Crypto
Bitcoin Songsheet: Fiat Money Has Debased Having Children
This is an opinion editorial by Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer, educator and entrepreneur and programmer with over 20 years of experience.
Everywhere around the world birth rates are plummeting. Many European and East Asian countries are projected to decrease in population and some, like Japan, are undergoing depopulation. Many people are not choosing to have children, and the ones that do have fewer and have them later.
The result is that the world is aging which, in turn, is causing economic havoc. Pensions of various types, including Social Security in the United States, are horrendously underfunded. There just aren’t enough people paying into these systems compared to the people withdrawing from them. We’re fast reaching the stage where the inverted demographic pyramid will cause default, inflation or an economic crash.
This is all the more ironic since just 50 years ago, we were in the throes of Malthusian fear-mongering where population explosion was the big worry. What’s going on? How is it that we got to where we are with so few children that elementary schools are closing in many places?
Furthermore, how did we get here? Civilization obviously cannot progress unless we have humans and all humans have to pass through childhood. Why don’t we value having more humans on earth?
Family Debasement
As the title of this article states, much of the current attitude towards children is due to fiat money. This isn’t some grand conspiracy by the WEF elites, per se, though I’m sure they’d like to take credit, but rather a horrible set of incentives.
The past 100 years of fiat money has been a story of a bigger and bigger dependency on the government. Social security, for example, was initially a way to stimulate the economy, though the justification was to take care of people in old age. Universal health care, welfare and the various Cantillon effects were all ways fiat money enabled people to rent seek from the bloated bureaucracy of government. What’s unmistakable is that during this time, families have been getting smaller.
A hundred years ago, family was not just the nuclear family, but a large number of aunts, uncles, cousins and even second and third cousins. To be a part of a family meant something and your last name had a reputation. To give your children a good name was something people aspired to do. Nowadays, only very rich families (Rockerfeller), or politically connected last names (Clinton, Bush) matter.
Starting in the ‘50s we started to get a bigger emphasis on the nuclear family. People identified themselves more with their immediate parents and siblings. The identification with the extended family grew less even as people started having fewer children. By the ‘80s, there were a lot more divorces and single parent homes were a lot more frequent, so families grew even smaller. Nowadays, many people choose not to get married and for them, the family has been reduced to the lowest possible number: one.
Dependence On Government
What’s striking over the past 100 years is how the family unit has not only grown smaller, but less and less necessary.
Large extended families naturally provide a form of insurance against any individual hardship. Families used to have lots of children because each additional person would be an asset to everybody else. A large family benefits not only by having more kids to ensure a legacy, but with better chances to make trusted connections and take advantage of profitable opportunities. Families were natural ways to expand businesses and to hire trusted people.
Children also provided for their family in old age. Instead of saving for retirement, you raised kids that had some level of filial piety and depended on them to take care of you. An extended family insures against bad luck like sickness or fires or market shocks. Marriage doubled the size of the extended family and thus, all the benefits that go with it.
All of these economic reasons for larger families have been supplanted by the government. Government provides health insurance, social security, unemployment insurance, not to mention compulsory education, student loans and much more. All these, at least economically, supplant what extended families used to provide. Unsurprisingly, given the incentives, people have opted to depend on the government and all its programs instead of depending on family.
Of course, all these goodies come at the cost of compliance to government mandates. All of these government programs would not exist without fiat money. The various ways in which the government has induced dependence is all based on stealth theft through inflation. The productive are stolen from so that the unproductive can continue their dependency on the government. In an extended family, the lazy, no-good scoundrel would be disowned, but in a democracy, that person’s vote matters more, so their dependency is not just tolerated, but encouraged. From a civilization standpoint, the trade from family dependency to government dependency is a Faustian bargain.
We’ve traded intimate, productive family bonds for rent-seeking political ones which work until they don’t.
Leftist Anti-Family Bias
What might surprise you is that this replacement of family by government is no accident. This has been the explicit goal of a certain, fairly influential ideology for the past 100 years: the Frankfurt School.
A thorough examination of the Frankfurt School is outside the scope of this article, but their origins can be traced to both Marxism and Freud. If this sounds like a very odd combination, it is. Their theories were combined out of necessity and their marriage in the Frankfurt School was something of a shotgun wedding.
The Frankfurt School
Marxism in the 1920s and ‘30s had a big problem. Karl Marx had written that when there was an economic crisis in capitalism, there would be a class consciousness that would develop which would lead to a revolution which would then usher in socialism.
In the 1920s there were huge economic crises in Europe, especially in Central Europe with hyperinflation episodes in Austria, Germany and Hungary. Yet there was no revolution. In the 1930s there was the Great Depression in the U.S. and Canada, and yet there was no revolution. Clearly, there was a crisis in capitalism, yet the people wouldn’t rise up and usher in socialism. What was going on?
For many Marxists of the time, this was an existential dilemma. If Marx was right, the next stage of the inevitable economic progress that he predicted had to come to pass. So why wasn’t socialism here yet?
The answer came from Frankfurt by a group of Marxists who were thinking through this very thorny problem. Their answer depended on the idea of class consciousness. Specifically, for violent revolution to bring about the next stage toward worker’s paradise, the proletariat had to be class conscious first.
Marxists before the 1920s thought that class consciousness would develop from the economic crises themselves, but the Frankfurt school argued that this wasn’t a given. Instead, they blamed families for preventing class consciousness. They cited Freud and claimed that people were enslaved to a false consciousness due to their familial ties and needed to be woken.
