“Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will be as one”
John Lennon, Imagine
“He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord
would surely suffice.
This disgrace to civilization
should be done away with at once.
Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is;
I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action!
It is my conviction that killing
under the cloak of war is nothing
but an act of murder.”
Albert Einstein
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
George Orwell, “1984”
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Albert Einstein
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
Plato
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”
Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education.
The twenty-first century will
reverse this order.
It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle.
The discovery of a new scientific truth
will be more important thanthe
squabbles of diplomats.
Even the newspapers of our own
dayare beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of freshphilosophical concepts as news.
The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere ‘stick’ in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage
practice of killing each other off.
I inherited from my father, an erudite
man who labored hard for peace,
an ineradicable hatred of war.
Nikola Tesla
“Older men declare war.
But it is youth that must fight and die.”
Herbert Hoover
“War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”
Anonymous
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,those who are
cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not
spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
This is not a way of life at all
in any true sense.
Under the clouds of war,
it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
“You can have peace.
Or you can have freedom.
Don’t ever count on having both at once.”
Robert A. Heinlein
“War is over … If you want it.”
John Lennon
“How is it possible to have a civil war?”
George Carlin
“It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace.”
Aristotle
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.
But in modern war, there is nothing
sweet nor fitting in your dying.
You will die like a dog
for no good reason.”
Ernest Hemingway
“In times of war, the law falls silent.”
“Silent enim leges inter arma“
Marcus Tullius Cicero
“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.”
Carl Sagan
“The human race is unimportant.
It is the self that must not be betrayed.”
“I suppose one could say that
Hitler didn’t betray his self.”
“You are right.
He did not.
But millions of Germans
did betray their selves.
That was the tragedy.
Not that one man had
the courage to be evil.
But that millions had not
the courage to be good.”
John Fowles, “The Magus”
“Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity.”
Stephen King, “Hearts in Atlantis”
“I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
George McGovern
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.
This is elementary common sense.
If you hamper the war effort of one side,
you automatically help out
that of the other.
Nor is there any real way
of remaining outside
such a war as the present one.
In practice, ‘he that is not with me
is against me’.”
George Orwell
“The essential act of war is destruction,
not necessarily of human lives,
but of the products of human labour.
War is a way of shattering to pieces,
or pouring into the stratosphere,
or sinking in the depths of the sea,
materials which might otherwise
be used to make the masses
too comfortable,and hence,
in the long run,too intelligent.”
George Orwell, “1984”
“Mankind must put an end to war – or war will put an end to mankind.”
[Address before the United Nations, September 25 1961]
John F. Kennedy
“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”
Henry Kissinger
“In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity In Peace: Good Will.”
Winston S. Churchill, “The Second World War”
“this is the 21st century and we need
to redefine r/evolution.
this planet needs a people’s r/evolution.
a humanist r/evolution.
r/evolution is not about bloodshed or about going to the mountains and fighting.
we will fight if we are forced to
but the fundamental goal of
r/evolution must be peace.
we need a r/evolution of the mind.
we need a r/evolution of the heart.
we need a r/evolution of the spirit.
the power of the people is stronger
than any weapon.
a people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped.
we need to be weapons
of mass construction.
weapons of mass love.
it’s not enough just to change the system.
we need to change ourselves.
we have got to make this world
user friendly. user friendly.
are you ready to sacrifice
to end world hunger.
to sacrifice to end colonialism.
to end neo-colonialism.
to end racism.
to end sexism.
r/evolution means the end of exploitation.
r/evolution means respecting
people from other cultures.
r/evolution is creative.
r/evolution means treating your
mate as a friend and an equal.
r/evolution is sexy.
r/evolution means respecting and
learning from your children.
r/evolution is beautiful.
r/evolution means protecting
the people.
the plants. the animals. the air. the water.
r/evolution means saving this planet.
r/evolution is love.”
Assata Shakur
“After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons.”
Herodotus
“Let my country die for me.”
James Joyce, “Ulysses”
“If we really saw war,
what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war.
If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war.
This is why war is carefully sanitized.
This is why we are given war’s perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war’s consequences.
The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…
The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage.
They are war’s refuse.
We do not see them.
We do not hear them.
They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled.
The message they tell is too painful for us to hear.
We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.“
Chris Hedges “Death of the Liberal Class”
“The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.”
Fidel Castro
“For the whole earth is the tomb
of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns
and inscriptions in their own country,
but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them,
graven not on stone
but in the hearts of men.
Make them your examples, and,
esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness,
do not weigh too nicely
the perils of war.”
[Funeral Oration of Pericles]
Thucydides, “History of the Peloponnesian War”
“War and drink are the two things
man is never too poor to buy.”
William Faulkner
For me, the most ironic token of
[the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon.
It reads:
“We came in peace for all Mankind.”
As the United States wasdropping
7 ½ megatons of conventional
explosives on small nations
inSoutheast Asia,
we congratulated ourselves on
our humanity.
We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.”
Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”
“This topic brings me to that
worstoutcrop of herd life,
the military system, which I abhor…
This plague-spot of civilization ought
to be abolished with all possible speed.
Heroism on command,
senseless violence,
and all the loathsome nonsense that
goes by the name of patriotism —
how passionately I hate them!”
Albert Einstein
1. Bangladesh…. In 1971 … Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support
the Pakistani generals in both their
civilian massacre policy in East Bengal
and their armed attack on India
from West Pakistan….
This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt.
Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China….
Of the new state of Bangladesh,
Kissinger remarked coldly that it
was ‘a basket case’ before turning
his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.
2. Chile…. Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap
and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces … who refused to countenance military intervention in politics.
In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms …
who warned him that a coup insuch
a stable democracy would
behard to procure.
The murder of Schneider nonetheless
went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and
with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation….
This was one of the relatively few times
that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater
than that of most PhDs) involved himself
in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter
of anonymous thousands.
His jocular remark on this occasion—
‘I don’t see why we have to let a country
go Marxist just because its people
are irresponsible’—suggests he may
have been having the best of times….
3. Cyprus…. Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists
for the murder of President Makarios,
and sanctioned the coup which tried
to extend the rule of the Athens junta
(a favoured client of his) to the island.
When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support
an even bloodier intervention by Turkey.
Thomas Boyatt … went to Kissinger
in advance of the anti-Makarios
putschand warned him that it
could leadto a civil war.
‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions.
4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt
in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided
by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that
the Kurds were not to be allowed to win,
but were to be employed fortheir
nuisance value alone.
They were not to be told that this was
the case, but soon found out when
the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American
aid to Kurdistan was cut off.
Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger …
for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees
who were thus abruptly created….
The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred.
5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces
of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor.
Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there
are good judges who put this
estimateon the low side.
Kissinger was furious when news of
his own collusion was leaked, because
as well as breaking international law
the Indonesians were also violating
an agreement with the United States….
Monroe Leigh … pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?‘
A good question, even if it did not and
does not lie especially well in his mouth.
It goes on and on and on until one
cannot eat enough to vomit enough.”
Christopher Hitchens
“At one time I had given much thought
to why men were so very rarely
capable of living for an ideal.
Now I saw that many, no,
all men were capable of dying for one.”
Hermann Hesse, “Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend”
“We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.”
Howard Zinn
All wars are sacred,” he said.
“To those who have to fight them.
If the people who started wars
didn’t make them sacred,who would be
foolish enough to fight?
But, no matter what rallying cries
the orators give to the idiots who fight,
no matter what noble purposes they
assign to wars, there is neverbut
one reason for a war.
And that is money.
All wars are in reality money squabbles.
But so few people ever realize it.
Their ears are too full of bugles
anddrums and the fine words
from stay-at-home orators.
Sometimes the rallying cry is
’save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’
Sometimes it’s ’down with Popery!’
andsometimes ‘Liberty!’
and sometimes
‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!”
Margaret Mitchell, “Gone with the Wind”
“The most dangerous people in the world are not the tiny minority instigating evil acts, but those who do the acts for them.
For example, when the British
invaded India, many Indians accepted
to work for the British to kill off
Indians who resisted their occupation.
So in other words, many Indians were
hired to kill other Indians on behalf
of the enemy for a paycheck.
Today, we have mercenaries in Africa, corporate armies from the western world, and unemployed men throughout the Middle East killing their own people – and people of other nations – for a paycheck.
To act without a conscience,
but for a paycheck,
makes anyone a dangerous animal.
The devil would be powerless
if he couldn’t entice people
to do his work.
So as long as money continuesto seduce
the hungry, the hopeless, the broken,
the greedy, and the needy,
there will always be
war between brothers.”
Suzy Kassem
“Peace is such hard work.
Harder than war.
It takes way more effort
to forgive than to kill.”
Rae Carson, “The Bitter Kingdom” (Fire and Thorns, #3)
“An unjust law is itself a species of violence.
Arrest for its breach is more so.
Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence.
This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.”
Mahatma Gandhi, “Non-violence in Peace and War” 1942-1949
“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
Sigmund Freud
“In war,
the strong make slaves of the weak,
and in peace,
the rich makes slaves of the poor.”
Oscar Wilde
“So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one’s fatherland
is to wish evil to one’s neighbors.
The citizen of the universe would be
the man who wishes his countrynever to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.”
Voltaire, “Philosophical Dictionary”
“A democracy which makes or eveneffectively prepares for modern,
A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.”
Steven Galloway, “The Cellist of Sarajevo”
“There has never been a just [war],
never an honorable one —
on the part of the instigator of the war.
I can see a million years ahead,
and this rule will never change
in so many as half a dozen instances.
The loud little handful— as usual —
willshout for the war.
The pulpit will–warily and cautiously–object–at first;
the great, big, dull bulk of the nation
will rub its sleepy eyes and tryto
make out why there should be a war,
and will say, earnestly and indignantly,
‘It is unjust and dishonorable,
and there is no necessity for it.
‘ Then the handful will shout louder.
A few fair men on the other side will
argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform,
and free speech strangled by hordesof furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as earlier–but do not dare say so.
And now the whole nation–pulpit and all–will take up the war-cry, and shout
itself hoarse, and mob any honest man
who ventures to open his mouth;
and presently such mouths
will cease to open.
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities,
and will diligently study them, and refuse
to examine any refutations of them;
and thus he will by and by convince
himself the war is just,
and will thank God
for the better sleep he enjoys
after this processof
grotesque self-deception.”
Mark Twain, “The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories”
“We often think of peace
as the absence of war,
that if powerful countries
would reduce their weapon arsenals,
we could have peace.
But if we look deeplyinto the weapons,
we see our own minds– our own
prejudices,fears and ignorance.
Even if we transport all the bombs
to the moon, the roots of war
and the roots of bombs are still there,
in our hearts and minds,
and sooner or later we will
make new bombs.
To work for peace is to uproot warfrom ourselves and from the hearts
of men and women.
To prepare for war,
to give millions of men and women
the opportunity to practice killing
day and night in their hearts,
is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, “Living Buddha, Living Christ”
“There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead.
I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.”
Bernard Cornwell, “Death of Kings” (The Saxon Stories, #6)
“That there are men in all countries
who get their living by war,
and by keeping up the quarrels
of Nations is as shocking as it is true…”
Thomas Paine
“The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps
and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees,
except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it.
They worship money and power and death.
Their ideal solution to all the
nation’s problems would be
another 100 Year War.”
Hunter S. Thompson, “Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century”
“Once war becomes a clash of absolutes, there is no breathing room for mercy.
Absolute truth is blind truth.”
Deepak Chopra, “The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore”
“What is so often said about the solders
of the 20th century is thatthe
foughtto make us free.
Which is a wonderful sentiment and
one witch should evoke tremendous gratitude if in fact there was a shred
of truth in that statement but,
it’s not true.
It’s not even close to true
in fact it’s the opposite of truth.
There’s this myth around that people believe that the way to honor deaths of so many of millions of people; that the way to honor is to say that we achieved some tangible, positive, good, out of their death’s.
That’s how we are supposed to
honor their deaths.
We can try and rescue some positive
and forward momentum of human progress, of human virtue from these hundreds of millions of death’s but we
don’t do it by pretending that they’d died
to set us free because we are less free;
far less free now then we were
beforethese slaughters began.
These people did not die to set us free.
They did not die fighting any enemy
other than the ones that the
previous deaths created.
The beginning of wisdom is to call
things by their proper names.
Solders are paid killers, and I say this
with a great degree of sympathy to young men and women who are suckered into
a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money and the life of honor is accepting ordered killings for money, prestige, and pensions.
We create the possibility of moral choice
by communicating truth
about ethics to people.
That to me is where real heroism
and real respect for the dead lies.
Real respect for the dead lies in exhuming the corpses and hearing what they would say if they could speak out; and they
would say: If any ask us why we died tell
it’s because our fathers lied, tell them it’s because we were told that charging up a hill and slaughtering our fellow man was heroic, noble, and honorable.
But these hundreds of millions of ghosts encircled the world in agony, remorse
will not be released from our collective unconscious until we lay the truth of
theirmurders on the table and look
at the horror that is the lie;
that murder for money can be moral, that murder for prestige can be moral.
