Bitcoin (BSV) Token Protocol Showdown

[eamesyi]

I don't think you can expect everyone to submit to overbearing scrutiny because of a few bad apples. The thing about this form of banknote is that every single transaction that happens is done in public, so it becomes very simple to perform analysis on patterns across a ledger of cash bills. Bills can be seeded into suspect operations and their path on the ledger can trace flows through a launder cycle making it much easier to catch.

I submit that while it is physically easier to move these bills, the act of cleaning them of the traces of crime is not so simple at all.

Address AML challenges with the FATF Travel Rule | ComplyAdvantage

The FATF Travel Rule will help AML efforts by enhancing the audit trail when virtual assets are transferred between entities.

complyadvantage.com

 

[BernhardCenti]

scrypt-sv/utp

Proposal to unify/compatibilize some of the token proposals out there. From xhliu.

 

[eamesyi]

Thanks @Norway for starting this thread and for all who have contributed. Extremely relevant to a business decision we want to take very soon. For Centi, the main factors we are currently trying to assess for each solution are the following (in no specific order):


License Cost
Implementation Cost / Complexity
Project Maturity
Availability of Libraries
Emulation of other Tokens?
Interoperatability (Ecosystem)
Compliance
Ecosystem Size
Exchanges
Miner Enforced?
Whitelists / Blacklists Possible?
Time to Validate TX
Team Size
Enterprise Support?
Presentation
White Paper
Other Documentation
Website
Contact

One of the most important things being: "How fast can we get a working system up and running which we have confidence in?"

Our token needs are threefold:

1. High regulatory oversight token like a stable-coin (from a legal side we have what we believe is a working concept, so we need a token that can fulfill the legal needs.
2. Lower regulatory oversight tokens such a tickets, vouchers, coupons, loyalty points... etc.
3. Ecosystem:We would like to start interacting with many other businesses. This is only an example, but e.g. for each real purchase made through us, a TrueReview token could be handed out, which is sort of on a "verified purchase" level. Again, this is just one small example and I would wish for many such collaborations in the future. Therefore it's a difficult time to make that decision, as not many are using tokens yet, and these that do seem to be using a set of different standards.

That all stated, if any of the reps from a protocol would like to comment on any of my bullet points above, you are more than welcome. I can always keep track of my own assessment as well as assessments coming directly from the creators.

License Cost - the protocol is open-source.
Implementation Cost / Complexity - for a wallet that sends/receives tokens, pretty simple. A full issuance platform is obviously a lot more complex. AML/CTF compliance and regulations are no joke for regulated tokens.
Project Maturity - The most mature, developed and feature-rich by far.
Availability of Libraries - getting there. Anything protocol related, we release open source.
Emulation of other Tokens? - I've yet to see a token I would be interested in emulating, but all easily doable.
Interoperatability (Ecosystem) - Too early.
Compliance - we're the only system that can comply at the moment. Importantly, we will be able to offer compliance as a service and identity/authority oracles allows for any wallet (including open-source/homemade) to be compliant.
Ecosystem Size - Too early.
Exchanges - only really applicable to regulated tokens aka financial instruments.
Miner Enforced? - partially.
Whitelists / Blacklists Possible? - Yes.
Time to Validate TX - ~2 seconds
Team Size - 12 (getting a lot bigger soon)
Enterprise Support? - we can host the smart contract for you, or you can host it yourself. We support the protocol/agent and use the open-source implementation ourselves..
Presentation - we can schedule a call if you like.
White Paper - https://tokenized.com/docs/intro/preface
Other Documentation - https://github.com/tokenized
Website - ^
Contact - you've got my details

 

[79b79aa8]

on permissionless tokens:
@digitsu FYI

 

[BernhardCenti]

Much appreciated James!

