning Network is clearly enormous,” the company claims. Can Lightning Labs back that case and argue it convincingly? Let’s find out. What Taro Does And How It Does It   The first thing Lightning Labs makes clear is the psychology behind the improvement proposal. It almost seems like bitcoin’s Lightning Network will be serving Taro and not the other way around. “Instead of starting from scratch and bootstrapping a new ecosystem of nodes and liquidity, Taro will leverage the existing network effects of both the infrastructure that’s been built out over the last several years plus the 4000+ BTC allocated to the network today as a global routing currency.” How does it work, though? The “edge nodes” are the key. By “integrating with Taro,” normal Lightning nodes can now “process an instantaneous conversion from L-USD into BTC or vice versa, for a small fee.” That means that “every Taro transaction on the Lightning Network will be converted into BTC by the first hop, routed across the network as BTC, and then converted back into a Taro asset by the last hop before the destination” What is a “Taro asset”? Whatever you want, your BTC can be “converted into different assets such as USD to EUR or USD to BTC.” Or, as Bitrefil’s Sergej Kotliar puts it, “Pay in currency of sender’s choice, receive in currency of recipient’s choice. This means that every wallet can now have native Strike-type “USD balance” functionality for example. With no need to trust the wallet, the only trust lies in the issuer of the token.” The trust model is the main difference from Galoy’s Stablesats, another novel concept that looks for a similar result. BTC price chart for 08/13/2022 on Bitstamp | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com What Does Taro Mean For The Lightning Network? In a recent interview published by NewsBTC, AXX’s head of research and strategy Ben Caselin explained the protocol further “In Taro, smart contracts and asset transfers are not executed by the blockchain, and they are also not enforced by the blockchain. Instead, transfers are executed by the sender of an asset (who has to make a corresponding bitcoin transaction), and enforced by the recipient, same as the Lightning Network.” And in the previous Lightning Speed, we theorized about how big could this development be for the Lightning Network. “According to The Bitcoin Layer, “a global capital market operating on top of bitcoin-denominated financial rails is inching closer with each new onramp.” And the Taro protocol and all of the assets it would bring to The Lightning Network is the mother of all onramps.” Back to Lightning Lab’s newsletter, the company toyed with even bigger expectations. For example: “A community bank could issue a local stablecoin on Taro and it would only need a handful of nodes or liquidity providers to make a market between the local currency and the BTC core of the Lightning Network to be connected to a global community of buyers and sellers. No permissioning required!” They’ll Never See It Coming According to Lightning Labs, bitcoin “renders cross-border payments obsolete.” Stablecoins are a huge business and so are cross-border payments. In the intersection between them, Taro stands tall. “Visa’s 65% operating margin is one of the highest of all the companies in the S&P 500 index, and this margin is Lightning and Taro’s opportunity. They’ll never see it coming.” The company expects that the benefit for everyone working on the Lightining Network will be tremendous. “We expect that bringing Taro to market and making Lightning a multi-asset network will dramatically expand the Total Addressable Market for those building Lightning applications.” And you know what more users mean, more of those sweet-sweet fees.} Featured Image by Joseph Mucira from Pixabay | Charts by TradingView

Lightning Speed 004: What’s The Lightning Development Initiative?

Author: Eduardo Próspero
United Kingdom
Jan 14, 2022 10:20

Lightning Speed 004: What’s The Lightning Development Initiative?