These poor young men and woman propagandized into an undead ethical status lied to about what is noble,
virtuous, courageous, honorable, decent, and good to the point that they’re rolling hand grenades into children’s rooms and the illusion that, that is going to make the world a better place.
We have to stare this in the face if we want to remember why these people died. They did not die to set us free. They did not die to make the world a better place. They died because we are ruled by sociopaths. The only thing that can create a better world is the truth is the virtue is the honor and courage of standing up to the genocidal lies of mankind and calling them lies and ultimate corruptions.
The trauma and horrors of this century of staggering bloodshed of the brief respite of the 19th century. This addiction to blood and the idea that if we pour more bodies into the hole of the mass graves of the 20th century, if we pour more bodies and more blood we can build some sort of cathedral to a better place but it doesn’t happen. We can throw as many young men and woman as we want into this pit of slaughter and it will never be full. It will never do anything other than sink and recede further into the depths of hell. We can’t build a better world on bodies. We can’t build peace on blood. If we don’t look back and see the army of the dead of the 20th century calling out for us to see that they died to enslave us. That whenever there was a war the government grew and grew.
We are so addicted to this lie. What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us. This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue. It drowns us, drowns our children, our future, and the world. When we pour these endless young bodies into this pit of death; we follow it.”
Stefan Molyneux
“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans
ofthe wounded who cry aloud for blood,
more vengeance, more desolation.
War is hell.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
Our enemies are Medes and Persians,
men who for centuries have lived
soft and luxurious lives;
we of Macedon for generations past
have been trained in the hard school
of danger and war.
Above all, we are free men,
and they are slaves.
There are Greek troops, to be sure, in Persian service — but how different
is their cause from ours!
They will be fighting for pay — and not much of at that; we, on the contrary,
shall fight for Greece, and our
heartswill be in it.
As for our foreign troops — Thracians, Paeonians, Illyrians, Agrianes — they
are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe, and they will find as their opponents the slackest and softest of the tribes of Asia.
And what, finally, of the two men
in supreme command?
You have Alexander, they — Darius!”
Alexander the Great
“If I had known they were going to do this,
I would have become a shoemaker.”
Albert Einstein
“One question in my mind,
which I hardly dare mention in public,
is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world.
Patriotism is rampant in war and
there are some good things about it.
Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family,
pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people.
War brings out the kind of pride in country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them
to be ready to die for it.
At no time do people work so well
together to achieve the same goal
as they do in wartime.
Maybe that’s enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue.
If only I could get out of my mind
the most patriotic people
who ever lived,
the Nazi Germans.”
Andy Rooney, “My War”
“My own concern is primarily the
terror and violence carried out by
my own state, for two reasons.
For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence.
But also for a much more important
reason than that; namely, I can
do something about it.
So even if the U.S. was responsible
for 2 percent of the violence in the
world instead of the majority of it,
it would bethat 2 percent I would
be primarily responsible for.
And that is a simple ethical judgment.
That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated
and predictable consequences.
It is very easy to denounce the
atrocitiesof someone else.
That has about as much ethical value
as denouncing atrocities that
took place in the 18th century.”
Noam Chomsky
“We are in the hands of men whosepower and wealth have separatedthem
from the reality of daily life
and from the imagination.
We are right to be afraid.”
Grace Paley
“Wars of nations are fought
to change maps.
But wars of poverty are fought
to map change.”
Muhammad Ali
“What passing bells for these
who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifle’s rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them;
no prayers, nor bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells, And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held
to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes, Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall, Their flowers the tenderness
of patient minds, And each, slow dusk a drawing
down of blinds.”
Wilfred Owen, The War Poems
Millions of fathers in rain Millions of mothers in pain Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
Millions of daughters walk in the mud Millions of children wash in the flood A million girls vomit and groan Millions of families hopeless alone”
Allen Ginsberg, “Poems”
“No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as ’embedded.’
To say, ‘I’m an embedded journalist’ is to say, ‘I’m a government Propagandist.”
Noam Chomsky, “Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World”
“Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism…
neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers
would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves
and their collaborators that one
of the worlds greatest atrocities
was really morally praiseworthy.”
Richard Weikart, “From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany”
“War means fighting.
The business of the soldier is to fight.
Armies are not called out to dig trenches,
to throw up breastworks,to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time.
This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance,
and so would be an economy of life
and property in the end.”
Stonewall Jackson
“I have seen war.
I have seen war on land and sea.
I have seen blood running from
the wounded.
I have seen men coughing out their
gassed lungs.
I have seen the dead in the mud.
I have seen cities destroyed.
I have seen 200 limping, exhausted
men come out of line—the survivors
of a regiment of 1,000 that went
forward 48 hours before.
I have seen children starving.
I have seen the agony of mothers and wives.
I hate war.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“How is the world ruled and led to war?
Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.”
Karl Kraus
“Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and
the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the
war seem winnable.”
Sebastian Junger, “War”
“But what are a hundred million deaths?
When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while.
And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead,
a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff
of smoke in the imagination.”
Albert Camus
“I have never advocated war except
as means of peace, so seek peace,
but prepare for war.
Because war…
War never changes.
War is like winter and winter is coming.”
Ulysses S Grant
“I do not say that there is no glory
to be gained [in war];
but it is not personal glory.
In itself, no cause was ever more glorious than that of men who struggle, not to conquer territory, not to gather spoil,
not to gratify ambition, but for freedom,
for religion, for hearth and home, and to revenge the countless atrocities inflicted upon them by their oppressors.”
G. A. HENTY
“World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that
has ever taken place on earth.
Any writer who said otherwise lied,
So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”
Ernest Hemingway
“In peace, children inter their parents;
war violates the order of natureand
causes parents to inter their children.”
Herodotus
“Perpetual peace is a futile dream.”
Gen. George S. Patton
“Such then is the human condition,
that to wish greatness for one’s country
is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.”
Voltaire
“It is precisely that requirement
ofshared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual manand the human race since
the beginning of history.
In their efforts to impose universal worship, men have unsheathed their swords
and killed one another.
They have invented gods and challenged each other:
“Discard your gods and worship mineor
I will destroy both your godsand you!”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov”
What a terrible thing war is,
what a terrible thing!”
Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”
“When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,’ he said,
‘all the efforts of culture seem worthless.
What have people learned from all
our Goethes and Bachs?
To kill babies?”
Vasily Grossman, “Life and Fate”
“Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also
those who are most likely to decide
that some things, after all,
are worth fighting for.”
Christopher Hitchens, “The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens”
“I have never advocated war
except as a means of peace.”
Ulysses S. Grant
“It is of the greatest important in this world that a man should know himself, and the measure of his own strength and means; and he who knows that he has not a genius for fighting must learn how to govern
by the arts of peace.”
Machiavelli, Niccolo
“War has no longer the justification that
it makes for the survival of the fittest;
it involves the survival of the less fit.
The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man’s advance involves a profound misreading
of the biological analogy.
The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent
the decaying human element.”
Norman Angell, “The Great Illusion”
“Homo sapiens!
The name itself was an irony.
They had not been wise at all,
but incredibly stupid.
Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life.
Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion.
From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued.
They had committed atrocities on others
of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted
and destroyed, left millions to starve
in Third World countries, and finished
it all with a nuclear holocaust.
The mutants were right.
Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment
on which they were dependent.”
Louise Lawrence, “Children of the Dust”
“War: first, one hopes to win;
then one expects the enemy to lose;
then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering;
in the end, one is surprised that
everyone has lost.”
Karl Kraus
“War is unlike life.
It’s a denial of everything you learn life is.
And that’s why when you get finished with it, you see that if offers no lessons that can’t be bettered learned in civilian life.
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
Apollo BTC – A Bitcoin ASIC Miner and Desktop Class Computer running a Full Node
Introducing the FutureBit Apollo BTC
Six CPU Cores. 44 ASIC Cores. 1TB NVMe Based SSD Drive. Quiet. Less than 200 Watts of Power. Made in the USA. This is what the Future of Bitcoin looks like.
FutureBit Apollo BTC is the world’s first vertically integrated platform bringing the full power of Bitcoin and it’s mining infrastructure in a small, quiet, easy to use desktop device designed for everyday people.
We have iterated and learned much from our first Apollo product. We realized early on that we focused too much on the mining aspect, and not enough on the software, applications, and services that run Bitcoin. Too many of these services have moved to online centralized websites, and many users have given up on running the core software that powers Bitcoin.
This must change, as Bitcoin will not continue to be the free, un-censorable, decentralized system it is today if only a few control the mining that powers it, and the nodes that control it.
At the heart of the new Apollo BTC product is a revamped SBC (Single Board Computer), that is as powerful as any consumer grade desktop system and can run almost any Bitcoin Application natively on the device 24/7. Take it out of the Box, plug it in, power it on, and you are already running a full Bitcoin node without needing to do anything.
Install a wallet of your choice, use any hardware wallet, run BTCPayServer, run a block explorer, run a Lightning Node. All of this is possible with our six core ARM based CPU with 4GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe drive that can easily store a FULL non pruned Bitcoin Node. It can power through a Full Node Sync in under 48 hours, which is a record for a device of its class! This is almost an order of magnitude faster than any Raspberry Pi 4 based Node.
On top of this we have taken our 6 years of experience building ASIC mining devices, and engineered the only American Made TeraHash range Bitcoin mining device that can be silent on your desk, mine Bitcoin in the background 24/7, and only use the power of one light bulb to do it.
We did this with our optimized PCB design that has carefully placed all 44 hash cores underneath our custom cold-forged aluminum induction heatsink, which draws up to 200 Watts of heat away from the device with our new nearly silent 25mm fan. This results in the Apollo BTC in Turbo Mode being just as quiet as the Apollo LTC in Eco Mode!
Like our previous products, we are super proud that we can continue manufacturing the Apollo BTC in the USA, and are now the only USA based company that delivers Bitcoin ASIC products with a supply chain whole owned in the western hemisphere (no more reliance on Chinese based ASICS, and their willingness to only sell to large farms and the highest bidder).
OPTIONS
Full Apollo Package: This is our Full Package option that comes with everything you need in the box. The Apollo BTC Unit with our latest controller built in, and our 200W Power supply with power cable.
Full Apollo Package NO Power Supply: We are also offering the Full Package with no power supply for people that want the plug-n-play experience but have spare 12v ATX power supply.
Standard: This option is ONLY the Apollo ASIC Miner, with no controller or power supply. Our new hashboard has a micro USB port, and can be used as a USB device. The Full Apollo Node can control multiple standard units through its USB ports. We wanted to give our customers an option to expand their hash power in a cost effective way. If you already have a Raspberry Pi, or Linux/Windows Desktop Computer and a power supply with two PCIE power ports you can also control our Standard unit in this way with our stand alone miner software (please note this setup will be for more advanced users, and the software will be command line based on launch).
Standard + Power Supply: Same as our Standard unit above, but comes with our 200W Power supply. This is a plug and play solution if you already have a Full Apollo Package. Take it out of the box, plug in the power supply, plug in the micro USB cable to the back of your Full Apollo BTC and it will automatically recognize the second hashboard and start mining!
Compact All-In-One Desktop Bitcoin System (4x6x4in) that mines Bitcoin and any SHA256 based crypto (Bitcoin Cash etc).
Powerful 6 ARM Core CPU with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD (NOT included in the Standard or Standard + package).
Comes Pre-Installed with a Bitcoin node, and you can install almost any Bitcoin Application
Very wide range of operation modes with preset ECO (quiet) mode, BALANCED, and TURBO mode.
2-3.8 TH/s of SHA256 performance per miner (+/- 5%)
125 Watts in ECO mode, and 200 Watts in TURBO * +/- 10%
Can be used as a full Desktop computer with a monitor keyboard and mouse (not included), or through our Web UI
Connect almost any peripheral with our USB 3.0 ports, USB C port, HDMI, AC Wifi, and Bluetooth
Clocks and Power is fully customizable by user with easy to use interface
Hashboard now monitors both voltage and power draw for accurate measurements*
Custom designed cold forged hexagonal pin heatsink with leading thermal performance for the quietest ASIC miner in operation!
1k-5k RPM Quiet Dual Ball Bearing Fan with automatic thermal management with onboard temperature sensor
Controlled via local connection on a web browser similar to antminers. You can simply set it up via smartphone browser. No crazy driver installs, hard to use miner software or scripts needed.
Two Six Pin PCIE power connectors for wide-range of power draw
Custom Designed all Aluminum case
Ships with our own custom built 200W 94% efficient PSU and is ready to run out of the box! (Does NOT come with Standard package).
Requirements:
Router with an Ethernet cable for initial setup OR Monitor with keyboard and mouse
At least a 250 watt 12v power supply with two 6 Pin PCIE connector is required (unless you order our packages that come with our power supply). This is the same connector used by all modern GPUs. Please note even standard units NEED a power supply, they cant be powered through the USB port on the full package unit.
As I am the owner of two of these beauties, that I have on my office as you saw in the photo above, I took the liberty to make Free-Publicity for the FutureBit Apollo Btc Miner.
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
The relative value of any two curren- cies—the exchange rate—is determined through their sale and purchase on the global foreign exchange market. If government policy interferes with this market by changing the relative supply or demand of currencies, the exchange rate is managed.