License Cost - the protocol is open-source.
Implementation Cost / Complexity - for a wallet that sends/receives tokens, pretty simple. A full issuance platform is obviously a lot more complex. AML/CTF compliance and regulations are no joke for regulated tokens.
Project Maturity - The most mature, developed and feature-rich by far.
Availability of Libraries - getting there. Anything protocol related, we release open source.
Emulation of other Tokens? - I've yet to see a token I would be interested in emulating, but all easily doable.
Interoperatability (Ecosystem) - Too early.
Compliance - we're the only system that can comply at the moment. Importantly, we will be able to offer compliance as a service and identity/authority oracles allows for any wallet (including open-source/homemade) to be compliant.
Ecosystem Size - Too early.
Exchanges - only really applicable to regulated tokens aka financial instruments.
Miner Enforced? - partially.
Whitelists / Blacklists Possible? - Yes.
Time to Validate TX - ~2 seconds
Team Size - 12 (getting a lot bigger soon)
Enterprise Support? - we can host the smart contract for you, or you can host it yourself. We support the protocol/agent and use the open-source implementation ourselves..
Presentation - we can schedule a call if you like.
White Paper - https://tokenized.com/docs/intro/preface
Other Documentation - https://github.com/tokenized
Website - ^
Contact - you've got my details

 

[brendan]

License Cost - Per project
Implementation Cost / Complexity - cost depends on project complexity, token complexity is very low, as close to Bitcoin as possible.
Project Maturity - Early stages, but proof of concept wallet, tokens are demonstrable today with high performance back-end demonstrable in approx 3-4 weeks
Availability of Libraries - not available, wallets per project
Emulation of other Tokens? - emulates physical tokens, but doesn't care about crypto
Interoperatability (Ecosystem) - should work with anything unless that thing explicitly doesn't work with other things
Compliance - can be engineered to work with any compliance or regulatory regime - per project
Ecosystem Size - just testing for now
Exchanges - no problem
Miner Enforced? - 100%
Whitelists / Blacklists Possible? - Yes but optional
Time to Validate TX - Targeting sub 100ms from wallet receipt to full token validation
Team Size - In-house business team 2, contract dev team 3, outside business team 1, hiring fast
Enterprise Support? - Will be offered as needed
Presentation - on demand
White Paper - not published
Other Documentation - see https://elas.digital/blog for more info, documentation available on demand
Website - www.elas.digital
Contact - brendan@elas.digital

 

[Norway]

scrypt-sv/utp

Proposal to unify/compatibilize some of the token proposals out there. From xhliu.

Yes, you describe it well as "a proposal" @BernhardCenti. I have seen this before. Proposals to "the technology community".

I don't think this approach works well to establish a long-lasting, widespread and stable protocol. It looks like what we see happening on BCH. Undefined power and leadership battles in the name of "the best solution". After all, common sense doesn't make decisions. People make decisions.

I believe the big protocol(s) will be established by a single company that....

1) Has a clear business model.

2) See the value of network effect and does the following:
- Provides competitors with a detailed technical protocol specification that is set in stone.
- Provides competitors with free software tools to implement the protocol.

Building moats around your company is not always beneficial.

Invent water for everyone and sell cups. Accept the fact that other companies will compete and sell cups too, but try to benefit as much as you can from first-mover advantage.

EDIT: It's not altruism from a company to give away specifications and software for free in this context. It's greed, and it's good. You build a new network you will be part of and benefit from as a leading provider while accepting that you will have competitors.

 

[eamesyi]

Yes, you describe it well as "a proposal" @BernhardCenti. I have seen this before. Proposals to "the technology community".

I don't think this approach works well to establish a long-lasting, widespread and stable protocol. It looks like what we see happening on BCH. Undefined power and leadership battles in the name of "the best solution". After all, common sense doesn't make decisions. People make decisions.

I believe the big protocol(s) will be established by a single company that....

1) Has a clear business model.

2) See the value of network effect and does the following:
- Provides competitors with a detailed technical protocol specification that is set in stone.
- Provides competitors with free software tools to implement the protocol.

Building moats around your company is not always beneficial.

Invent water for everyone and sell cups. Accept the fact that other companies will compete and sell cups too, but try to benefit as much as you can from first-mover advantage.

