Crypto
Baltic Honeybadger 2022: For Bitcoiners, The Yield Is The Friends We Make Along The Way
Published
2 years agoon
This is an opinion editorial by Josef Tětek, the Trezor brand ambassador for SatoshiLabs.
After a three-year hiatus, Bitcoiners once again met at the iconic Baltic Honeybadger event in the Latvian capital of Riga.
Around 800 people attended the conference, so it was a rather small event — by comparison, the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami welcomed over 20,000 visitors. However, the saying that “small is beautiful” applied in this case -— compared to the Miami conference, visitors at Honeybadger did not have to worry about endless crowds and queues. But at the same time, it was a conference with global notoriety and one that was held entirely in English, so there was no problem attending hard-hitting talks and later chatting with well-known Bitcoiners like Adam Back, Jimmy Song, Peter Todd, Gigi and many others. Several dozen speakers gave presentations over the two days in two lecture rooms: the main Bitcoin Stage, and the secondary Sats Stage.
The entire conference was filmed and the recordings will be available on the Hodl Hodl YouTube channel (at the time of writing, only the Bitcoin Stage talks have been published).
Free Speech And Free Money
After an opening speech by Max Keidun from Hodl Hodl (the conference organizer), Giacomo Zucco took the floor. Zucco didn’t reveal the title of his talk beforehand, so the audience had no idea what to expect. However, the long-time Bitcoiner, with his characteristic humor peppered with an Italian accent, did not disappoint this time as he revealed the speech title:
But as Zucco readily acknowledged, such a title might offend some, so he decided to make it nicer:
Zucco explained that freedom of speech is a fundamental human right to which we can only make an exception when speech becomes direct aggression, as in the case of ordering a murder or deliberate fraud. He warned of the increasing level of censorship by both governments and corporations; the only practical self-defense is to build and use agorist tools such as the Tor browser.
Zucco then made a segue to money, which also falls under freedom of speech protection (especially in an age where money is overwhelmingly digital in nature) — people have the fundamental right to choose their monetary instrument and use their money as they see fit. However, as with freedom of speech, freedom of money is not guaranteed: again, agorist instruments such as bitcoin and the bitcoin ecosystem need to be built. A quote worth remembering:
“Know-your-customer laws mean that you don’t understand economics. The whole point of money is that you don’t have to know your customer.”
Bitcoin And Islamic Finance
Another talk worth watching is “Bitcoin And Islamic Finance” by Allen Farrington. Farrington is the co-author of “Bitcoin Is Venice,” which in my opinion is one of the very best books written on bitcoin and economics.
According to Farrington, Islamic finance has become a kind of a Bitcoin meme: we often refer to the concept without properly understanding its tenets. However, we should make the effort to learn more about Islamic finance, because its principles are almost the perfect antithesis of modern fiat money, and are consistent with how the world would likely operate on a bitcoin standard.
The three main tenets of Islamic finance are:
- Risk is shared between trading partners, not transferred
- Collateral is transferred between the parties, not financialised
- The spirit of the law is important, not the letter of the law
The consequence of these principles is that, for example, it is not possible to accept a loan backed by certain collateral and still have the same collateral available for use by the borrower (as is the case with mortgages).
If you find the mortgage-free world to be a wild idea, then it’s worth reminding that the over-financialization of real estate caused both the Great Financial Crisis of 2007 to 2008, and also made a lifetime debt slave out of virtually everyone who wants to own their own homes:
“The aversion to financialization in islamic finance comes from the pretty straightforward idea that there ought to be a one-to-one relationship between a financial instrument and the underlying real-economy asset. The more this ratio diverges, the less real finance becomes and the more we end up building a house of cards that will surely one day collapse.”
–Farrington
Bitcoin is close to the principles of Islamic finance because when it is used as a transaction instrument or collateral, it needs to be actually used and sent to the counterparty’s address (the classic not your keys, not your coins). The compatibility between bitcoin (i.e., in the principle of “commodity money”) and Islamic finance is not accidental, as these principles have evolved over hundreds of years under the gold standard and a system of commerce that relied heavily on merchant reputation.
However, unlike in the Western world, these principles have survived to this day in Islamic finance, as they have become part of the faith and thus ethics of the Islamic world. But, as Farrington pointed out, the principles themselves can be applied outside of any religious context — they are simply sound financial principles.