The trilemma of international finance, is a restriction on government policy that follows immediately from the interaction of exchange rates, monetary policy and international capital flows.
Trilemma of International Finance
The trilemma states that any country can have only two of the following:
(1) Unrestricted international capital markets.
(2) A managed exchange rate.
(3) An independent monetary policy.
If the government wants a managed exchange rate but does not want to interfere with international capital flows, it must use monetary policy to accommodate changes in the demand for its currency in order to stabilize the exchange rate.
In the extreme, this would take the form of a currency board arrangement, where the domestic currency is fully backed by a foreign currency (as in the case of Hong Kong).
In such a situation, monetary policy can no longer be used for domestic purposes (it is no longer independent).
If a country wishes to maintain control over monetary policy to reduce domestic unemployment or inflation, for example, it must limit trades of its currency in the international capital market (it no longer has free international capital markets).
A country that chooses to have both unrestricted inter-national capital flows and an independent monetary policy can no longer influence its exchange rate and, therefore, cannot have a managed exchange rate.
Pieters and Vivanco (2016), government attempts to regulate the globally accessible bitcoin markets are generally unsuccessful, and, as shown in Pieters (2016), bitcoin exchange rates tend to reflect the market, not official exchange rates.
Should the flows allowed by bitcoin become big enough, all countries will have, by default, unrestricted international capital markets.
Thus, with bitcoin, (1)unrestricted international capital markets is chosen by default.
Therefore, the only remaining policy choice is between (2)managed exchange rates or (3)independent monetary policy.
If the country chooses (1) and (2), it must use reactive monetary policy to achieve the managed exchange rate.
If the country chooses (1) and (3), it must have a floating exchange rate because it has no remaining tools with which to maintain a managed exchange rate.
Ali et al. (2014), the European Central Bank (2015) and the Bank for International Settlements (2015) all concur that cryptocur- rencies may eventually undermine monetary policy.
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
• Individually, each of these technologies deserves all the attention they’re getting as enablers and disruptors
• But, taken together?
• Their transformative effect becomes multiplicative
• A future driven by machine connectivity, data exchange and commercial services:
IoT connects billions of machines and sensors generate unprecedented quantities of real-time data
AI enables the machines to act on data and trigger services
Blockchain functions are the transaction layer where data and service contracts are securely stored and payments for services are settled
How does blockchain support intelligent connected machines?
• Smart Contracts enable self-executing and self-enforcing contractual states
Custom financial instruments (tokens), records of ownership of an underlying physical asset (smart property), any
complex business logic that can be programmable
Can such applications be ideal for intelligent (AI) and connected (IoT) machines?
These machines are intelligent enough to negotiate contracts, but need a technology allowing them to securely sign and enforce them
• Digital currencies create new forms of money
Programmable and active
Will such money be ideal for intelligent (AI) and connected (IoT) machines?
These machines will need digital currency to pay for services assigned through the smart contracts
How will the three technologies work together?
IoT – Internet of Things
Sensors allow us to cost-effectively gather tremendous amounts of data.
Connectivity allows us to transmit/broadcast these data.
But, there is a missing element: intelligence to process these data.
AI – Artificial Intelligence
Intelligence at the very edges of the network (mini-brains).
Combine with IoT and you have the ability to recognize meaningful patterns buried in mountains of data in ways that would be impossible for most humans, or even non-AI algorithms, to do.
But, there is a missing element: a secure storage layer for data and a transaction layer for services
DLT (blockchain) – Distributed Ledger Technology
Decentralized governance, coupled with no single point of failure, disintermediation, unalterable and searchable records of events.
Digital currencies and tokenized custom financial instruments.
Combine with AI and IoT and you have a new world of autonomous systems interacting with each other, procuring services from each other and settling transactions.
The technology stack of the future
Technology Stack of the Future
Toward a world of machine commerce
A world of Machine Commerce
M2M will need SSI (self-sovereign identities) – for objects!
Human Identities types
Object identities can be SSI by default
Multi-source, multi-verifier
Digitally signed, verifiable credentials that can prove issuer, holder and status
Secure peer-to-peer connections (permanent or session-based)
Exchange full credentials, partial credentials or ZKPs derived from credentials
Next milestone: Decentralized Organizations (DOs)
DOs are good at:
Coordinating resources that do not know/trust each other (including hybrid
H/M)
Governing in a geography-agnostic, censorship-resistant manner
Enabling short-term or informal organizational structures (networks/communities)
Tracking and rewarding contribution
Challenges
Jurisdictional issues
Legislating new types of work for humans and work rules for machines
Governance modalities, including external supervision
Challenges
New/upgraded system architectures
• From legacy to blockchain/AI/IoT-native systems • Integration, interoperability, backward compatibility • ROI obvious ex post, difficult ex ante – Bootstrapping
Advanced analytics capabilities
• As devices at the edge become smarter, the smart contracts enabled by blockchain platforms will require more advanced data analytics capabilities and gateways to the physical world.
New Business Models
Disruptive innovation will dominate – but not without boom-and-bust cycles and big failures along the way.
Winners will NOT be the ones focusing on efficiency gains, but on disruptive models.
Key takeaways
• IoT, AI and DLT (blockchain) are foundational and exponentially growing technologies
When combined, they will create a new internet of connected, intelligent and commercially transacting machines
An era machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-machine (H2M) commerce is likely to emerge, with profound consequences on social and economic dynamics
New forms of corporations or organizational formats (code-only, autonomous) will emerge
• There are numerous challenges that must be overcome
IoT has outpaced the human internet, but is still a largely passive, insecure and privacy-vulnerable network
AI has made huge leaps, but still requires immense computational resources and is largely incompatible with edge computing
DLT is a new technology, largely untested at scale; both smart contracts and digital assets lack the regulatory clarity required for mass adoption
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from Latin: aurum) and atomic number 79, making it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally.
It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal in a pure form.
Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements and is solid under standard conditions.
Gold often occurs in free elemental (native) form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, veins, and alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as electrum), naturally alloyed with other metals like copper and palladium, and mineral inclusions such as within pyrite.
Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides).
A relatively rare element, gold is a precious metal that has been used for coinage, jewelry, and other arts throughout recorded history.
Still, gold coins ceased to be minted as a circulating currency in the 1930s, and the world gold standard was abandoned for a fiat currency system after 1971.
As of 2017, the world’s largest gold producer by far was China, with 440 tonnes per year.
A total of around 201,296 tonnes of gold exists above ground, as of 2020. This is equal to a cube with each side measuring roughly 21.7 meters (71 ft).
Gold’s high malleability, ductility, resistance to corrosion and most other chemical reactions, and conductivity of electricity have led to its continued use in corrosion-resistant electrical connectors in all types of computerized devices (its chief industrial use).
The world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments and 10% in industry.
Gold is also used in infrared shielding, colored-glass production, gold leafing, and tooth restoration. Certain gold salts are still used as anti-inflammatories in medicine.
F I A T
Fiat money (from Latin: fiat, “let it be done”) is a type of money that is not backed by any commodity such as gold or silver, and typically declared by a decree from the government to be legal tender.
Throughout history, fiat money was sometimes issued by local banks and other institutions. In modern times, fiat money is generally established by government regulation.
Yuan dynasty banknotes are a medieval form of fiat money
Fiat money does not have intrinsic value and does not have use value. It has value only because the people who use it as a medium of exchange agree on its value. They trust that it will be accepted by merchants and other people.
Fiat money is an alternative to commodity money, which is a currency that has intrinsic value because it contains a precious metal such as gold or silver which is embedded in the coin.
Fiat also differs from representative money, which is money that has intrinsic value because it is backed by and can be converted into a precious metal or another commodity.
Fiat money can look similar to representative money (such as paper bills), but the former has no backing, while the latter represents a claim on a commodity (which can be redeemed to a greater or lesser extent).
Government-issued fiat money banknotes were used first during the 11th century in China.
Fiat money started to predominate during the 20th century.
Money declared by a person, institution or government to be legal tender, meaning that it must be accepted in payment of a debt in specific circumstances.
State-issued money which is neither convertible through a central bank to anything else nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.
Money used because of government decree.
An otherwise non-valuable object that serves as a medium of exchange (also known as fiduciary money.)
The term fiat derives from the Latin word fiat, meaning “let it be done” used in the sense of an order, decree or resolution.
Bitcoin – Digital Gold
The most common, and best, ways to think about bitcoin is as “digital gold”.
Like gold, bitcoin doesn’t rely on a central issuer, can’t have its supply manipulated by any authority, and has fundamental properties long considered important for a monetary good and store of value.
Unlike gold, bitcoin is extremely easy and cheap to “transport”, and trivial to verify its authenticity.
Bitcoin is also “programmable”. This means custody of bitcoin can be extremely flexible. It can be split amongst a set of people (“key holders”), backed up and encrypted, or even frozen-in-place until a certain date in the future. This is all done without a central authority managing the process.
You can walk across a national border with bitcoin “stored” in your head by memorizing a key.
The similarities to gold, plus the unique features possible because bitcoin is purely digital, give it the “digital gold” moniker.
Sharing fundamental properties with gold means it shares use-cases with gold, such as hedging inflation and political uncertainty.
But being digital, bitcoin adds capabilities that are especially relevant in our modern electronic times.
The world does indeed need a digital version of gold.
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
Assigning the most powerful supercomputer to mine bitcoin would be comparable to hiring a grandmaster chess player to move a pile of bricks by hand.
The job would get done eventually but the chess player is much better at thinking and playing chess than exerting energy to repetitively move bricks.
Likewise, combining the computing power of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and using them to mine bitcoin would essentially be pointless when compared to the ASIC machines used today.
ASICs are designed to do one thing as quickly and efficiently as possible, whereas a supercomputer is designed to do complicated tasks or math problems.
Since Bitcoin mining is a lottery based on random trial and error rather than complex math, specialization (ASICs)beatsgeneral excellence (supercomputers) everytime.
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
Why this crazyness with rabbits ?!? And their holes, you would ask ?!? Why is the rabbit hole so deep ?¿
And what does the rabbit hole has to do with that BitCorn thing I keep hearing about all over the place ?¿
I like to start from the begining, as I think so I am 😋😂
Rabbit Hole is a play written by David Lindsay-Abaire. It was the recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play premiered on Broadway in 2006, and it has also been produced by regional theatres in cities such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The play had its Spanish language premiere in San Juan, Puerto Rico in Autumn of 2010.
The play deals with the ways family members survive a major loss, and includes comedy as well as tragedy. Cynthia Nixon won the 2006 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for her performance as Becca in the New York production, and the play was nominated for several other Tony awards.
Rabbit Hole
A situation, journey, or process that is particularly strange, problematic, difficult, complex, or chaotic, especially one that becomes increasingly so as it develops or unfolds.
An allusion to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll, it is used especially in the phrase “(go) down the rabbit hole.”
Overhauling the current tax legislation is a rabbit hole I don’t think this administration should go down at this point.I’ve stayed away from drugs and alcohol since coming to college. I have an addictive personality, so I decided to just avoid that rabbit hole altogether.
What does rabbit hole mean?
Used especially in the phrase going down the rabbit hole or fallingdown the rabbit hole, a rabbit hole is a metaphor for something that transports someone into a wonderfully (or troublingly) surreal state or situation.
On the internet, a rabbit holefrequently refers to an extremely engrossing and time-consuming topic.
Where does rabbit hole come from?
Alice’s Adventures in WonderLand
Literally, a rabbit hole is what the animal digs for its home. The earliest written record of the phrase dates back to the 17th century. But the figurative rabbit hole begins with Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In its opening chapter, “Down the Rabbit-Hole,” Alice follows the White Rabbit into his burrow, which transports her to the strange, surreal, and nonsensical world of Wonderland.
Since then, Carroll’s rabbit hole has proved a popular and useful reference. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first allusive rabbit hole in a 1938 edition of TheYale Law Journal: “It is the Rabbit-Hole down which we fell into the Law, and to him who has gone down it, no queer performance is strange.”
Over much of the 20th century, rabbit hole has been used to characterize bizarre and irrational experiences. It’s especially used to reference magical, challenging, and even dangerous places or positions, similar to Carroll’s topsy-turvy Wonderland.
Rabbit holehas many metaphorical applications—from frustrating red tape to the mind-bending complexity of science to hallucinations during altered states—all united by a common sense of passing into some labyrinthine, logic-defying realm that, once entered, is hard to get out of.
One can fall down the rabbit hole of government bureaucracy, healthcare, obtaining a green card, tax law, the political economy of modern Japan, puberty, college admissions, or quantum mechanics.
If you’re Neo in the hit film The Matrix, you can take the red pill—a pill that shows you the truth, as opposed to the blue pill, which keeps you in ignorance—and “see how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
In a related note, some people literally take pills and go down the rabbit hole of a psychedelic drug trip.
But as Kathryn Schulz observed for The New Yorker in 2015, rabbit hole has further evolved in the information age: “These days…when we say that we fell down the rabbit hole, we seldom mean that we wound up somewhere psychedelically strange. We mean that we got interested in something to the point of distraction—usually by accident, and usually to a degree that the subject in question might not seem to merit.”