EDIT: It's not altruism from a company to give away specifications and software for free in this context. It's greed, and it's good. You build a new network you will be part of and benefit from as a leading provider while accepting that you will have competitors.

A thousand times yes on every point.

 

[Norway]

I think @eamesyi and I are very much on the same page on many topics. But we should find the differences. That's why I started this thread. Let's hash it out!

I understand that central banks want whitelists of recipients for e-money, or Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). They want more power than they should have.

The whole idea of the state/central bank being able to crawl into my pocket and freeze/steal any amount of money is a true nightmare. Spying on all my transactions is also a nightmare. We don't have this totalitarian tool for government today, and I don't want them to have it

However, we have bitcoin (BSV) at the same time. Perhaps bitcoin could become the M0 digital cash. More volatile, but with the properties we want, while central banks build CBDC on the rails of bitcoin with competing digital cash.

EDIT: What I mean is: We have 2 types of everyday money. 1 is bitcoin. 1 is CBDC. The first has privacy, but volatility. The second has neither.

What do you think?

Post automatically merged: Jul 31, 2020

License Cost - Per project

This is suicide @brendan if it means what I think.

Do you want to release a token protocol where people have to pay you money to use your protocol? I'm sure there is a misunderstanding here. Please explain.

 

[Norway]

I'd like to understand the concept of UTXO tokens better, and I hope people here can help me.

AFAIK, UTXO-tokens are "confirmed" or "settled" by bitcoin miners.

But are they?

They are not part of Merchant API today. Is there reason to believe they will tomorrow?

I'm a big fan of Merkle proofs to document history. But I am also aware of SPV's weakness regarding double-spends and race conditions when the party paying is pseudonymous.

I'd really appreciate if someone could explain to me the real benefit of UTXO tokens. Thanks in advance.

 

[eamesyi]

I think @eamesyi and I are very much on the same page on many topics. But we should find the differences. That's why I started this thread. Let's hash it out!

I understand that central banks want whitelists of recipients for e-money, or Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). They want more power than they should have.

The whole idea of the state/central bank being able to crawl into my pocket and freeze/steal any amount of money is a true nightmare. Spying on all my transactions is also a nightmare. We don't have this totalitarian tool for government today, and I don't want them to have it

However, we have bitcoin (BSV) at the same time. Perhaps bitcoin could become the M0 digital cash. More volatile, but with the properties we want, while central banks build CBDC on the rails of bitcoin with competing digital cash.

EDIT: What I mean is: We have 2 types of everyday money. 1 is bitcoin. 1 is CBDC. The first has privacy, but volatility. The second has neither.

What do you think?

Post automatically merged: Jul 31, 2020

This is suicide @brendan if it means what I think.

Do you want to release a token protocol where people have to pay you money to use your protocol? I'm sure there is a misunderstanding here. Please explain.

"I understand that central banks want whitelists of recipients for e-money, or Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). They want more power than they should have."

RE power, I don't think they do mate. The Bank of England was very clear on that point. Also, if you listen carefully to the leading thinkers/politicians in the US, they also respect the privacy component of money, to a degree. They don't want a 'god view' of the market, and I don't think they should have it. It presents too large of a risk to have all of that information in one honeypot, and even worse it's managed by the government. They want the private sector to continue to manage kyc/aml/ctf/reporting, which I agree with, and is how our system works. To be clear, that is a whitelist system with a public key architecture. The whitelist can be off-chain with no on-chain accountability, or it can be off-chain but with on-chain accountability. We believe that on-chain accountability around the provision of whitelisting/kyc services holds the financial institutions to a higher standard. Of course, our system can work without whitelists too...

"The whole idea of the state/central bank being able to crawl into my pocket and freeze/steal any amount of money is a true nightmare. Spying on all my transactions is also a nightmare. We don't have this totalitarian tool for government today, and I don't want them to have it."

The banking system literally operates on that basis today. Financial institutions, in accordance with their own duties/policies/law, and also at the direction of government agencies, freeze accounts and confiscate money all of the time. Our proposed solution is equivalent to the current banking system wrt to privacy, however, it improves on the system by making the financial institutions and government agencies more accountable by bringing their actions out into the open with transparency.