Security And Hardware Wallets
Another important theme of the conference was secure bitcoin self custody, a topic that is inherently linked to the industries of hardware wallets and physical backups. These industries were represented by the founders of Trezor, BitBox, Cryptosteel and Tinyseed, who were all present in Riga.
The concept of air gapping was discussed on two instances: in the panel on security, and in Douglas Bakkum’s lecture. Bakkum defined air gapping as a form of data transfer between hardware wallets and computers/phones utilizing SD cards or QR codes (i.e., not via USB cables). Addressing SD cards, Peter Todd noted that these devices now come with complex microprocessors that probably have a wider field of attack than USB cables. Stick added that QR codes, not SD cards, can be considered the proper method for air gapping these days; and also that the risk with USB cables tends to be the opposite of what some may fear, i.e., with USB devices attacking the host (computer or phone), not the other way around.
“We should be thinking about security threat modeling. I think that the security threat model of regular people is very different from that of Edward Snowden’s for example. And what we are trying to do is to tackle the problems of 99% of people, but if you have three-letter agencies coming after you, I agree you should be using something very different than the off-the-shelf solutions.”
–Stick
Bitcoin Counterculture And Its Psychopathic Defenders
Rigel Walshe (of Swan Bitcoin) dedicated his talk to Bitcoin culture. According to Walshe, not everyone agrees that Bitcoin represents a culture at all, however, as he stated, “When you get a couple of people together, you get a culture.”
And Bitcoin culture is best described as a counterculture, that is, a subculture revolving around the active opposition to certain elements of the mainstream culture. The fate of successful countercultures is that sooner or later they become part of the mainstream: Walshe gave the examples of the rise of punk, hip-hop, marijuana and LGBT subcultures. This transition from counterculture to mainstream culture is accompanied by phenomena that can be understood through three sociological theories:
- Mimetic Theory: Most people adopt the desires of role models, and then imitate their behavior. Many latecomers to the subculture cannot adequately explain why they believe what they believe — they can only repeat what others are saying and turn up the volume, often upping one another in extremist statements. Tribalism and purity tests arise.
- Geeks, Mops And Sociopaths Theory: Describes how new ideas become cool. Cool things start with creators (Satoshi Nakamoto), that are helped by fanatics (Laszlo Hanyecz, Andreas Antonopoulos) who spread the word and build the infrastructure. Then come the mops: those who soak up the good stuff but contribute little (various Twitter influencers come to mind here). The final group are often the sociopaths who exploit the whole subculture for their gains (Richard Heart, Do Kwon).
- The Eternal September Theory: In the early ’90s, the internet (or rather, Usenet) was predominantly accessed through universities, and every September, it was swamped by college freshmen who didn’t know what they were doing and had to be taught by the veterans from previous years. The “eternal September” came when, in the mid-’90s, the internet started to be used by regular households and noobs started coming in droves every day. Bitcoin is experiencing this stage, with waves and waves of new users unable to understand the concepts of private keys and other previously unseen elements.
In conclusion, Walshe pointed out that there’s a trade off between numbers and nuance, and the only solution is to try to figure out what the core ideas of Bitcoin culture that we want to impart on new users are, and turn these into memes, sound bites and digestible pieces of information.
“So it’s on us to distill these ideas, and to disseminate these ideas to the newcomers that are coming aboard and to the sociopaths that would use bitcoin for their own nefarious ends to defend it. And defend it like a fucking psychopath.”
–Walshe
The talks described above are just a taste of the massive conference program, which featured over 40 individual lectures and discussion panels. I’m sure I’ll discover more treasures in the recordings in the coming weeks — as in previous years, the speakers had a lot to say and I believe we’ll be returning to some of the talks years from now. For instance, my favorite talk from the 2019 edition is “Social Impacts Of Gold And Bitcoin.”
Conference Announcements
During the Honeybadger event, several noteworthy announcements were made:
Trezor CoinJoin Implementation: Trezor and Wasabi Wallet are joining forces to introduce the CoinJoin anonymization technique for hardware wallets early next year. Trezor owners will be able to mix their coins using the WabiSabi protocol without their coins leaving the secure environment of the hardware wallet. This is the first implementation of its kind and a true revolution in Bitcoin anonymity.