Thanks to the abundance, variety, and instant access of content online, many fall down internet rabbit holes which are often spectacularly, and addictively, niche: scary stories, obscure conspiracy theories, or famous last meals, for instance.
Other rabbit holes tend to be opened up by specific services or social media, which serve users item after item, link after link: Wikipedia, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth.
These rabbit holes have become so common that people sometimes swap out rabbit for the name of the particular site, e.g. “I’ve fallen down an Instragram hole” or “I’m falling down a wikihole.”
Who uses rabbit hole?
From formal documents to internet status updates, rabbit hole is a very popular and widespread expression. Unlike earlier iterations of the metaphor, internet rabbit holes convey less a sense of weirdness, disorientation, or difficulty than they do of an intensely captivating diversion.
Rabbit hole is also showing increasing use as a modifier, e.g. a rabbit-hole question or phenomenon.
Now… that we have a basic and broader understanding about this Hole and it’s rabbit that digged it 😋😂
Let me show you a journey that I took to get to know, understand, admire, be amazed and support the BitCorn everybody is so crazy about …
Bitcoin Glossary
Block
Blocks are found in the Bitcoin blockchain. Blocks connect all transactions together. Transactions are combined into single blocks and are verified every ten minutes through mining. Each subsequent block strengthens the verification of the previous blocks, making it impossible to double spend bitcoin transactions (see double spend below).
BIP
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal or BIP, is a technical design document providing information to the bitcoin community, or describing a new feature for bitcoin or its processes or environment which affect the Bitcoin protocol. New features, suggestions, and design changes to the protocol should be submitted as a BIP. The BIP author is responsible for building consensus within the community and documenting dissenting opinions.
Blockchain
The Bitcoin blockchain is a public record of all Bitcoin transactions. You might also hear the term used as a “public ledger.” The blockchain shows every single record of bitcoin transactions in order, dating back to the very first one. The entire blockchain can be downloaded and openly reviewed by anyone, or you can use a block explorer to review the blockchain online.
Block Height
The block height is just the number of blocks connected together in the block chain. Height 0 for example refers to the very first block, called the “genesis block.”
Block Reward
When a block is successfully mined on the bitcoin network, there is a block reward that helps incentivize miners to secure the network. The block reward is part of a “coinbase” transaction which may also include transaction fees. The block rewards halves roughly every four years; see also “halving.”
Change
Let’s say you are spending $1.90 in your local supermarket, and you give the cashier $2.00. You will get back .10 cents in change. The same logic applies to bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin transactions are made up of inputs and outputs. When you send bitcoins, you can only send them in a whole “output.” The change is then sent back to the sender.
Cold Storage
The term cold storage is a general term for different ways of securing your bitcoins offline (disconnected from the internet). This would be the opposite of a hot wallet or hosted wallet, which is connected to the web for day-to-day transactions. The purpose of using cold storage is to minimize the chances of your bitcoins being stolen from a malicious hacker and is commonly used for larger sums of bitcoins.
Confirmation
A confirmation means that the bitcoin transaction has been verified by the network, through the process known as mining. Once a transaction is confirmed, it cannot be reversed or double spent. Transactions are included in blocks.
Cryptography
Cryptography is used in multiple places to provide security for the Bitcoin network. Cryptography, which is essentially mathematical and computer science algorithms used to encrypt and decrypt information, is used in bitcoin addresses, hash functions, and the blockchain.
Decentralized
Having a decentralized bitcoin network is a critical aspect. The network is “decentralized,” meaning that it’s void of a centralized company or entity that governs the network. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer protocol, where all users within the network work and communicate directly with each other, instead of having their funds handled by a middleman, such as a bank or credit card company.
Difficulty
Difficulty is directly related to Bitcoin mining (see mining below), and how hard it is to verify blocks in the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin adjusts the mining difficulty of verifying blocks every 2016 blocks. Difficulty is automatically adjusted to keep block verification times at ten minutes.
Double Spend
If someone tries to send a bitcoin transaction to two different recipients at the same time, this is double spending. Once a bitcoin transaction is confirmed, it makes it nearly impossible to double spend it. The more confirmations that a transaction has, the harder it is to double spend the bitcoins.
Full Node
A full node is when you download the entire blockchain using a bitcoin client, and you relay, validate, and secure the data within the blockchain. The data is bitcoin transactions and blocks, which is validated across the entire network of users.
Halving
Bitcoins have a finite supply, which makes them scarce. The total amount that will ever be issued is 21 million. The number of bitcoins generated per block is decreased 50% every four years. This is called “halving.” The final halving will take place in the year 2140.
Hash Rate
The hash rate is how the Bitcoin mining network processing power is measured. In order for miners to confirm transactions and secure the blockchain, the hardware they use must perform intensive computational operations which is output in hashes per second.
Hash (txid)
A transaction hash (sometimes referred to as a transaction ID or txid) is a unique identifier that can be used on any block explorer to look up all of the public details of a particular transaction. Every on-chain transaction has a unique hash made up of a long string of alphanumeric characters.
Mining
Bitcoin mining is the process of using computer hardware to do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network in order to confirm transactions. Miners collect transaction fees for the transactions they confirm and are awarded bitcoins for each block they verify.
Pool
As part of bitcoin mining, mining “pools” are a network of miners that work together to mine a block, then split the block reward among the pool miners. Mining pools are a good way for miners to combine their resources to increase the probability of mining a block, and also contribute to the overall health and decentralization of the bitcoin network.
Private Key
A private key is a string of data that shows you have access to bitcoins in a specific wallet. Think of a private key like a password; private keys must never be revealed to anyone but you, as they allow you to spend the bitcoins from your bitcoin wallet through a cryptographic signature.
Proof of Work
Proof of work refers to the hash of a block header (blocks of bitcoin transactions). A block is considered valid only if its hash is lower than the current target. Each block refers to a previous block adding to previous proofs of work, which forms a chain of blocks, known as a blockchain. Once a chain is formed, it confirms all previous Bitcoin transactions and secures the network.
Public Address
A public bitcoin address is cryptographic hash of a public key. A public address typically starts with the number “1.” Think of a public address like an email address. It can be published anywhere and bitcoins can be sent to it, just like an email can be sent to an email address.
RBF
RBF stands for Replace By Fee, and refers to a method that allows a sender to replace a “stuck” or unconfirmed transaction with a new one that uses a higher fee. This is done to make sure a transaction confirms as quickly as possible. The “replacement” transaction uses the same inputs as the original one. This is not considered a double spend, as the receiving address(es) typically remain the same.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Bitcoin’s existence began with an academic paper written in 2008 by a developer under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi is the name used as the original inventor of Bitcoin.
Transaction
A transaction is when data is sent to and from one bitcoin address to another. Just like financial transactions where you send money from one person to another, in bitcoin you do the same thing by sending data (bitcoins) to each other. Bitcoins have value because it’s based on the properties of mathematics, rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities, like fiat currencies.
Wallet
Just like with paper dollars you hold in your physical wallet, a bitcoin wallet is a digital wallet where you can store, send, and receive bitcoins securely. There are many varieties of wallets available, whether you’re looking for a web or mobile solution. Ideally, a bitcoin wallet will give you access to your public and private keys. This means that only you have rightful access to spend these bitcoins, whenever you choose to.
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
R&D, wisdom, knowledge, curiosities, answers and many more questions 🙂🤣🙃
You have a Choice !!!Power to the People !!! Wake the F… Up !!! No more excuses, you have a choice now !!!WHO as in WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATIONP F I Z E R InsiderPoem of the LegacyBeing Curious…Of course it doesn’t comply…The Problem with centralized Social-Media10 Principles of Strategic LeadershipGlobal Reserve CurrencyPsychology of a Market CycleSuccessSuccessTriangle of SuccessDon’t plan for travelling when old…😋😳😋Be like a Tree…If anyone understands this please enlighten me too 😊🤭🤗http://www.revelationtimelinedecoded.comESGFor those that think WE are the Center of the Universe 🤣😅😂Confident vs. Insecure PeopleDay by day…Managing Complex ChangeThe Cone of LearningThe Hero’s JourneyElectromagnetic Field of the HeartI-ChingLanguage creates RealitySex Organs of the Machine WorldPhilosopher’s StoneIsaac NewtonAbracadabraSingularityMulti-Mind Thought Control Process APPLE INC.RetrocausalityCERNEGOSYSCOIN ECOSYSTEMJagSteinSysCoinBitcoin might bury FIAT 🙂 🤭 🙃DEFI Ecosystem on EthereumDeFi StackBitcoin Mining Ecosystem Map…the other 6 BillionbitcoinThis is about the other 6 Billion…Top NFT ProjectsBusiness CyclesCentral’s Bank’s 3 StrategiesGlobal DebtDefender of the FlowerFlower of LifeSacred GeometrySeed & Flower of LifeKnowledge – An Antidote to FearJOIN THE REVOLUTION 😋 🤣 😋Emotion – Judgement – Action…violent recolution inevitable.E S B IEvery generation…LOVE YOUR RAGE NOT YOUR CAGERevolutionThe Times – January 3, 2009REVOLUTIONBitcoin Genesis Block – 03 January 2009Introduction to BitcoinIntroduction to Decentralized FinanceIntroduction to Digital CurrenciesAll Metals We MinedMap to Multiplication Nikola TeslaTop VC’s Investing in BlockChain CompaniesAthmospheres of the Solar SystemGlobal GDP 2021Map of CyberSecurity Domains21 QuestionsSix Innovation ModelsWhat May Happen in the next 100 YearsAbstract – “…to pull the body out of dimension so that the person can walk through solid objects such as wooden doors.” Okay 🤯 😳 🤯 ?¿?China’s Social Credit SystemBlockchain Platforms Comparison (BCP)ARISE
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
Power to the People No more Excuses You have a Choice NowCode is LawThis is about the other 6 billion…Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wired fences !!!Veritas non Auctoritas…Choose!FreedomLet the Bitcoin seed thrive…Bitcoin – People’s MoneyPeaceLoveBitcoin cannot be Shut DownVeritas non AuctoritasWhen you’re Ready…
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How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
Staking Vs. Yield Farming Vs. Liquidity Mining – Key Differences
The DeFi space is growing, and there is no reason to deny it. Enterprises and individuals want to capitalize on the benefits of decentralized finance with the newly emerging solutions. Decentralized finance has not only opened up the possibilities for improved financial inclusion throughout the world but also strengthened the possibilities for using and managing digital assets.
The most notable factor which comes up in discussions about DeFi trading would refer to the staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining differences.
All three of them are popular solutions in the domain of DeFi for obtaining plausible returns on crypto assets.
The three approaches differ in the way participants have to pledge their crypto assets in decentralized protocols or applications.
In addition, the underlying technologies also provide further indications of differences between staking and the other two approaches.
Understanding Yield Farming
The first thing that you should take into account about yield farming is its definition. Yield generation is a popular approach for obtaining returns on crypto assets.
Basically, it offers a flexible approach for earning passive income through depositing crypto assets in a liquidity pool.
The liquidity pools in the case of yield farming could refer to bank accounts in the conventional sense.
Yield generation is the practice that involves investors locking in their crypto assets in liquidity pools based on smart contracts.
The assets locked in the liquidity pools are available for other users to borrow in the same protocol.
Yield farming is a crucial aspect of the DeFi ecosystem as it supports the foundation of DeFi protocols for enabling exchange and lending services.
It is also essential for maintaining the liquidity of crypto assets on different decentralized exchanges or DEXs.
Yield farmers could also earn rewards in the form of APY.
Working of Yield Generation
In order to develop a better impression of yield generation in staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining, it is important to understand how to yield generation works. First of all, it is important to note that Automated Market Makers or AMMs are responsible for yield farming.
AMMs are just smart contracts that leverage mathematical algorithms for enabling digital asset trading.
Automated Market Makers play a highly critical role in yield farming for maintaining consistent liquidity as the transactions do not need any counterparties for the transaction.
You could find two distinct components in AMMs such as liquidity pools and liquidity providers.
Liquidity pools are basically the smart contracts that drive the DeFi ecosystem. The pools include digital assets which can help users in purchasing, selling, borrowing, lending, and swapping tokens.
Liquidity providers are the users or investors who have locked their assets in the liquidity pool.
Yield farming also offers a plausible foundation for easier trading of tokens with low trading volume in the open market.
Risks in Yield Farming
The understanding of staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining can only get better with an awareness of risks with each.
It is important to note that yield generation offers high risk and high reward ventures for investment.
The notable risks with yield farming include impermanent loss, smart contract risk, composability risk, and liquidation risk.
Understanding Staking
The second important entry in a debate on staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining would obviously bring another notable and common consensus algorithm. Staking is basically an interesting way of pledging crypto assets as collateral in the case of blockchain networks leveraging the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. Just like miners use computational power for achieving consensus in Proof-of-Work blockchains, users with the highest stakes are selected for validating transactions on the PoS blockchains.
Working of the Proof of Stake Consensus
You might be wondering about the potential rewards for staking your crypto assets in a PoS blockchain-based DeFi protocol. First of all, you are investing in a highly scalable blockchain consensus algorithm with staking, which also ensures improved energy efficiency. Proof-of-Stake algorithms also create new avenues of opportunities for earning rewards.