 

[Norway]

RE power, I don't think they do mate. The Bank of England was very clear on that point. Also, if you listen carefully to the leading thinkers/politicians in the US, they also respect the privacy component of money, to a degree. They don't want a 'god view' of the market, and I don't think they should have it. It presents too large of a risk to have all of that information in one honeypot, and even worse it's managed by the government. They want the private sector to continue to manage kyc/aml/ctf/reporting, which I agree with, and is how our system works. To be clear, that is a whitelist system with a public key architecture. The whitelist can be off-chain with no on-chain accountability, or it can be off-chain but with on-chain accountability. We believe that on-chain accountability around the provision of whitelisting/kyc services holds the financial institutions to a higher standard. Of course, our system can work without whitelists too...

This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing. My idea of a whitelist was a single, secret list enforced by a single entity. But having on-chain accountability around the provision of whitelisting change the game.

I'm not surprised the government has wisdom and wants to avoid a totalitarian monetary system. Bill Barr proved recently that the foundations of government are much more solid than the Twitteresque politicians.

And, as stated before: We have an alternative in the form of bitcoin for small transactions.

The banking system literally operates on that basis today. Financial institutions, in accordance with their own duties/policies/law, and also at the direction of government agencies, freeze accounts and confiscate money all of the time.

Not for smaller amounts. We have cash. Notes and coins. And there is a push to remove it along with freedom.

I have a few questions about Tokenized's e-money solution:

1) Does a user have a static bitcoin address?

2) Who can monitor my own money?

Thanks.

 

[brendan]

This is suicide @brendan if it means what I think.

Do you want to release a token protocol where people have to pay you money to use your protocol? I'm sure there is a misunderstanding here. Please explain.

It's not a 'protocol' but more a design system. Because every token ledger will have different requirements they require different design parameters, different script engineering etc.
It is impossible for us to put a one size fits all pricing model on this. It depends what you want to do, what transaction volumes you will generate and more.

 

[Norway]

@brendan
Sounds like you want to design custom "intranets" tailored by expensive experts for each unique customer.

I hate to say it, but this approach will lose in

BSV TOKEN PROTOCOL
SHOWDOWN!​

 

[brendan]

I'd like to understand the concept of UTXO tokens better, and I hope people here can help me.

AFAIK, UTXO-tokens are "confirmed" or "settled" by bitcoin miners.

But are they?

They are not part of Merchant API today. Is there reason to believe they will tomorrow?

I'm a big fan of Merkle proofs to document history. But I am also aware of SPV's weakness regarding double-spends and race conditions when the party paying is pseudonymous.

I'd really appreciate if someone could explain to me the real benefit of UTXO tokens. Thanks in advance.

Think everything you like about Bitcoin, and then think that in a token.
We have solutions that would obviate the need for merchant API in very large token economies, but I'm not going to share those here.
UTXO tokens have about the same double spend risk as Bitcoin - i.e. almost none and, with all the benefits of zero-conf, payment channels and more. The benefit is in the simplicity. Being so close to Bitcoin, the token exchange process is highly efficient and an issuer does not need any infrastructure to support transactions - unless they are countersignatory which is simple to engineer into the token flow using Bitcoin script (e.g. airline tickets, warranties, goods tracking, etc).
To give you an idea, this is a token transaction:

https://whatsonchain.com/tx/177846c5743335471eef502488ab7381fbd0e5ef4e6081fd2a5277a87dfac5d9

The 'protocol' is just Bitcoin. The tokens are just outputs. For us, It's all about the project specific implementation and the token use case. E-Money is just one use.

Post automatically merged: Jul 31, 2020

@brendan
Sounds like you want to design custom "intranets" tailored by expensive experts for each unique customer.

I hate to say it, but this approach will lose in

BSV TOKEN PROTOCOL
SHOWDOWN!​

I think you're underestimating the level of engineering needed to actually build anything useful on top of a token. Ask yourself why the $billions poured into ICOs never resulted in anything less than shitcoins with names that represented an idea, but no actual use case functionality. Maybe if you're looking for a way to mint shitcoins you should rename this as the shitcoin showdown.

