Oddbean

We lived in the same city for a while (Bratislava). He was an author of an independent implementation of Bitcoin back then (libbitcoin). One day we met in the hackerspace (Progressbar) and he drew a giant tree with many branches and said "I am going to teach you everything there is to know about bitcoin". And we went down every branch. Opcodes, mining, P2P, ... It was back at the time when Bitcoin was much simpler and it was really possible. Amir is amazing.

Yes. I actually introduced Amir to bitcoin. He's a great guy and friend. He is quite often in prague for the confences at Paralelni Polis. He definitely knows his stuff. But he left bitcoin, unfortunately. And I dont like coins with proprietary monetary policies. So we dont intersect very much these days. It is always nice to see him though. Genuinely good hearted person.

Yes, we organize the program of HCPP together, which is probably the only cypherpunk/ cryptoanarchy conference left. https://hardcore.hcpp.cz/ I am a co-founder of Paralelni Polis Prague and Bratislava, but few people know it actually has its roots in Progressbar in Bratislava. BTW: His project does not have any monetary policy, they did not launch a token, now it is more of a zero knowledge compiler and infrastructure. Plus a lot of infrastructure for anonymous development and coordination. And they are behind the Lunarpunk philosophy which I perceive as the natural continuation of Cypherpunk.

I didnt realilze there was no token. Someone told me darkfi was based on ETH (Vlad I think). I'm doing something on layer 2 of bitcoin called glyphs which is a fork or Runes, but without the inscriptions. I think it will go quite well, and requires no new token because it's built on bitcoin. https://github.com/glyph-protocol/glyphs/blob/main/README.md I worked with Amir on a social network called Lorea before bitcoin, but Pablo and Amir left, and it never quite made it. But I didnt give up trying to build a social network on top of bitcoin, and helped make nostr 7 years later.

There probably will be a base token when they launch, but they've been focusing on building the primitives, not the token. The mainnet is not launched yet, but you can use the language, proofs and verifiers and of course all the infrastructure for developers. They have built for example anonymous voting infrastructure (AnonDAO). It has nothing to do with Eth, Vlad is mistaken in this, they are not compatible with Eth, don't have a token on Eth nor use any infrastructure. They build it on utxo not account model. I am not sure how successful it is going to be, but I'm glad that they are actually building some very interesting stuff that did not exist before at all, they did not do any kind of scam raising of money or anything.

Great info thanks. So I think distributing a token in a fair way is always going to be hard. While bitcoin is not perfect in that regard, I think it's about ad good as we can do. If darkfi is just technology that's great. Could we add it onto bitcoin or L2?

I don't know, probably possible. If it's smart, I don't know. The team that's been working on it full time for years has to be paid. I don't even know if it's that great, I'm just telling you what they have right now. I remember a story by the author of the original coin that became Monero. He said that Monero is proud to have a fair launch and he replied that fair launch is super easy when you take someone else's months of work, change the name of the coin, release schedule (probably one day worth of work) and post it on GitHub. I'm not that strict with Bitcoin only and launches, I think open market for discovering what is fair and how to do these things is great. I think Ethereum was too much, but the market seems to be ok with it, it's very successful, people are actually paying fees and even holding, because they find it useful.

Probably, the question is how to do it in a way that the team can keep working on it. sustainability is key here, otherwise it would result in a very underfunded project. I'd rather have a separate service with its own token and a wrapped representation of bitcoin providing additional services like anonymous exchange and lending products than an underfunded L2. Ultimately it's on the team and the users to agree on model (including financial model) that works for everyone. I don't think they are thinking about Bitcoin L2, although it's FOSS, so if someone invests energy into turning it to L2, they are free to do so.

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