With higher stakes in the protocol, investors could get better rewards from the network. It is important to note that rewards in the case of staking are allocated on-chain. Therefore, new tokens of the cryptocurrency are minted and distributed as staking rewards for the validation of each block. PoS blockchain does not imply the need for expensive computational equipment, thereby providing better usability.
Risks in Staking
The risks associated with Proof-of-Stake protocols are also another highlight in discussions on staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining.
Interestingly, the aspect of risk is considerably lower in the case of staking when compared to other approaches for passive investment. You should note that the safety of the staked tokens depends directly on the safety of the protocol.
At the same time, you would still notice some prominent risks in staking cryptocurrencies, such as slashing, volatility risks, validator risks, and server risks. In addition, you might have to encounter issues of loss or theft of funds, waiting periods for rewards, project failure, liquidity risks, minimum holdings, and extended lock-up periods.
Understanding Liquidity Mining
The final entry in the staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining also deserves adequate attention when it comes to discussions on DeFi. As a matter of fact, liquidity mining serves as the core highlight in any DeFi project. Furthermore, it also focuses on offering improved liquidity in the DeFi protocols.
Participants have to offer their crypto assets to liquidity pools in DeFi protocols for the purpose of crypto trading. However, it is important to note that participants do not offer crypto assets into liquidity pools for crypto lending and borrowing in the case of liquidity mining. Investors place their crypto assets in trading pairs such as ETH/USDT, and the protocol offers a Liquidity Provider or LP token to them.
Working of Liquidity Mining
A deeper understanding of how liquidity mining works can help in anticipating its differences with the other strategies for crypto investment.
The investors would receive rewards from the protocol for the tokens they place in the liquidity pool.
The rewards in liquidity mining are in the form of native governance tokens, which are mined at every block.
In addition, investors also have the LP token from the first stage of locking their crypto assets into the liquidity pool.
It is important to note that the reward in liquidity mining depends profoundly on the share in total pool liquidity.
Furthermore, the newly minted tokens could also offer access to governance of a project alongside prospects for exchanging to obtain other cryptocurrencies or better rewards.
Risks in Liquidity Mining
The understanding of staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining would be complete with an impression of their risks.
Just like the other two approaches, liquidity mining also presents some notable risks such as impermanent loss, smart contract risks, and project risks. In addition, liquidity miners are also vulnerable to the rug pull effect in their projects.
Staking vs. Yield Farming vs. Liquidity Mining – Key Differences
Staking vs Yield Farming vs Liquidity Mining
The differences between the three players in staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining would refer directly to some key pointers. Here are some of them outlined in brief for your understanding.
Yield farming is a proven approach for investing your crypto assets in liquidity pools of protocols.
Staking involves locking your crypto assets in the protocol in return for privileges to validate transactions on the protocol.
Liquidity mining involves locking in crypto assets in protocols in return for governance privileges in the protocol.
In terms of objectives, yield farming aims to offer you the highest possible returns on the crypto assets of users. On the other hand, liquidity mining focuses on improving liquidity of a DeFi protocol. Furthermore, staking emphasizes maintaining the security of a blockchain network.
Bottom Line
On a concluding note, it is quite clear that staking as well as yield generation and liquidity miners provide distinct approaches for investing crypto assets.
The growing attention towards crypto assets is undoubtedly opening up many new opportunities for investors.
However, investors need to understand the strategies they need to follow for the type of returns they are expecting.
Therefore, a clear impression of staking vs. yield farming vs. liquidity mining differences could help in making a plausible decision.
Yield generation, liquidity mining, and Proof-of-Stake blockchains also have some setbacks you should look for.
Start discovering more about yield farming and the other two crypto investment strategies now.
*Disclaimer: The article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide any investment advice. Claims made in this article do not constitute investment advice and should not be taken as such. 101 Blockchains shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this article. Do your own research!
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
For the first time in human history there is at the disposal of the masses a tool that eliminates the middlemen and takes trust from the hands of humans and beautifully makes it a mathematics code that cannot be breaken, hacked or tricked…
How & Why You should Prepare Here are just a few examples of what that sort of total control may look like: Government in total control The government could not only withhold money … Continue reading CBDC’s Tyranny Is Coming→
Here is a list of 100 of the best based things: Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to … Continue reading 100 Based things→
THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s. Cryptography … Continue reading CypherPunk Movement→
The first ever bitcoin transaction from one person to another, on 2009-01-12 at 04:30 used Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), when Satoshi Nakamoto sent coins to Hal Finney in Block 170. P2PK is no longer used … Continue reading Block 170 – First ever bitcoin transaction→
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; lit. ‘Sun Tzu’s Military Method’, pinyin: Sūnzi bīngfǎ) is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The … Continue reading The Art of War Quotes→
A Design For An Efficient Coordinated Financial Computing Platform
Jag Sidhu
Feb 25, 2021·41 min read
Abstract
Bitcoin was the first to attempt to offer a practical outcome in the General’s Dilemma using Crypto Economic rationale and incentives. Ethereum was the first to abstract the concept of Turing completeness within similar frameworks assumed by Bitcoin.
What Syscoin presents is a combination of both Bitcoin and Ethereum with intuitions built on top to achieve a more efficient financial computing platform which leverages coordination to achieve consensus using Crypto Economic rationale and incentives.
We propose a four-layer tech stack using Syscoin as the base (host) layer, which provides an efficient (ie, low gas cost per transaction) platform.
Some of the main advantages include building scalable decentralized applications, the introduction of a decentralized cost model around Ethereum Gas fees.
This new model proposes state-less parallelized execution and verification models while taking advantage of the security offered by the Bitcoin protocol. We may also refer to this as Web 3.0.
Table Of Contents
Abstract
Introduction
Syscoin Platform
Masternode Configuration
Chain Locks
Blockchain as a Computational Court
Scalability and Security
Efficiency
State Liveness and State Safety
Avoiding Re-execution of Transactions
Validity Proof Systems Overtop Proof-of-Work Systems
Quantum Resistance:
A Design Proposal for Web 3.0
Optimistic vs ZkRollup
Decentralized Cost Model
State-less Layer 1 Design
Related Works
Commercial Interests
Functional Overview
Give Me The Goods
Blockchain Foundry
Acknowledgements
References
Introduction
Syscoin is a cryptocurrency borrowing security and trust models of Bitcoin but with services on top which are conducive for businesses to build distributed applications through tokenization capabilities.
Syscoin has evolved since being introduced in 2013 where it offered a unique set of services through a coloured coin implementation on top of Bitcoin.
These services included aliases(identity), assets(tokens), offers(marketplace), escrow (multisig payments between aliases and marketplaces), and certificates (digital credentials).
In its current iteration, it has evolved to serve availability of consensus rather than data storage itself which requires some liveness guarantees better suited to systems like Filecoin and IPFS.
The recent iteration of Syscoin, version 4.0, streamlined the on-chain footprint to exclusively serve assets, a service which requires on-chain data availability for double-spend protection.
Ultimately, the only data that belongs on the blockchain are proofs that executions occurred (eg, coin transfers, smart contract executions, etc.) and information required to validate those proofs.
We introduced high-throughput payment rails for our asset infrastructure through an innovation we called Z-DAG [1]. This innovation offered real-time probabilistic guarantees of double-spend protection and ledger settlement for real-time point-of-sale. As a result, the token platform is one step closer to mass adoption by providing scalable infrastructure and speed that met or exceeded what was necessary to transact with digital tokens in real-life scenarios.
In addition, a two-way bridge to trustlessly interoperate with Ethereum. This enables Ethereum users to benefit from fast, cheap and secure transactions on Syscoin, and Syscoin users to leverage the Turing complete contract capabilities and ecosystem of Ethereum, all of which exclude custodians or third-parties.
Every decision we’ve made has been with security in mind. We believe that one of the biggest advantages of Syscoin is that it is merge-mined with Bitcoin.
Rather than expend more energy, Syscoin recycles the same energy spent by Bitcoin miners in order to solve blocks while being secured by the most powerful cryptocurrency mining network available.
With this energy efficiency we were able to reduce the subsidy to miners and increase subsidy to masternodes without raising the overall inflation; see Fig 1 for configuration.
Unlike Dashpay, these masternodes are not what you expect, as they have the specific job of running full nodes.
Fig 1: Masternode setup
Syscoin Platform
Today, Syscoin offers an asset protocol and deterministic validators as an enhancement on top of Bitcoin, as summarized below:
UTXO Assets
Compliance through Notary
Fungible and Non-Fungible tokens (Generic Asset infrastructure named SPT — Syscoin Platform Tokens)
Z-DAG for fast probabilistic onchain payments, working alongside payment channel systems like Lightning Networks
Deterministic validators (Masternodes) which run as Long-Living Quorums for distributed consensus decisions such as Chain Locks
Decentralized Governance, 10% of block subsidy is saved to pay out in a governance mechanism through a network wide vote via masternodes
Merged-mined with Bitcoin for shared work alongside Bitcoin miners
Masternode Configuration
With 2400+ masternodes running fullnodes, Z-DAG becomes much more dependable, as does the propagation of blocks and potential forks.
The masternodes are bonded through a loss-less strategy of putting 100000 Syscoin in an output and running full nodes in exchange for block rewards.
A seniority model incentivizes the masternodes to share long-term growth by paying them more for the longer period of service. Half of the transaction fees are also shared between the PoW miners and masternodes to ensure long term alignment once subsidy becomes negligible.
The coins are not locked at any point, and there is no slashing condition if masternodes decide to move their coins, the rewards to those masternodes simply stop.
Sharing Bitcoin’s compact block design, it consumes very little bandwidth to propagate blocks assuming the memory pool of all these nodes is roughly synchronized [2].
The traffic on the network primarily consists of propagating the missing transactions to validate these blocks. Having a baseline for a large number of full-nodes that are paid to be running allows us to create a very secure environment for users.
It proposes higher costs to would-be attackers who either have to attempt a 51% attack of Syscoin (effectively also trying to attack the Bitcoin network), or try to game the mesh network by propagating bad information which is made more difficult by incentivized full-nodes.
The health of a decentralized network consists of the following;
(a) the mining component or consensus to produce blocks, and
(b)the network topology to disseminate information in a timely manner in conditions where adversaries might be lurking.
Other attacks related to race conditions in networking or consensus code are mostly negligible as Syscoin follows a rigorous and thorough continuous development process.
This includes deterministic builds, Fuzz tests, ASAN/MSAN/TSAN, functional/unit tests, multiple clients and adequate code coverage.
Syscoin and Bitcoin protocol code bases are merged daily such that the build/signing/test processes are all identical, allowing us to leverage the massive developer base of Bitcoin.
The quality of code is reflective of taking worst case situations into account. The most critical engineers and IT specialists need confidence that value is secure should they decide to move their business to that infrastructure.
It’s true that there are numerous new ideas, new consensus protocols and mechanisms for achieving synchronization among users in a system through light/full node implementations.
However, in our experience in the blockchain industry over the last 8 years, we understand that it takes years, sometimes generations to bring those functionalities to production level quality useful for commercial applications.
Chain Locks
With a subset of nodes offering sybil resistance through the requirement of bonding 100,000 SYS to become active, plus the upcoming deterministic masternode feature in Syscoin 4.2, we have enabled Chain Locks which attempts to solve a long-standing security problem in Bitcoin [3], where Dashcore was the first project to implement this idea [4] which the industry has since widely accepted as a viable solution [5].
Our implementation is an optimized version of this, in that we do not implement Instant Send or Private Send transactions and thus Syscoin’s Chain Lock implementation is much simpler.
Because of merged-mining functionality with Bitcoin, we believe our chain coupled with Chain Locks becomes the most secure via solving Bitcoin’s most vulnerable attack vector, selfish mining.
These Chain Locks are made part of Long-Living Quorums(LLMQ) which leverage aggregatable Boneh–Lynn–Shacham(BLS) signatures that have the property of being able to combine multiple signers in a Distributed Key Generation(DKG) event to sign on decisions. In this setup, a signature can be signed on a group of parties under threshold constraints without any one of those parties holding the private key associated with that signature. In our case, the signed messages would be a ChainLock Signature (CLSIG) which represent claims on what the block hashes represent of the canonical chain [4].
This model suggests a very efficient threshold signature design was needed to be able to quickly come to consensus across the Masternode layer to decide on chain tips and lock chains preventing selfish mining attacks. See [6] to understand the qualities of BLS signatures in the context of multi-sig use cases.
Ethereum 2.0 design centers around the use of BLS signatures through adding precompile opcodes in the Ethereum Virtual Machine(EVM) for the BLS12–381 curve [7] which Syscoin has adopted.
This curve was first introduced in 2017 by Bowe [8] to the ZCash protocol. Masternodes on Syscoin use this curve and have a BLS key that is associated with each validator. There is the performance comparison to ECDSA (Secp256k1) [9] that shows its usefulness in contrast to what Bitcoin and Syscoin natively use for signature verification.
Blockchain as a Computational Court
A computational court is a way of enforcing code execution on the blockchain’s state. This was first introduced by de la Rouvier [10].
Since the inception of Syscoin and Blockchain Foundry we have subscribed to the idea that the blockchain should be used as a court system rather than a transaction processor.