The language should sound familiar because current vernacular continues this trend. The meaning of the word “woke” was to get people to be class conscious and in agreement with Marxist ideology so that they could bring about a socialist revolution predicted by Marx.
What Marx implied would be natural, the left figured out had to be instilled into everyone to get the elusive socialist revolution to come. This is what they called critical theory, whose descendants critical race theory, queer theory and intersectionality pervades leftist politics today.
The Frankfurt School blamed the family for why socialist revolution hadn’t come. As a result, followers of Marx started opposing family formation and with the help of fiat money, they successfully debased the family over the past 100 years.
Marxist Infiltration
Marxists were fantastically successful in getting their ideas entrenched. In particular, Hollywood, academia and media were targeted by Communist operatives in the ‘20s and ‘30s. These were people funded from the U.S.S.R. who operated all over the world and they were largely successful as can be seen in these institutions 100 years later. Hollywood, academia and the media are some of the proudest champions of the Frankfurt School.
These groups, in turn, have influenced the political conversation, especially on the left. As a result, many of these programs have been instituted to get people dependent on the government. With fiat money to fund them, they’ve been successful in reducing dependency on families, ultimately degrading family bonds. Their goal has been achieved by opportunistically making family less and less important. As a result, we’re in the situation we’re in now, where populations everywhere are shrinking.
Broken Economics Of Marxism
Like all forms of Marxism, the main strategy is to take capital away from the people that own it and give it to a central authority who can distribute it. The effect on families has been that the people who want to have children are being taxed for the benefit of those that don’t. The economic incentive is to depend on the state and families aren’t as necessary. The Marxists’ goal of getting the population class conscious/woke/ready to usher in socialism was the benefit and people producing economically was what was traded off.
That’s had a terrible effect resulting not just in increased rent-seeking, but also in much less interest in starting families. In a fiat world, each new person is someone that needs to be taken care of. New people dilute the amount everyone else receives. This profoundly zero-sum attitude pervades the left, where even having children is frowned upon as harmful, whether to the planet or to common resources. Though there is plenty of compassion for the people who already exist, there’s little love for more new people in the world.
The price of raising children, as a result, has gone up tremendously. Not only are the medical bills for pregnancies themselves pretty huge, but there’s postnatal care, pediatricians, all manner of government mandated and socially pressured things each child must have. Marxists have succeeded in effectively taxing the hell out of having children. Is it any surprise, then, that fewer children are being born?
Without these government dependence programs, especially in the form of entitlements, the reasons to have kids and start families increases tremendously. Each kid is a very close node on a network of relationships and any skill they acquire benefits the parents disproportionately. Larger families naturally lower the variance for economic disasters and act as a form of insurance. Kids are assets under sound money instead of liabilities as they are under fiat money. Fiat money has distorted the natural tendency for people to have kids and Marxists couldn’t be happier.
Fiat Instinct
Fiat money makes people have a high time preference. Most people in their 20s and 30s don’t think much about what life will be like at 70 or 80. Yet if you speak to anyone at that age, they make it very clear that all those things you cared about in your 20s and 30s don’t matter much later in life. Making partner at a fund just isn’t what it was cracked up to be. Neither was getting tenure, or buying that luxury condo. In fact, the only things that matter to people in old age are their health and their kids. The fact that so few people think about the future shows how pervasive high-time-preference behavior has become.
Even worse, women are being shamed for not putting their career before their kids. The raising of kids has been so devalued in the fiat economy that the act of putting more people on earth has been debased to being lower than an email job.
In every other period of history, motherhood was seen as a crowning achievement and a noble pursuit because, without people, there is no civilization.
The Value Of Children
I’ve told my wife that whatever I do, whatever I accomplish, whatever I invent, nothing I do will compare to the kids she brought into the world. And it’s true. Nothing I can do will compare to the glory of making a person. This was the view of every culture and civilization before now. How did such a noble, meaningful and fulfilling pursuit get debased? Through Marxist fiat incentives.
Fiat money and all the dependency it created has been a cancer to having children and it’s no surprise that it’s leading to civilization’s collapse.
Bitcoin’s focus on real value has led to a renaissance in rearing children and building families. This is not a surprise since studying Bitcoin naturally leads to an examination of what value really is and how human beings ultimately create value through real work. The reversal of the fiat trend is finally at hand.
Bitcoiners, be fruitful and multiply.
Top Ten Reasons You Are Not Having Kids
- Having kids would mean less time looking in the mirror.
- You want to go to clubs and parties at 85, because it’ll totally still be fun.
- It would be irresponsible to bring a new life into the world without a 4-bedroom house in a safe neighborhood, a surrogate mom and silver spoons to feed the baby.
- How are you supposed to have time for “World of Warcraft,” manga and your freemium mobile game if you have kids?
- Deep inside, you’re just a wuss.
- Clearly, what your boss and coworkers think of you is more important than your legacy.
- You’re incapable of picking up new skills like changing a diaper or cutting up someone else’s food.
- You totally would if someone else would take care of, emotionally support and pay for the child.
- Because a whale species is going to go extinct or something.
- All your life, you’ve been imitating childless sociopaths, why stop now?
This is a guest post by Jimmy Song. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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.
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.
Source: Title deed of unregistered real estate propriety
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.