BTCPay CoinJoin Implementation (also using the WabiSabi protocol): This means that a merchant or a fundraiser organizer can obfuscate the transaction history of any received bitcoin — this is fast becoming a welcome and an acute use case, as the recent protests of Canadian truckers illustrated.
Trezor Suite, Hodl Hodl Trading Offers: For some time now, it has been possible to buy and sell bitcoin directly in Trezor Suite, the native interface of the Trezor hardware wallet. Until now, however, most of these offers required the users to undergo a KYC identification. During the conference, a partnership with the Hodl Hodl decentralized exchange was announced; soon it will be possible to buy bitcoin directly from individual sellers, thus without the need for identification.
Prince Philip Of Serbia Joining Jan3 As CSO: Samson Mow’s Jan3 is a Bitcoin company with the mission to accelerate hyperbitcoinization, and Prince Philip of Serbia has joined its ranks as chief strategy officer.
Fun Off Stage
As is the case at many conferences, most of the fun was had away from the stages. Although Honeybadger was a relatively small conference, it attracted dozens of well-known Bitcoiners, and the speakers didn’t have their own private VIP section (save for a small refreshment room), so they moved among the attendees and engaged in fruitful conversations.
For me personally, the most interesting discussion was the one I had with the aforementioned Farrington, where I had great fun talking about the writing process of “Bitcoin is Venice” and of “A Tale of Two Talebs” (I hope to have convinced Farrington to publish the latter in book form as well!).
It was also nice to see one of the fathers of bitcoin, Adam Back, wearing a BTCPay Server hoodie:
In the exhibition area, attendees could talk to folks from Braiins, Mempool.Space (I got a cool piece of swag from softsimon!), Cryptosteel, Tinyseed, IVPN, Peach, SeedSigner, BTCTKVR, Satochip, Debifi — while Jimmy Song, Daniel Prince and Knut Svanholm sold autographed books.
What’s Next For Bitcoin In Europe?
Baltic Honeybadger was, until recently, the largest bitcoin-only conference in Europe. In October, this status will likely be trumped by Bitcoin Amsterdam. Then, that one will likely be superseded by a yet bigger event: BTC Prague.
This is a guest post by Josef Tětek. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Crypto
El Salvador Takes First Step To Issue Bitcoin Volcano Bonds
Published
2 years agoon
November 22, 2022
El Salvador’s Minister of the Economy Maria Luisa Hayem Brevé submitted a digital assets issuance bill to the country’s legislative assembly, paving the way for the launch of its bitcoin-backed “volcano” bonds.
First announced one year ago today, the pioneering initiative seeks to attract capital and investors to El Salvador. It was revealed at the time the plans to issue $1 billion in bonds on the Liquid Network, a federated Bitcoin sidechain, with the proceedings of the bonds being split between a $500 million direct allocation to bitcoin and an investment of the same amount in building out energy and bitcoin mining infrastructure in the region.
A sidechain is an independent blockchain that runs parallel to another blockchain, allowing for tokens from that blockchain to be used securely in the sidechain while abiding by a different set of rules, performance requirements, and security mechanisms. Liquid is a sidechain of Bitcoin that allows bitcoin to flow between the Liquid and Bitcoin networks with a two-way peg. A representation of bitcoin used in the Liquid network is referred to as L-BTC. Its verifiably equivalent amount of BTC is managed and secured by the network’s members, called functionaries.
“Digital securities law will enable El Salvador to be the financial center of central and south America,” wrote Paolo Ardoino, CTO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, on Twitter.
Bitfinex is set to be granted a license in order to be able to process and list the bond issuance in El Salvador.
The bonds will pay a 6.5% yield and enable fast-tracked citizenship for investors. The government will share half the additional gains with investors as a Bitcoin Dividend once the original $500 million has been monetized. These dividends will be dispersed annually using Blockstream’s asset management platform.
The act of submitting the bill, which was hinted at earlier this year, kickstarts the first major milestone before the bonds can see the light of day. The next is getting it approved, which is expected to happen before Christmas, a source close to President Nayib Bukele told Bitcoin Magazine. The bill was submitted on November 17 and presented to the country’s Congress today. It is embedded in full below.
Crypto
How I’ll Talk To Family Members About Bitcoin This Thanksgiving
Published
2 years agoon
November 22, 2022
This is an opinion editorial by Joakim Book, a Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, contributor and copy editor for Bitcoin Magazine and a writer on all things money and financial history.