This debate has stemmed from the block size debate in the Bitcoin community [11]. However, with recent revelations in cryptography surrounding Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) [12] and particularly Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge(zk-STARK) [13], we propose a secure ledger strategy using the Bitcoin protocol as a court (ie, host layer), an EVM or eWASM (ie, operating system layer), computational scaling through ZKP (ie, SDK layer) and business verticals (ie, application layer); see Fig 2
Fig 2: Four-layer tech stack
Scalability and Security
Scalability in blockchain environments is typically measuredbyTotal Transactions per Second (TPS).
This means full trustlessness, decentralization and liveness properties as evidenced by something like Bitcoin.
If trade-offs are made to achieve higher scale it means another property is affected.
A full node is one that creates blocks and/or fully validates every block of transactions.
For the purpose of this discussion, we will refrain on expounding on designs where light-clients are used to give semblance of higher throughput, etc.
However, if two nodes are running the same hardware and doing the same work, the one that provides more TPS performance than the other is considered more scalable. This is not to be confused with throughput which is the measure of output that can be increased by simply adding more hardware resources. Hence, more throughput does not mean more scalable.
Some blockchains require the producers of blocks to run on higher specifications, offering higher throughput but not necessarily more scale.
However, there are projects which employ parallel processing to try to achieve higher scale whilst also enforcing more capable hardware to provide a more efficient overall system [33].
As a logical experiment, the throughput of a system divided by the scalability of the system is what we define as efficiency.
In the following sections, we will outline our proposal for improved efficiency.
Efficiency
The holy grail of blockchain design resides in the ability to have a ledger that can claim to be sublinear while retaining consistency, fault tolerance and full availability (ie, CAP Theorem).
This means there are roughly constant costs for an arbitrary amount of computation performed and being secured by that ledger.
This has always been thought of as impossible and it mostly is unless acceptable trade-offs appear in application designs and they are easy to understand and work around.
Most experts make the assumption that an O(1) ledger is simply impossible and thus design blockchains and force applications to work in certain ways as a result.
We will remove such assumptions and let business processes dictate how they work by giving the ability to achieve O(logk n) for some constant k (ie, polylogarithmic) efficiency with trade-offs.
A polylogarithmic design would give the ability for almost infinite scaling over time for all intents and purposes.
The only bottlenecks would be how fast information can be propagated across the network which would improve over time as telecom infrastructure naturally evolves and increases in both capability and affordability.
Put in context, even Lightning Networks for transactional counts qualifies as a form of sublinear scaling on a transactional basis but not per user, as users must necessarily enter the main chain first before entering a payment channel.
It requires the state of the blockchain to include the users joining the system.
This state (the UTXO balances) is the single biggest factor of efficiency degradation in Bitcoin.
Users need to first start on the main chain and then move into the payment channel system to receive money, meaning that scale is at best O (N) where N is the number of users.
There are some solutions to this problem of state storage on Bitcoin by reducing it via an alternative accumulator strategy to the cost of increased bandwidth [14].
This approach would make the chain state-less, however the validation costs would remain linear to the number of transactions being done. When combined with payment channels, only the costs to get in/out are factored into the validation and this offers an interesting design for payments themselves while providing for on-chain availability.
We consider this as a good path for futuristic scalable payments.
Hence, it is not possible to employ that strategy with general computations. With this design, we are still left with the issue on how to do general computations at higher efficiency.
What we present is the ability to have a polylogarithmic chain at the cost of availability for both payments and general computations where business processes dictate availability policies, and users fully understand these limitations when using such systems.
Users may also be provided the ability to ensure availability for themselves and others at their discretion. This will be expounded upon in the following sections.
State Liveness and State Safety
While many compelling arguments can be made migrating to a state-less design [15], it is not possible to achieve sublinear efficiency without sacrificing some other desired component that we outlined above.
To achieve polylogarithmic efficiency it’s necessary to have a mix of state and stateless nodes working together in harmony on a shared ledger [15].
This should be accomplished in such a way that business processes can dictate direction, and users can choose to pay a little more for security either by using a stateful yet very scalable ledgering mechanism or by paying to ensure their own data availability amortized over the life of that user on such systems.
Presenting the ability for users to make these choices allows us to separate the consensus of such systems and reduce overall complexity.
However, in whatever solution we adopt , we need to ensure that the final implementation allow for both the liveness and safety of that state, which are defined as follows:
State Liveness — Transferring coins in a timely manner
State Safety — Private custody
It is important to adhere to these concepts; if one cannot move one’s coins, then it is as useful as if one burned their coins. Hence, if we had third party custody in place, this would give rise to custodial solutions, and lose decentralized and trustless aspects of the solution, which again is not desired.
The options as described would allow users to decide their state liveliness at their own discretion, while state safety is a required constraint throughout any system design we provide. The doorway to possibilities of sublinear design is opened by giving users the ability to decide.
Avoiding Re-execution of Transactions
In order to scale arbitrarily, independent of the number of transactions — a desired property of increasing throughput — one requires a mechanism to avoid re-executing transactions.
Further, ideally it would be able to batch these transactions together for a two-fold scaling proposition.
There are a few mechanisms in literature that attempted to solve re-execution:
Unfortunately, they require challenge response systems to ensure security, which leads to intricate attack vectors of unbounded risk/reward scenarios.
Multi-Party Computation (MPC) is a mechanism to have parties act under a threshold to decide on actions such as computational integrity of a smart contract. MPC is used in Syscoin for BLS threshold signatures for Chain Locks and Proof-of-Service in quorums of validators deterministically chosen using Fiat-Shamir heuristics on recent block hashes.
The problem with this approach is that validators may become corrupt, hence need to be wrapped in a consensus system along with DKG and random deterministic selection. This was an interesting topic of discovery for the Syscoin team early-on as a way to potentially scale smart contract execution but was ultimately discarded due to the incentive for risk/reward scenarios to favour attacks as the value of the transactions increases.
Hardware enclaves (eg, Intel SGX through remote attestation) were also of particular interest to the Syscoin team as a way to offload execution and avoid re-execution costs.
However, there are a myriad of attack vectors and censorship concerns on the Intel platform . We also should note that the Antarctica model was interesting but required a firmware update from Intel to support such a feature which raises concerns over censorship long term.
The theme amongst all of these approaches is that although re-execution is avoided the communication complexity is largely still linear with the number of transactions on the main chain. The security and trust models are also different from that of the layer 1 assumptions which was not desired. Lacking solvent solutions to avoid re-execution and enable sublinear overall complexity, we were led — in the development of Syscoin 4.0 — to build a trust-minimized two-way bridge between Syscoin and the Ethereum mainchain, offloading the concerns around smart contracts to Ethereum.
With the advent of such promising technology as ZKP and the optimizations happening around them, we have re-considered the possibilities and believe this will play an important role in the development of Web 3.0. This mathematical breakthrough led us to re-test our assumptions and options related to our desired design.
ZKP allows us the desired superlinear scaling trait we had been looking to achieve but they also offer other benefits; namely privacy is very easy to introduce and will not add detectable costs and complexities to verification on the mainchain.
With users controlling their own data, the mainchain and systems may be designed such that only balance adjustments are recorded, not transaction sets (we will explain the case with full data availability below). In this scenario there is no advantage for a miner to gain to be able to collude with users to launch attacks on systems such as Decentralize Finance (DeFi) pools and provenance of transactions.
The flexibility has to be there though for application developers that need experiences consistent with those we have today with Bitcoin/Syscoin/Ethereum, and to enable the privacy use-cases without requiring extra work, knowledge or costs.
Fig 3: Host and EVM layer
Validity Proof Systems Overtop Proof-of-Work Systems
Prior to the use of Proof Systems, the only option for “Validity Proofs” in a permissionless system involved naive replay, and as such greatly limited scalability; in essence this replay is what is still done today in Layer-1 blockchain (L1) solutions, with the known penalty to scalability.
Proof Systems offer a very appealing trait known as succinctness: in order to validate a state transition, one needs to only verify a proof, and this is done at a cost that is effectively independent of the size of the state transition (ie, polylogarithmic in the size of the state transition).
For maximal financial security, the amount of value being stored should depend on the amount of security provided on the settlement side of the ledger.
Proof-of-Work offers the highest amount of security guarantees. Our next generation financial systems begin with optimal ledgering security and add proof systems on top for scaling. Block times are not as important in a world where most users and activity are on Layer-2 blockchain (L2) validity proof based systems.
This liberates engineers who are focused on scalability to define blocks better; safe block times plus the maximal amount of data bandwidth that can be safely propagated in a time sensitive manner across full nodes in the network.
In Syscoin there are incentivized full nodes (ie, deterministic masternodes), so again we can maximize the bandwidth of ledgering capabilities while retaining Bitcoin Proof-of-Work (PoW) security through merged-mining.
Quantum Resistance:
Table 1: Estimates of quantum resilience for current cryptosystems (see [20])
As seen in Table 1, hashing with the SHA256 algorithm is regarded to be quantum safe because it requires Grover’s algorithm to crack in the post-quantum world, and at best the quantum computer will offer only 50% reduction in time to break.
On the other hand, where Shor’s algorithm applies, any pair based cryptographic system will be broken in hours.
For L2, we propose to implement ZKP in the SDK Layer (see Fig 2); namely Non-Interactive Zero Knowledge Proofs(NIZKP).
Popular implementations of NIZKP include Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge(zk-SNARKS) and Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge(zk-STARKS).
There are some zk-STARK/zk-SNARK friendly cipher’s employed in zkRollup designs such as MiMC and Pederson hashes for which we lack certainty on classical security, yet are hopeful and would offer quantum resistance within ZKPs.
It is important to note that Bitcoin was developed with change addresses in mind exposing the hash of a public key requires a quantum computer to use Grover’s Algorithm in order to attempt stealing that Bitcoin. Each time a Bitcoin Unspent Transaction Output(UTXO) is spent, the public key is exposed and a new change address — which does not expose the public key — is used as change.
With this in mind, any scalable L2 solution should be quantum resistant because otherwise we undermine Bitcoin design as the gold standard of security.
Fig 4: zkSync Rollup design
A Design Proposal for Web 3.0
The following describes the 4-layers (see Fig 2) of Syscoin’s proposed tech stack for Web 3.0:
[Host Layer] Bitcoin’s design is the gold standard for security and decentralization.
Proof-of-work and Nakamoto Consensus settlement security are widely regarded by academics as the most hardened solution for ledgering value.
It’s possible this may change, however it’s also arguable that the intricate design encompassing Game Theory, Economics, risk reward ratios for attack, and the minimal amounts of compromising attack vectors is likely not to change for the foreseeable future.
UTXO’s (and payments with them) are more efficient than account-based or EVM-based. That said, Bitcoin itself suffers from not being expressive enough to build abstraction for general computation.
[Operating System Layer]
EVM/eWASM is the gold standard for general computation because of its wide adoption in the community.
Anyone building smart contracts are likely using this model or will continue to use it as the standard for autonomous general computation with consensus.
[SDK Layer]
Zero-knowledge proofs are the gold standard for generalized computation scaling for blockchain applications. They enable one-time execution via a prover and enable aggregate proof checking instead of re-execution of complex transactions.
zk-STARKs or zk-SNARKs using collision resistant hash functions that work with only weak cryptographic assumptions and therefore are quantum safe.
At the moment generalized smart contracts are not there yet but we are quickly approaching the day (eg, Cairo, Zinc) when there will be abstractions made to have most Solidity code trans-compile into a native zero-knowledge aware compiler similar to how .NET runtime and C# allows an abstraction on top of C/C++ as an interpretive layer on top
[Application Layer]
Verticals or applications applying the above SDK to define business goals.
Surprisingly, these ideals represent a design that is not shared with any other project in the industry, including Bitcoin or Ethereum.
We feel these ideals, fashioned together in a singular protocol, could possibly present a grand vision for a “World Computer” blockchain infrastructure.
Syscoin has already implemented Geth + Syscoin nodes in one application instance already (ie, release 4.2), we foresee that it will not prove too challenging to have them cooperate on a consensus basis working together to form a dual chain secured by Syscoin’s PoW.
Fig 5: Proposed design
Fig 5 describes a system where nodes are running two sets of software processes, the Syscoin chain protocol and an EVM/eWASM chain protocol which are kept in sync through putting the EVM tip hash into the Syscoin block. Both have their own individual mempools and effectively the Ethereum contracts, tools and processes can directly integrate as is into the EVM chain as it stands.
Note that the two chains are processes running on the same computer together. Thus a SYS NODE and EVM NODE would be operating together on one machine instance (ie, Masternode) with ability to communicate with each other directly through Interprocess Communication(IPC).
The intersection between the two processes happens in three points:
Miner of the EVM chain collects the latest block hash and places it into the Syscoin block.
When validating Syscoin blocks, nodes confirm the validity of the EVM tip by consulting the EVM chain software locally.
Fees for the EVM chain are to be paid in SYS. We need an asset representing SYS on the EVM chain, which will be SYSX.
We will enable this through a similar working concept that we’ve already established (SysEthereum Bridge).
We may also enable pre-compiles on the EVM chain side to extract Syscoin block hashes and merkle roots to confirm validity of SYS to SYSX burn transactions.