There’s no denying that 2021 was the Lightning Network’s year. What does the future hold, though? If the objective is to onboard the next billion people, the network needs work and fine-tuning. To grab the bull by the horns, The Human Rights Foundation and Strike set up three 1 BTC bounties.  The bounties will go to the first person or team to develop an anonymous Lightning tip jar, a tokenless way to peg BTC to dollars, or a privacy-focused wallet that supports some kind of Chaumian e-cash feature. In a Twitter Spaces conversation about the program, they named it The Lightning Development Initiative.  A catchy name that we’ll use from now on to refer to all of this. This fourth edition of Lightning Speed is all about the future. Let’s explore the three ideas and the new information that we have about each of them. The Lightning Development Initiative In Twitter Spaces Among the speakers were Strike’s Jack Mallers, The Human Rights Foundation’s Alex Gladstein, Bitcoin Magazine’s Christian Keroles AKA CK Snarks, and Tales From The Crypt’s Matt Odell. It took place on December 29th and Bitcoin Magazine hosted it. A Twitter user named Gigi summarized it for us. ?? A thread summarizing the Lightning Développement Initiative Space ?? 3 amazingly interesting topic related to the bounties were discussed. I'm so bullish on Lightning? it hurts. Very grateful to have these people on our side ???? let's look at my notes ?? pic.twitter.com/PRs9cohPaN — Gigi ????? (@GuerillaV2) December 29, 2021 Bounty #1: An Anonymous Tip Jar In our sister site Bitcoinist’s report, they described the challenge as follows: “Can you create a Lightning tip jar that doesn’t reveal any information about the parties involved? That’s the first task. How to receive completely anonymous donations. According to Bitcoin Mag, the “goal is to enable anyone to use free and open-source software (FOSS) to print a QR code that can be used for receiving Lightning payments privately. Importantly, “The QR code should not reveal the public key or IP address of the user.”  In the Lightning Development Initiative’s report, we learned that this has to do with the two competing protocols, Bolt12 and lnurl. Jack Mallers “pointed out the absolute need for interoperability on the Lightning Network and that even though lnurl might not be “optimal” right now, the market will eventually decide what open standard they prefer to use. He thinks that currently UX is a major focus for the Lightning community and we should make peace with the fact that there will be competition between solutions.” Rockstar pointed out that this debate around lnurl vs bolt12 will have huge implications for the future but that he's glad that there's now an active discussion on the matter. Jack added that contrary to the Bitcoin main chain, we can somewhat afford to fuck up on LN.. — Gigi ????? (@GuerillaV2) December 29, 2021 Mallers put forth another interesting idea, “contrary to the Bitcoin main chain, we can somewhat afford to f**k up on the Lightning Network. As long as the Bitcoin monetary policy is not threatened then we can freely fiddle on top of the protocol via Lightning.” BTC price chart for 01/14/2022 on Bitfinex | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com Bounty #2: Stablecoin On Lightning Without A Token Bitcoinist described this one as: “The second challenge seems to be even more difficult, at least on a conceptual level. The HRF and Strike want a wallet that enables “anyone to “peg” an amount of bitcoin to U.S. dollars without needing an exchange or another token.” That’s right, without a centralized entity. And relying only on sats and bitcoin.” Gigi summarizes why the world needs this: “The goal is to allow people to access dollars without a single point of failure. Further down the line, as Bitcoin becomes less volatile, these people can use btc, but until then there’s massive demand for holding value in dollars. The tether market cap is proof of this.” It serve an important humanitarian use case. We need to create the foundation for this new financial system.@Chris_Stewart_5 >> maybe it can be done with DLC's? Not using a token but rather something representing price exposure (think Eurodollar system). (oracles?) The END. — Gigi ????? (@GuerillaV2) December 29, 2021 Bounty #3: A Chaumian E-Cash Feature First of all, Investopedia defines Chaumian e-cash as: “eCash was a digital-based system that facilitated the transfer of funds anonymously. A pioneer in cryptocurrency, its goal was to secure the privacy of individuals that use the Internet for micropayments. eCash was created by Dr. David Chaum under his company, DigiCash, in 1990.“ So, once again, anonymity is the priority. As Alex Gladstein put it when announcing the bounties, they’re “for the first open-source, non-custodial, non-KYC Lightning wallets to ship features requested by dissidents worldwide.” Also, take into consideration the words of security expert Brian Trollz, “Bitcoin without privacy is nothing but a surveillance system.” Bitcoin without privacy is nothing but a surveillance system. — Shino (@brian_trollz) January 13, 2022 What does Gigi have for us on this topic? “We need a sort of Chaumian e-cash, extremely easy to use for the Plebs and accessible. Maybe the solution is a federated  one, making it harder to regulate.” He then quotes Jack Mallers again, “There’s going to be a singular standard for the internet of money (Bitcoin). Many will compete on top of BTC so we need “interoperability to the standard.” Matt: We need to make it very easy to use because experience shows us that if it's somewhat challenging (coinjoins etcc) people won't bother to protect their privacy (goddam idiot normies ??) — Gigi ????? (@GuerillaV2) December 29, 2021 Conclusion: The Future Is Bright Developers, teams, companies, anyone can earn the Lighting Development Initiative’s bounties. The non-profit OpenSats will serve as the judge. They are all open for the whole year. If by the end of 2022 no one has claimed them, the money will go to the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund on January 1st. Which is fair. Especially considering they just gave 425 million Sats to these worthy organizations and individuals. For more information and details read Bitcoinist’s original report. Featured Image by Micah Tindell on Unsplash | Charts by TradingView