I don’t.
That’s it. That’s the article.
In all sincerity, that is the full message: Just don’t do it. It’s not worth it.
You’re not an excited teenager anymore, in desperate need of bragging credits or trying out your newfound wisdom. You’re not a preaching priestess with lost souls to save right before some imminent arrival of the day of reckoning. We have time.
Instead: just leave people alone. Seriously. They came to Thanksgiving dinner to relax and rejoice with family, laugh, tell stories and zone out for a day — not to be ambushed with what to them will sound like a deranged rant in some obscure topic they couldn’t care less about. Even if it’s the monetary system, which nobody understands anyway.
Get real.
If you’re not convinced of this Dale Carnegie-esque social approach, and you still naively think that your meager words in between bites can change anybody’s view on anything, here are some more serious reasons for why you don’t talk to friends and family about Bitcoin the protocol — but most certainly not bitcoin, the asset:
- Your family and friends don’t want to hear it. Move on.
- For op-sec reasons, you don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to the fact that you probably have a decent bitcoin stack. Hopefully, family and close friends should be safe enough to confide in, but people talk and that gossip can only hurt you.
- People find bitcoin interesting only when they’re ready to; everyone gets the price they deserve. Like Gigi says in “21 Lessons:”
“Bitcoin will be understood by you as soon as you are ready, and I also believe that the first fractions of a bitcoin will find you as soon as you are ready to receive them. In essence, everyone will get ₿itcoin at exactly the right time.”
It’s highly unlikely that your uncle or mother-in-law just happens to be at that stage, just when you’re about to sit down for dinner.
- Unless you can claim youth, old age or extreme poverty, there are very few people who genuinely haven’t heard of bitcoin. That means your evangelizing wouldn’t be preaching to lost, ignorant souls ready to be saved but the tired, huddled and jaded masses who could care less about the discovery that will change their societies more than the internal combustion engine, internet and Big Government combined. Big deal.
- What is the case, however, is that everyone in your prospective audience has already had a couple of touchpoints and rejected bitcoin for this or that standard FUD. It’s a scam; seems weird; it’s dead; let’s trust the central bankers, who have our best interest at heart.
No amount of FUD busting changes that impression, because nobody holds uninformed and fringe convictions for rational reasons, reasons that can be flipped by your enthusiastic arguments in-between wiping off cranberry sauce and grabbing another turkey slice. - It really is bad form to talk about money — and bitcoin is the best money there is. Be classy.
Now, I’m not saying to never ever talk about Bitcoin. We love to talk Bitcoin — that’s why we go to meetups, join Twitter Spaces, write, code, run nodes, listen to podcasts, attend conferences. People there get something about this monetary rebellion and have opted in to be part of it. Your unsuspecting family members have not; ambushing them with the wonders of multisig, the magically fast Lightning transactions or how they too really need to get on this hype train, like, yesterday, is unlikely to go down well.
However, if in the post-dinner lull on the porch someone comes to you one-on-one, whisky in hand and of an inquisitive mind, that’s a very different story. That’s personal rather than public, and it’s without the time constraints that so usually trouble us. It involves clarifying questions or doubts for somebody who is both expressively curious about the topic and available for the talk. That’s rare — cherish it, and nurture it.
Last year I wrote something about the proper role of political conversations in social settings. Since November was also election month, it’s appropriate to cite here:
“Politics, I’m starting to believe, best belongs in the closet — rebranded and brought out for the specific occasion. Or perhaps the bedroom, with those you most trust, love, and respect. Not in public, not with strangers, not with friends, and most certainly not with other people in your community. Purge it from your being as much as you possibly could, and refuse to let political issues invade the areas of our lives that we cherish; politics and political disagreements don’t belong there, and our lives are too important to let them be ruled by (mostly contrived) political disagreements.”
If anything, those words seem more true today than they even did then. And I posit to you that the same applies for bitcoin.
Everyone has some sort of impression or opinion of bitcoin — and most of them are plain wrong. But there’s nothing people love more than a savior in white armor, riding in to dispel their errors about some thing they are freshly out of fucks for. Just like politics, nobody really cares.
Leave them alone. They will find bitcoin in their own time, just like all of us did.
This is a guest post by Joakim Book. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
This is an opinion editorial by Federico Tenga, a long time contributor to Bitcoin projects with experience as start-up founder, consultant and educator.