This design separates concerns by not complicating the PoW chain with EVM execution information, keeping the processes separate yet operating within the same node.
To further delineate point 1 (see above), a miner would mine both chains. With Syscoin being merged-mined, the work spent on Bitcoin would be shared to create a Syscoin block that includes the EVM chain within it as a ledgering event representing the latest smart contract execution state (composed of Chain Hash, State Root, Receipt Root, and Transaction Trie Root).
Since the EVM chain has no consensus attached, technically a block can be created at any point in time. Creation of Syscoin and EVM blocks will be near simultaneous, and occur every one minute on average.
Fig 6: Merge mining on Syscoin
As seen in Fig 6, work done on BTC is reused to create SYS blocks through the merged-mining specification. Concurrently, the miner will execute smart contracts in the memory pool of the node running the EVM chain. Once a chain hash has been established post-execution, it will be put into the coinbase of the Syscoin block and published to the network. Upon receiving these blocks, every node would verify that the EVM chain which they would locally execute (ie, similar to the miner) matches the state described by the Syscoin block.
Technically, one would want to ensure both the latest and previous EVM block hashes inside of their respective Syscoin blocks are valid.
The block->evmblock == evmblock && block->prev == evmblock->prev is all that is needed to link the chains together with work done by Bitcoin which is propagated to Syscoin through AUXPOW and can serve as a secure ledgering mechanism for the EVM chain.
There has been much discussion as to what the safe block size should be on Ethereum. Gas limits are increasing as optimizations are made on the Ethereum network.
However, since this network would be ledgered by the Syscoin chain through PoW, there would be no concern for uncle orphaning of blocks since the blocks must adhere to the policy set inside of the Syscoin block. We should therefore be able to increase bandwidth significantly and parameterize for a system that will scale globally yet still be centered around L2 rollup designs.
A very important distinction here is that the design of Ethereum 2.0 centers around a Beacon chain and sharding served by a Casper consensus algorithm. The needs of the algorithm require a set of finality guarantees necessitating a move towards Proof-of-Stake (PoS).1
This has large security implications for which we may not have formal analysis for a long time, however we do know it comes with big risk.
We offer similar levels of scalability on a network while retaining Nakamoto Consensus security. The simpler design which has been market tested and academically verified to work would lead to a more efficient system as a whole with less unknown and undocumented attack vectors.
The only research that would need to be made therefore is on the optimal parameterization of the gas limit taking into account an L2 centric system but also a safe number of users we expect to be able to serve before fee market mechanisms begin to regulate the barrier of entry for these users.
This proposed system should be scalable enough to serve the needs of global generalized computation while sticking to the core fundamentals set forth in the design ideals above. Our upcoming whitepaper will have more analysis on these numbers but we include some theoretical scaling metrics at the end of this article.
Optimistic vs ZkRollup
ZKP are excellent for complex calculations above and beyond simple balance transfers. For payments, we feel UTXO payment channels combined with something like Z-DAG is an optimal solution.
However, we are left with rollup solutions for generalized computation involving more complex calculations requiring consensus.
Whatever solution we adopt has to be secured by L1 consensus that is considered decentralized and secure, which we achieve via merged-mining with Bitcoin.
There are two types of rollup solutions today:
(a) Optimistic roll ups (OR); and (b) zkRollups; which offer trade-offs.
Consensus about which chain or network you’re on is a really hard problem that is solved for us by Nakamoto consensus. We build on that secure longest chain rule (supplemented by Chain Locks to prevent selfish mining) to give us the world-view of the rollup states. The executions themselves can be done once by a market of provers, never to be re-executed, only verified, meaning it becomes an almost constant cost on an arbitrarily large number of executions batched together. With OR you have the same world-view but the world-view is editable without verifying executions. The role of determining the validity of that world-view is delegated to someone watching who provides guarantees through crypto-economics. Zero-knowledge proofs remove crypto-economics on execution guarantees and replace them with cryptography.
See [26] to see contrasting benefits between fraud proofs (optimistic) vs validity proofs (zk)
Key takeaways from this article are as follows
Eliminate a nasty tail risk: theft of funds from OR via intricate yet viable attack vectors;
Reduce withdrawal times from 1–2 weeks to a few minutes;
Enable fast tx confirmations and exits in practically unlimited volumes;
Introduce privacy by default.
One point missing is interoperability. A generalized form of cross-chain bridging can be seen in Chain A locking tokens based on a preimage commitment by Chain B to create a zero-knowledge proof, followed by verification of that proof as the basis for manifesting equivalence on Chain B. Any blockchain with the functionality to verify these proofs could participate in the ecosystem.
Our vision here is described using a zkRollup centric world-view, yet it can be replaced with other technologies should they be able to serve the same purpose. As an infrastructure we are not enforcing one or the other; developers can build on what they feel best suits their needs. We believe we are close to achieving this, and that the technology is nearing the point of being ready for the vision set forth in this article.
Decentralized Cost Model
Decentralized cost models lead to exponential efficiency gains in economies of scale. We set forth a more efficient design paradigm for execution models reflective of user intent. This design uses the UTXO model to reflect simple state transitions and a ZKP system for complex computations leading to state transitions. This leads to better scalability for a system by allowing people to actively make their trade-off within the same ecosystem, driven by the same miners securing that ecosystem backed by Bitcoin itself.
Furthermore, a decentralized cost model contributes to scalability in that ZKP gates can generalize complex computation better than fee-market resources like gas or the CPU/memory markets of EOS, etc.
This leads to better scalability for a system by allowing people to actively make their trade-off within the same ecosystem, driven by the same miners securing that ecosystem backed by Bitcoin itself.
Furthermore, a decentralized cost model contributes to scalability in that ZKP gates can generalize complex computation better than fee-market resources like gas or the CPU/memory markets of EOS, etc. This leads to more deterministic and efficient consumption of resources maximizing efficiency in calculations, and gives opportunity for those to scale up or down based on economic incentives without creating monopolistic opportunities unlike ASIC mining.
In other words, the cost is dictated by what the market can offer, via the cost of compute power (as dictated by Moore’s law), rather than the constrained costs of doing business on the blockchain itself.
This model could let the computing market dictate the price for Gas instead of being managed by miners of the blockchain. The miners would essentially only dictate the costs of the verification of these proofs when they enter the chain rather than the executions themselves.
We can already begin to see computational optimization through hardware happening with ZKP and with a decentralized cost model it will be much easier to understand costs of running prover services as well as know how the costs scale based on the number of users and parameters of systems that businesses would like to employ. All things considered, it will be easier to make accurate decisions on data availability policies and the consensus systems needed to keep the system censorship resistant and secure.
Rollups will be friends, that is, users of one rollup system doing X TPS and users of another doing Y TPS, with the same trust model, will in effect get us to global rates of X*Y (where X is TPS of the sidechains/rollups and Y is the number of sidechains and rollups that exist). X is fairly static in that the execution models of rollups do not change drastically (and if they do, the majority of those rollup or sidechain designs end up switching to the most efficient design for execution over time).
State-less Layer 1 Design
The single biggest limiting factor of throughput in blockchains is state growth and access to the global state.
More specifically, in Bitcoin it is the UTXO set, and in Ethereum it is the Account Storage and World State tries. State lookups typically require SSD in Ethereum full nodes because real-time processing of transactions of block arrivals are critical to reaching consensus, this is especially the case for newly arriving blocks (ie, every 10–15 seconds).
As state and storage costs rise, the number of full verifying nodes decreases due to the resource consumption of fully validating nodes and providing timely responses to peers. Consequently, network health suffers due to the risks of centralization of consensus amongst the subset peers running full nodes.
State-less designs are an obvious preference to solve problems using alternative mechanisms to validate the chain without requiring continuous updates to the global state.
In a rollup, smart contracts on L1 do not access the global state unless entering or exiting a rollup. Therefore smart contracts that provide full data availability on-chain (ie, zkRollup), would only require state updates to the local set of users within that L2. Under designs where data availability is kept off-chain, there is no state update on L1, unless entering and exiting.
Therefore, it classifies as purely state-less, whereas in zkRollup mode we can consider this partially state-less. Since these L1 contracts are state-less to the global state, nodes on the network can parallelize verification of any executions to the contracts which do not involve entering or exiting. This is in addition to the organic and natural parallel executions of transactions that are composing these rollup aggregated transactions posted on L1.
State-less layer 1 designs also allow for parallelizable smart contract execution verification. The parallelization of smart contracts running on L1 in the EVM model is a recent topic of research that some projects have implemented in production which involves defining “intent” for the execution of a contract (because nodes do not know ahead of time what the smart contract execution will entail in terms of accessing global state).
Adding in the intent of a transaction as supplied as part of the commitment of that transaction would allow nodes to reject if the execution of that contract did not correspond with the intent, possibly costing the user fees for invalid commitments.
Although these designs may be flexible, they come at the cost of additional complexity through sorting, filtering and general logic that may be susceptible to intricate attacks.
In our case, the transaction can include a field that is understood by the EVM to denote if it is intending to use global state in any way (for rollups typically this would be false) then we can simply reject any access to global states for those specific types of executions.
This would allow nodes to execute these specific types of transactions in parallel knowing that no global state is allowed to access executions. If a transaction is rejected due to incorrectly setting this field the fees are still spent to prevent users from purposefully setting this field incorrectly.
Related Works
The following organizations offer various open source third party L2 scaling solutions:
Starkware is built using a general purpose language (Cairo) with Solidity (EVM) in mind, as is Matter labs with the (Zinc) language. Hermez developed custom circuits tailor-suited to fast transactions and Decentralized Exchange (DEX) like capability. These will be able to directly integrate into Syscoin without modification.
As such, the optimizations and improvements they make should directly be portable to Syscoin, hence becoming partners to our ecosystem.
Aleo uses Zero knowledge EXEcution(Zexe) for zkSNARK proof creation through circuits created from R1CS constraints. The interesting thing about Aleo is that there is a ledger itself that is purpose-built to only verify these Zexe proofs for privacy preserving transactability. The consensus is PoW, while the proof system involves optimizing over the ability to calculate the verifications of these proofs efficiently.
The more efficient these miners become at verifying these proofs, the faster they are able to mine and thus the system provides sybil resistance through providing resources to verify Zexe proofs as a service in exchange for block creation.
However, these proof creations can be done in parallel based on the business logic for the systems the developers need to create. There is no direct need for on-chain custom verification as these can be done in an EVM contract, similar to what Cairo Generic Proving Service (GPS) verifier and Zinc Verification do.
The goal of Aleo is to incentivize miners to create specialized hardware to more efficiently mine blocks with verification proofs.
However, provers can also do this as we have seen with Matter Labs’ recent release of FPGA to do more efficient zkSNARK proofs [27]. It is a desirable property to use PoW to achieve “world-view” consensus in Aleo; however they focus on private transactions. They are typically not batched and employ a recursive outer proof to guarantee execution of an inner proof where the outer proof is sent to the blockchain to be verified. This proof is a limited 2-step recursion, consequently batching of arbitrary amounts of transactions is not supported.
However, as a result the cost of proof verification is relatively constant with a trade-off of limiting the recursion depth. Aleo is not meant to be a scalable aggregator of transactions, but mainly oriented towards privacy in their zk-SNARK constructions using Zexe.
Commercial Interests
Commercial enterprises may start to create proprietary prover technologies where costs will be lower than market in an attempt to create an advantage for user adoption. This design is made possible since the code for the prover is not required for the verifier to ensure that executions are correct. The proof is succinct whether or not the code to make the proof is available.
While the barrier of entry is low in this industry, we’ve seen the open source model and its communities optimize hardware and software and undergo academic peer review using strategies that outpace private funded corporations.
That is plausible to play out over the long term. However, an organic market will likely form on its own, forging its own path leading to mass adoption through capitalist forces.
The point here is that the privately funded vs open source nature of proving services does not change the mechanism of secure and scalable executions of calculations that are eventually rooted to decentralized and open ledgers secured by Bitcoin.
The utmost interesting propositions are the verticals that become possible by allowing infrastructure that is parameterized to scale into those economies where they are needed most, and where trust, security and auditability of value are concerns.
Smart cities, IoT, AI and Digital sovereignty are large markets that intersect with blockchain as a security blanket.
Although ZKP are tremendously useful on their own, applying them to consensus systems for smart contract executions drive them to another level due to the autonomous nature of “code-is-law” and provable deterministic state of logic. We believe a large majority of the next generation economy will depend on many of the ideas presented here.
Blockchain Foundry is working with commercial and enterprise adopters of blockchain technology. Our direct interaction with clients combined with our many collective years of experience in this field are reflected in this design.
Functional Overview
Fig 7: High-level description
For scalable simple payments, one can leverage our Syscoin Platform Token (SPT) asset infrastructure and payment channels to transact at scale.
Unique characteristics of SPTs include a generalized 8 byte field for the asset ID which is split between the upper and lower 4 bytes; the upper 4 are issued and definable (ie, NFT use cases) and lower 4 are deterministic. This enables the ability to have a generalized asset model supporting both Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) and Fungible Tokens (FT) without much extra cost at the consensus layers. 1 extra byte is used for all tokens at best case and 5 extra bytes are used for NFT at worst case.