And 'intranets' is way off the mark.

We aren't here to allow you to print shitcoins. We are here to make sure you can build what you need for your business using Bitcoin as a substrate. That is our value add.

 

[eamesyi]

This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing. My idea of a whitelist was a single, secret list enforced by a single entity. But having on-chain accountability around the provision of whitelisting change the game.

I'm not surprised the government has wisdom and wants to avoid a totalitarian monetary system. Bill Barr proved recently that the foundations of government are much more solid than the Twitteresque politicians.

And, as stated before: We have an alternative in the form of bitcoin for small transactions.


Not for smaller amounts. We have cash. Notes and coins. And there is a push to remove it along with freedom.

I have a few questions about Tokenized's e-money solution:

1) Does a user have a static bitcoin address?

2) Who can monitor my own money?

Thanks.

1) Does a user have a static bitcoin address?

No. The protocol supports no address reuse and allows for output values of tokens/bitcoin spread across as many outputs as desired to preserve privacy.

2) Who can monitor my own money?

The identity oracle(s) of your choosing. You can also choose which subsets of your public keys are stored with which identity oracle. In this way, each identity oracle only possesses a subset of the entire market's transaction details. A whitelist of a particular smart contract is broken up into sub-whitelists managed by separate companies operating identity oracle services. For a regulated instrument the oracles communicate off-chain (trusted network of regulated entities) to gather identifying details on both sides of a transaction to comply with AML/CTF/etc rules. However, they only see the big picture for their customers, and even that, as mentioned above, can be a subset of the user's financial life, depending on what percentage of pub keys the user registered with the identity oracle.

An issuing entity (or the agents of the issuing entity) will declare which identity/authority/event oracles are permitted to interoperate with the particular contract in the drafting/formation process. The permitted oracle entities, and the oracle's public key and endpoint (where appropriate), are published to the blockchain as part of the contract formation action (C2). The contract administrator of the particular contract can then add/remove/amend oracles over time using the contract amendment action (C3) and can do so for many reasons (e.g. compliance, licenses, reputation, going out of business, security/key compromised, etc.). There is no practical limit to how many oracles can work with a particular contract.

 

[79b79aa8]

TAAL Files Second Patent For Layer 1 Token Technology To Enable Smart Contracts Built On Bitcoin Sv And In Direct Competition To Ethereum Erc-20 Tokens – TAAL

Vancouver, British Columbia; August 6, 2020 – TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc. (CSE:TAAL | FWB:9SQ | OTCQB: OTC:TAALF) (“TAAL” or the “Company”) announces that its operating subsidiary has filed a second patent application (the “Patent Application”) with the United Kingdom patent...

www.taal.com

 

[eamesyi]

An important point regarding the value proposition of the request-response mechanism, in combination with time-based identity oracle certificates, is that you can significantly compress the critical path required for clearing and settlement (down to ~2 secs), while also allowing for practical offline token payments.

The certificate-based approach achieves these features by allowing receivers to 'spool up' certificates for common asset types (USD, GBP, etc) well in advance of actually needing to make a transaction. Certificates aren't transaction-specific, they simply attest to the right a particular address(es) has to receive a particular asset.

Multisig-controlled tokens will always be slower in terms of clearing and settlement speed and are unable to offer offline payments.

 

[LudwigVonRothoppe]

Attila just released Super Assets: https://bitcoinfiles.org/t/80c06d32012577b41ffea21a0b0aadefdb1331c8bb62ddc1a2d2682a9a90b7d2

Post automatically merged: Oct 11, 2020

Attila just released Super Assets: https://bitcoinfiles.org/t/80c06d32012577b41ffea21a0b0aadefdb1331c8bb62ddc1a2d2682a9a90b7d2

After first gaze it looks to me to be very close to Taal's STAS token, seems to be more elaborated though.

 

[eamesyi]