The term “smart contracts” predates the invention of the blockchain and Bitcoin itself. Its first mention is in a 1994 article by Nick Szabo, who defined smart contracts as a “computerized transaction protocol that executes the terms of a contract.” While by this definition Bitcoin, thanks to its scripting language, supported smart contracts from the very first block, the term was popularized only later by Ethereum promoters, who twisted the original definition as “code that is redundantly executed by all nodes in a global consensus network”
While delegating code execution to a global consensus network has advantages (e.g. it is easy to deploy unowed contracts, such as the popularly automated market makers), this design has one major flaw: lack of scalability (and privacy). If every node in a network must redundantly run the same code, the amount of code that can actually be executed without excessively increasing the cost of running a node (and thus preserving decentralization) remains scarce, meaning that only a small number of contracts can be executed.
But what if we could design a system where the terms of the contract are executed and validated only by the parties involved, rather than by all members of the network? Let us imagine the example of a company that wants to issue shares. Instead of publishing the issuance contract publicly on a global ledger and using that ledger to track all future transfers of ownership, it could simply issue the shares privately and pass to the buyers the right to further transfer them. Then, the right to transfer ownership can be passed on to each new owner as if it were an amendment to the original issuance contract. In this way, each owner can independently verify that the shares he or she received are genuine by reading the original contract and validating that all the history of amendments that moved the shares conform to the rules set forth in the original contract.
This is actually nothing new, it is indeed the same mechanism that was used to transfer property before public registers became popular. In the U.K., for example, it was not compulsory to register a property when its ownership was transferred until the ‘90s. This means that still today over 15% of land in England and Wales is unregistered. If you are buying an unregistered property, instead of checking on a registry if the seller is the true owner, you would have to verify an unbroken chain of ownership going back at least 15 years (a period considered long enough to assume that the seller has sufficient title to the property). In doing so, you must ensure that any transfer of ownership has been carried out correctly and that any mortgages used for previous transactions have been paid off in full. This model has the advantage of improved privacy over ownership, and you do not have to rely on the maintainer of the public land register. On the other hand, it makes the verification of the seller’s ownership much more complicated for the buyer.
How can the transfer of unregistered properties be improved? First of all, by making it a digitized process. If there is code that can be run by a computer to verify that all the history of ownership transfers is in compliance with the original contract rules, buying and selling becomes much faster and cheaper.
Secondly, to avoid the risk of the seller double-spending their asset, a system of proof of publication must be implemented. For example, we could implement a rule that every transfer of ownership must be committed on a predefined spot of a well-known newspaper (e.g. put the hash of the transfer of ownership in the upper-right corner of the first page of the New York Times). Since you cannot place the hash of a transfer in the same place twice, this prevents double-spending attempts. However, using a famous newspaper for this purpose has some disadvantages:
- You have to buy a lot of newspapers for the verification process. Not very practical.
- Each contract needs its own space in the newspaper. Not very scalable.
- The newspaper editor can easily censor or, even worse, simulate double-spending by putting a random hash in your slot, making any potential buyer of your asset think it has been sold before, and discouraging them from buying it. Not very trustless.
For these reasons, a better place to post proof of ownership transfers needs to be found. And what better option than the Bitcoin blockchain, an already established trusted public ledger with strong incentives to keep it censorship-resistant and decentralized?
If we use Bitcoin, we should not specify a fixed place in the block where the commitment to transfer ownership must occur (e.g. in the first transaction) because, just like with the editor of the New York Times, the miner could mess with it. A better approach is to place the commitment in a predefined Bitcoin transaction, more specifically in a transaction that originates from an unspent transaction output (UTXO) to which the ownership of the asset to be issued is linked. The link between an asset and a bitcoin UTXO can occur either in the contract that issues the asset or in a subsequent transfer of ownership, each time making the target UTXO the controller of the transferred asset. In this way, we have clearly defined where the obligation to transfer ownership should be (i.e in the Bitcoin transaction originating from a particular UTXO). Anyone running a Bitcoin node can independently verify the commitments and neither the miners nor any other entity are able to censor or interfere with the asset transfer in any way.