This model promotes multiple assets to be used as input and consequently as outputs, suggesting that atomic swaps between different assets are possible within 1 transaction. This has some desirable implications when using payment channels for use cases such as paying in one currency when merchants receive another atomically.
A multi-asset payment channel is a component that is desired so users are not constrained to single tokens within a network. Composability of assets as well as composability across systems (such as users from one L2 to another) is a core fundamental to UX and convenience that needs to be built into our next generation blockchain components that we believe will enable mass adoption.
The Connext box shows how potentially you can move from one L2 on one network to another as described in [29]. This would promote seamless cross-chain L2 communication without the high gas fees. Since these L2’s are operating under an EVM/eWASM model, there are many ways to enable this cross-communication.
An EVM layer will support general smart contracts compatible with existing Ethereum infrastructure and L2 rollups will enable massive scale. The different types of zkRollups will allow businesses and rollup providers to offer ability for custom fee markets (ie, pay for fees in tokens other than base layer token SYS).
In addition, it will remove costs and thus improve scale of systems by offering custom data availability consensus modules. This design discussed here shares similarities to the zkPorter design where a smart contract would sign off on data availability checks that would get put into the ZKP as part of the validity of a zkBlock which goes on chain.
The overall idea of the zkPorter design is that the zkRollup system would be called a “shard”, and each shard would have a type either operating in “zkRollup” mode or operating in “normal” mode.
Taken from the zkPorter article the essence of it is:
If a shard type is zkRollup, then any transaction that modifies an account in this shard must contain the changes in the state that must be published as L1 calldata (same as a zkRollup).
Any transaction that modifies accounts in at least two different shards must be executed in zkRollup mode.
All other transactions that operate exclusively on the accounts of a specific shard can be executed in normal shard mode (we will call them shard transactions). If a block contains some shard transactions for a shard S, then the following rules must be observed:
The root hash of the subtree of the shard S must be published once, as calldata on L1. This guarantees that users of all other shards will be able to reconstruct their part of the state.
The smart contract of the data availability policy of this shard must be invoked to enforce additional requirements (e.g. verify the signature of the majority of the shard consensus participants).
This concludes that shards can define different consensus modules for data availability (censorship resistance mechanisms) via separating concerns around ledgering the world-view of the state (ie, ZKP that is put on L1 and the data that represents the state. Doing so would allow shards to increase scale, offload costs of data availability to consensus participants.
A few note-worthy examples of consensus for data availability are:
Non-committee, non fraud proof based consensus for data availability checks. No ⅔ online assumption; see ethresear.ch post [30].
Sublinear block validation of ZKP system. Use something like Lazy Ledger as a data availability proof engine and majority consensus; see ethresear.ch post [31].
Use a combination of above, as well as masternode quorum signatures for any of the available quorums to sign a message committing to data availability checks as well as data validity. Using masternodes can provide a deterministic set of nodes to validate decisions as a service. The data can be stored elsewhere accessible to the quorums as they reach consensus that it is indeed valid and available.
Give Me The Goods
You may be wondering what a system like this can offer in terms of scale …
Simple payments: since payment channels work with UTXO’s and also benefit from on-chain scaling via Z-DAG, 16MB blocks (with segwit weight) assumed, we will see somewhere around 8MB-12MB effectively per minute (per block).
We foresee that is sufficient to serve 7 Billion people who may enter and exit the payment channel networks once a year (ie, 2 transactions on chain per person per year) for a total of 14 Billion transactions.
Let’s conservatively assume 8MB blocks and 300 bytes per transaction. Once on a payment channel, the number of transactions is not limited to on-chain bandwidth, but to network related latencies and bandwidth costs. Therefore, we will conclude that our payment scalability will be able to serve billions of people doing 2 on-chain transactions per year which is arguably realistic based on the way we envision payments to unfold; whether that is an L2 or payment channel network that will hold users to pay through instant transaction mechanisms.
On-chain, we have some metrics on Z-DAG throughput [1]; in those cases someone needs to transact for point-of-sale using the Syscoin chain. The solution for payments ends up looking like a hybrid mechanism of on-chain (Z-DAG) and off-chain (ie, payment channel) style payments.
Complex transactions such as smart contracts using zkRollups require a small amount of time to verify each proof. In this case, we assume that we will host data off-chain while using an off-chain consensus mechanism to ensure data availability for censorship resistance; so the only thing that goes on the chain are validity proofs. We will assume that we will assign 16MB blocks for the EVM chain per minute.
A proof size will be about 300kB for about 300k transactions batched together which will take about 60–80ms to verify and roughly 5 to 10 minutes to create such proofs.
These are the Reddit bake-off estimates using zk-STARKs which present quantum resistance and no trusted setup.
After speaking with Eli Ben-Sasson, we were made aware that proving and verifications metrics are already developed compared to what is currently presented by Starkware [34].
Hence, zk-SNARKs offer even smaller proofs and verification times at the expense of trusted setups and stronger cryptography assumptions (not post-quantum safe).
We foresee that these numbers will improve over time as the cryptography improves, but current estimates suggest a rough theoretical capacity of around 1 Million TPS.
Starkware was able to process 300k transactions over 8 blocks with a total cost of 94.5M gas; final throughput was 3000 TPS (see Reddit bake-off estimates). As a result, or the following calculations, let’s assume one batch-run to be 300k transactions.
Ethereum can process ~200kB of data per minute, with a cost limit of 50M gas per minute. Therefore, considering the Starkware benchmark test, and assuming a block interval of 13 seconds, we would achieve ~ 3000 TPS (ie, 300 k transactions per batch-run / (8 blocks per batch-run * 13 seconds per block))
It is estimated that Syscoin will be able to process ~16MB of data per minute on the EVM layer (ie, SYSX in Fig 3), which is ~80x gain over Ethereum; thus a cost limit of 4B gas (ie, 80*50M) per minute.
Therefore, if the Starkware benchmark test was run on Syscoin, it is estimated that Syscoin could run the equivalent of 42 batch-runs per minute (ie, 4B gas per minute / 94.5 M gas per batch-run).
That would result in an equivalent of 210 k TPS (ie, 42 batch-runs per minute * 300 k transactions per batch-run / 60 seconds per minute).
If we were to consider using Validum on the Syscoin EVM layer, we estimate that we could achieve 800 batch-runs per minute (ie, 4B gas per minute / 5 M gas per batch-run). That would equate to an equivalent of 4M TPS (ie, 800 batch-runs per minute * 300 k transactions per batch-run / 60 seconds per minute).
Table 2: Gas costs and Total throughput
* Because all transactions are on-chain, which would include state lookups and modifications, it would likely result in a smaller total throughput depending on the node. This would be on average somewhere between 50–150 TPS total due to the state lookup bottlenecks, which are not an issue in a rollup design and can be done in a state-less way on-chain (meaning the throughput can instead be bounded by computational verification of the ZKPs)
**Rollups post the transitions on-chain and Validium does not, but note that the transitions on chain are account transitions and not transactions and so if some accounts interact within the same batch it will be just those account transitions recorded to the chain regardless of how many actual transactions are done between them.This is the minimum TPS with full layer 1 decentralized security. The amortized cost per Tx thus drops as accounts are reused within the This is the minimum TPS with full layer 1 decentralized security. The amortized cost per Tx thus drops as accounts are reused within the batch and the total TPS would subsequently rise.
Optimizations to the verification process are likely and would be required to get to those numbers, but the bandwidth would allow for such scale should those optimizations come to fruition.
For example 800 zk-STARK verifications at roughly 80ms per zk-STARK would take around 64 seconds, however these proofs can be verified in parallel so with a 32-core machine. It would take ~2–3 seconds total spent on these proofs, and likely decrease further with optimizations (note that TPS includes total account adjustments).
The aforementioned calculations demonstrate the full State Safety of the mainchain secured by Bitcoin, and no asynchronous network assumptions which make theoretical calculations impractical in many other claims of blockchain throughput due to execution model bottlenecks.
These results were extrapolated based on real results with constant overhead added that becomes negligible with optimizations. It is imperative to note that transactions in this strategy are not re-executable; there is little to no complexity in this model other than verifying succinct proofs. The proof creation strategy is parallelized organically using this model. The verifications on the main chain can also be parallelized as they are executed on separate shards or rollup networks. Dual parallel execution and verification gives exponentially more scalability than other architectures.
Additionally, privacy can be built into these models at minimal to no extra cost, depending on the business model. Lastly, we suggest these are sustainable throughput calculations and not burst capacity numbers which would be much higher (albeit with a marginally higher fee based on fee markets).
For example Ethereum is operating at 15 TPS but there are around 150k transactions pending, and the average cost is about 200 gWei currently. The fee rate is based on the calculation that it takes around 10000 seconds to clear, assuming this many transactions, no new transactions, and there is demand to settle earlier.
Extrapolating on 4M TPS the ratio would become 40B transactions pending with 4M TPS to achieve the same fee rate on Ethereum today assuming the memory pool is big enough on nodes to support that many pending transactions.
Since masternodes on Syscoin are paid to provide uptime, we can expect network bandwidth to scale up naturally to support higher throughput as demand for transaction settlement increases.
Today, the ability to transact at a much higher rate using the same hardware provides the ability for a greater scale than the state-of-the-art in blockchain design without the added desired caveat of avoiding asynchronous network assumptions.
We believe this proposed design will become the new state-of-the-art blockchain, which is made viable due to its security, flexibility and parallelizable computational capacity.
In regards to uncle rates with higher block sizes, keep in mind we make uncle rates and re-organizations in general negligible through the use of the PoW chain mining Syscoin along with Chain Locks. We provide intuition that block sizes can be increased substantially without affecting network health.
Furthermore, the gas limits can be adjusted by miners up to 0.1% from the previous block and so a natural equilibrium can form where even if more than 4B gas is required it can be established based on demand and how well the network behaves with such increases.
There is a lot to unpack with such statements and so we will cover this in a separate technical post as it is out-of-scope for this discussion.
Blockchain Foundry
One of the main reasons for a profit company is to take advantage of some of the aforementioned verticals which we expect to underpin the economies of tomorrow with infrastructure similar to what is presented here.
Since the company’s beginning in 2016, we have spent the majority of our existence designing architecture parameterized to global financial markets.
Breakthroughs in cryptography and consensus designs as described here lead us to formalize these designs to apply to market verticals, formulating new applications and solutions that would not have been possible before.
Specifically, , we believe these ideas can be IP protected without requiring privatization of the entire tech stack. These value-added ideas that will use existing open-source tech stacks enabling a massive network effect of value through incentivization of commercial and enterprise adoption.
These new ideas, innovations and proprietary production quality solutions could steer in a new wave of prosperity for civilization.
References
[1] J. Sidhu, E, Scott, and A. Gabriel, Z-DAG: An interactive DAG protocol for real-time crypto payments with Nakamoto consensus security parameters, Blockchain Foundry Inc, Feb. 2018. Accessed on: Feb 2021. [Online]. Available: https://syscoin.org
[3] I. Eyal and E. G. Sirer, Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable, Proceedings of International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, pp. 436–454, 2014.
[11] Anonymous Kid, Why the fuck did Satoshi implement the 1 MB blocksize limit? [Online forum comment], Jan 2018, Accessed on: Feb 2021. [Online]. Available: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2786690.0
[12] Zero-Knowledge Proofs What are they, how do they work, and are they fast yet? Accessed on: Feb 2021. [Online]. Available: https://zkp.science/
[13] E. Ben-Sasson, I. Bentov, Y. Horesh, and M. Riabzev, Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity, IACR Cryptol, 2018, pp 46
[14] Dryja, T, Utreexo: A dynamic hash-based accumulator optimized for the bitcoin UTXO set, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch., 2019, p. 611.
[16] S. Bowe, A. Chiesa, M. Green, I. Miers, P. Mishra, H. Wu: Zexe: Enabling decentralized private computation. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/962 (2018). Accessed on: Feb 2021. [Online]. Available: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10175111
[17] A. Nilsson, P.N. Bideh, J. Brorsson, A survey of published attacks on Intel SGX. 2020, arXiv:2006.13598
[20] Quantum Computing’s Implications for Cryptography (Chapter 4), National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: Quantum Computing: Progress and Prospects. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2018.
[24] V. Buterin and V. Griffith, Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget. CoRR, Vol. abs/1710.09437, 2017. arxiv: 1710.09437, http://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437
[25] M. Neuder, D.J. Moroz, R. Rao, and D.C. Parkes, Low-cost attacks on Ethereum 2.0 by sub-1/3 stakeholders, 2021. arXiv:2102.02247, https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02247
[32] T. Chen, X. Li, Y. Wang, J. Chen, Z Li, X. Luo, M. H. Au, and X. Zhang. An adaptive gas cost mechanism for Ethereum to defend against under-priced DoS attacks. Proceedings of Information Security Practice and Experience — 13th International Conference ISPEC, 2017
[33] Y. Sompolinsky, and A. Zohar, Secure High-rate Transaction Processing in Bitcoin, Proc. 19th Int. Conf. Financial Cryptogr, Data Secur. (FC’20), Jan 2015, pp. 507–527
[34] Starkware Team, Rescue STARK Documentation — Version 1.0, Jul 2020
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