Lightning Speed: Taproot And The Lightning Network, A Match Made In Heaven

Author: Eduardo Próspero
United Kingdom
Jan 04, 2022 08:30

Lightning Speed: Taproot And The Lightning Network, A Match Made In Heaven

A little more than two months ago, Taproot went live. What does the biggest update to the Bitcoin network in years bring to the table? How can it help the increasingly popular Lightning Network? That’s exactly what the article we’re about to summarize is about. It starts by informing us that “Bitcoin even has a scripting language,” and that it’s called Script. Related Reading | Number Of Bitcoin Lightning Network Nodes Jumps 23% In Three Months But before we get into that, what is Taproot? “Taproot is a combination of three Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) that enhance this scripting infrastructure: BIP340 – Schnorr, BIP341- Taproot and BIP342 – Tapscript. The key of Taproot that unlocks all the others is the introduction of Schnorr Signatures, which allow for key and signature aggregation. This means that multiple parties are able combine their keys to a single public key, thereby allowing them to sign a single message.” It’s important to know that Taproot won’t allow “fully expressive” or “Turing complete” contracts like in Ethereum and all its related chains. Nor are those kinds of contracts a priority for the Bitcoin network, as our sister site Bitcoinist points out. Also, to curb our expectations, let’s read what Tales From The Crypt podcast’s host Marty Bent warned us about in his newsletter: “It is important to understand that these benefits aren’t going to be immediate. They are going to come to market slowly over time as the software gets implemented into wallets and other services. Many are expecting Taproot to get activated over the weekend and all its potential benefits to be realized immediately. This is simply not the case and it is important that this fact is understood.” Ok, let’s get into the meat and potatoes. How Does Taproot Help The Lightning Network? First of all, every Lightning channel consists of “2 of 2 multisigs”. So, a first benefit of being “able combine their keys to a single public key” is that “we have lighter transactions and therefore cheaper channel openings”. Not only that but “signature aggregation also offers enhanced privacy since its contents are indistinguishable from a single-signature transaction.” To clear up how does this benefit privacy, let’s quote the Binance Academy: “Spending Bitcoin using Taproot could make a transaction in a Lightning Network channel, a peer-to-peer transaction, or a sophisticated smart contract become indistinguishable. Anyone monitoring one of these transactions would see nothing but a peer-to-peer transaction. It’s worth noting, though, that this doesn’t change the fact that the wallets of the initial sender and final recipient will be exposed.” However, this is not quite true… yet. The Voltage article clarifies, “Does this mean that lightning channels are now unidentifiable on the blockchain? Well, the answer is ‘yes’ for private channels and ‘not quite yet’ for public channels.” BTC price chart for 01/04/2021 on Gemini | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com Private And Public Lightning Network Channels What’s the problem? Well, the network doesn’t announce the creation of private channels. The public ones, on the other hand: “Unfortunately, even if we do hide the channel openings on the blockchain, the current specification of the lightning protocol requires nodes to broadcast the details of the funding transactions when announcing their channels. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but it’s also an elegant way to prevent nodes spamming the network with fake channels.” Related Reading | How Big Is Bitcoin’s Lightning Network? The Answer Will Surprise You Also, let’s take into account that surveillance firm Chainalysis already announced a Lightning Network-related service. We should assume there are “sybil nodes surveilling the network”. And that “With enough hostile nodes” a bad actor could paint “a fairly detailed picture of the flow of funds”. Well, Taproot has an elegant solution for that: “Taproot’s introduction of Schnorr signatures paves the way for a type of smart contract called Point Time Locked Contracts (PTLCs). PTLCs operate in the same manner as HTLCs by allowing payments to be identified by nodes, but PTLCs come with a handy feature of being able to randomize its identifier with each hop thereby making it impossible for nodes to correlate the traffic of sending and receiving nodes.” Understand that “Taproot is a door that opens many other doors”. It’s a new toolkit with which developers all over the world will create new features and improvements. The info this article contains is just the beginning, the low-hanging fruit that we can see from our advantage point. Remember what Marty Bent said, “these benefits aren’t going to be immediate.” The Taproot-enabled stage of Bitcoin is just starting. Featured Image by Cooper Baumgartner on Unsplash | Charts by TradingView

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