Since on the Bitcoin blockchain we only publish a commitment of an ownership transfer, not the content of the transfer itself, the seller needs a dedicated communication channel to provide the buyer with all the proofs that the ownership transfer is valid. This could be done in a number of ways, potentially even by printing out the proofs and shipping them with a carrier pigeon, which, while a bit impractical, would still do the job. But the best option to avoid the censorship and privacy violations is establish a direct peer-to-peer encrypted communication, which compared to the pigeons also has the advantage of being easy to integrate with a software to verify the proofs received from the counterparty.
This model just described for client-side validated contracts and ownership transfers is exactly what has been implemented with the RGB protocol. With RGB, it is possible to create a contract that defines rights, assigns them to one or more existing bitcoin UTXO and specifies how their ownership can be transferred. The contract can be created starting from a template, called a “schema,” in which the creator of the contract only adjusts the parameters and ownership rights, as is done with traditional legal contracts. Currently, there are two types of schemas in RGB: one for issuing fungible tokens (RGB20) and a second for issuing collectibles (RGB21), but in the future, more schemas can be developed by anyone in a permissionless fashion without requiring changes at the protocol level.
To use a more practical example, an issuer of fungible assets (e.g. company shares, stablecoins, etc.) can use the RGB20 schema template and create a contract defining how many tokens it will issue, the name of the asset and some additional metadata associated with it. It can then define which bitcoin UTXO has the right to transfer ownership of the created tokens and assign other rights to other UTXOs, such as the right to make a secondary issuance or to renominate the asset. Each client receiving tokens created by this contract will be able to verify the content of the Genesis contract and validate that any transfer of ownership in the history of the token received has complied with the rules set out therein.
So what can we do with RGB in practice today? First and foremost, it enables the issuance and the transfer of tokenized assets with better scalability and privacy compared to any existing alternative. On the privacy side, RGB benefits from the fact that all transfer-related data is kept client-side, so a blockchain observer cannot extract any information about the user’s financial activities (it is not even possible to distinguish a bitcoin transaction containing an RGB commitment from a regular one), moreover, the receiver shares with the sender only blinded UTXO (i. e. the hash of the concatenation between the UTXO in which she wish to receive the assets and a random number) instead of the UTXO itself, so it is not possible for the payer to monitor future activities of the receiver. To further increase the privacy of users, RGB also adopts the bulletproof cryptographic mechanism to hide the amounts in the history of asset transfers, so that even future owners of assets have an obfuscated view of the financial behavior of previous holders.
In terms of scalability, RGB offers some advantages as well. First of all, most of the data is kept off-chain, as the blockchain is only used as a commitment layer, reducing the fees that need to be paid and meaning that each client only validates the transfers it is interested in instead of all the activity of a global network. Since an RGB transfer still requires a Bitcoin transaction, the fee saving may seem minimal, but when you start introducing transaction batching they can quickly become massive. Indeed, it is possible to transfer all the tokens (or, more generally, “rights”) associated with a UTXO towards an arbitrary amount of recipients with a single commitment in a single bitcoin transaction. Let’s assume you are a service provider making payouts to several users at once. With RGB, you can commit in a single Bitcoin transaction thousands of transfers to thousands of users requesting different types of assets, making the marginal cost of each single payout absolutely negligible.
Another fee-saving mechanism for issuers of low value assets is that in RGB the issuance of an asset does not require paying fees. This happens because the creation of an issuance contract does not need to be committed on the blockchain. A contract simply defines to which already existing UTXO the newly issued assets will be allocated to. So if you are an artist interested in creating collectible tokens, you can issue as many as you want for free and then only pay the bitcoin transaction fee when a buyer shows up and requests the token to be assigned to their UTXO.
Furthermore, because RGB is built on top of bitcoin transactions, it is also compatible with the Lightning Network. While it is not yet implemented at the time of writing, it will be possible to create asset-specific Lightning channels and route payments through them, similar to how it works with normal Lightning transactions.
Conclusion
RGB is a groundbreaking innovation that opens up to new use cases using a completely new paradigm, but which tools are available to use it? If you want to experiment with the core of the technology itself, you should directly try out the RGB node. If you want to build applications on top of RGB without having to deep dive into the complexity of the protocol, you can use the rgb-lib library, which provides a simple interface for developers. If you just want to try to issue and transfer assets, you can play with Iris Wallet for Android, whose code is also open source on GitHub. If you just want to learn more about RGB you can check out this list of resources.
This is a guest post by Federico Tenga. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.