Crypto
Fiat Infects Relationships With High Time-Preference
Published
2 years agoon
This is an opinion editorial by Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer, educator and entrepreneur and programmer with over 20 years of experience.
Link to audio read of the article.
Our relationships have an unwelcome intruder, and that’s the government.
A society is a network of relationships between people. An edge should be bilateral and relationships should be direct, but unfortunately, in today’s fiat world, they are not. Most relationships have an authority in the middle and thus have a centralized controller. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. When it comes to justice or common standards, a third party that can figure something out in the midst of conflict is desirable. Centralization is a problem when it restricts the freedom of how people want to relate, especially when there’s no conflict.
I don’t need to argue here the importance of human relationships for a good and happy life. That is a given and everyone knows this instinctively. Even people who are very good at sustaining themselves need relationships as can be seen in the popular TV show “Alone.” Doing without human relationships is simply not a pleasant experience. No matter how introverted you may claim to be, you still have at least a few relationships that matter. Relationships are, in many ways, the thing that makes life interesting and worth living. The relationship network is civilization.
Unfortunately, our relationships, the edges on the network of civilization, have been debased. The unwelcome intrusion by authorities making bilateral relationships have created bureaucracy and added trusted third parties. I’ve written about this with respect to a specific relationship, that of marriage, but this applies to many other relationships. The quality of all relationships has been made much worse by the presence of fiat money.
We all instinctively feel this. Relationships seem especially shallow and there’s a high time-preference feel to them. Why do first impressions matter so much more these days? Why is it so difficult to connect with anyone at a deep level? Is life imitating Facebook where we know all sorts of surface-level details about people but little of the depth of their character? Do most people even have a desire to have deep relationships? There’s clearly something askew about relationships and this essay is an exploration into why.
High Time-Preference Relationships
One of the most obvious consequences of fiat money is that it incentivizes high time-preference behavior. Why save and plan for the future when the very money that we use is debased constantly? Government promises various forms of safety nets for the long term, so why not live for the present? Fiat money changes the incentives from long-term planning to short-term fun.
As a result, relationships are not built with the view of a long time-horizon. Working relationships, friendships and even family relations are entered into with a very short-term focus. In a fiat economy, people expect relationships to provide for the here and now. It’s no wonder, then, that global birth rates are going down everywhere. If you think about it, the parent-child relationship is a very long-term investment. 20-30 years is a long time to wait and in a fiat economy, such waiting just doesn’t make much sense.
Sadly, a short-term focus incentivizes exploitation. If you’re not in a relationship for the long term, why not burn bridges for your own benefit?
Further, the short-term nature of relationships makes them shallow. People are more concerned with having fun or getting access or making life convenient than with character, loyalty or reliability. High time-preference relationships are more volatile and require a lot more maintenance. Your relationship is only as good as your last interaction and if it wasn’t fun or interesting or feel-good in some way, it’s likely to end. Say some harsh truth and you’re likely to no longer have a relationship, for example.
In a fiat system, people have a higher time-preference and high time-preference people are not very disciplined. This naturally means that they are liable to act more emotionally and without much regard to the long term. Many people end up burning relationships on a regular basis because the investment in that relationship wasn’t much to begin with. This is especially true of people who don’t need anything from you. Many of these people are rent-seekers and they’re one of the blights to relationships in today’s society.
Fiat Reduces The Need For Reputation
Reputation used to be critical to making money. Being a good baker, cobbler or lawyer meant that you did a good job and treated your customers well. Having a bad reputation was a quick path to ruin.
Fiat money changed that.
Rent-seeking opportunities abound in a fiat money system and those require little to no reputation. Instead of being subject to market forces of supply and demand, rent-seekers need to only please the money printer. The only relationship that needs to be maintained is with whoever pays the salary. Of course, the payor of the salary usually has certain requirements and standards, but fulfilling requirements requires monitoring. The payor of the salary becomes the trusted third party in the bilateral relationship. Rent seekers will do the minimum they can to meet requirements. The third party’s presence and evaluation debases the relationship.
Contrast this with a market transaction. People that are seeking your business or service are much more likely to self-monitor and invest in the relationship. They have a much longer time-horizon because they are motivated by profit, not by satisfying a boss.
Fiat jobs have essentially made long-term consumer relationships almost unnecessary. Fiat has permeated other relationships and like most fiat things, has infected and debased them like cancer.
Implied Third Party
The most obvious fiat infection is in employer-employee relationships. The government regulates the relationship through employment laws. Salaries are taxed, certain benefits are required and both sides have to fulfill requirements of the government mandates. The government is a third party in the relationship and they add a lot of friction.
Monetarily, it’s a tax on the relationship, but the debasement is also in its depth. Instead of employers and employees creatively figuring out what would work for them, the government decides how the relationship has to be. Thus, much of the employer-employee relationships are standardized. There’s little innovation or competition because these aspects are the same everywhere.
This is why companies feel so cold and impersonal. Fiat companies are essentially extensions of government and they become rent-seeking which make them less focused on the long term. How many employees feel loyalty to a company anymore? It’s now expected that people leave a company and come back to get a promotion. Everyone is acting in high time-preference in that scenario as it costs both the company and the employee lots of money, time and energy that a good relationship would fix.
Even entrepreneurs are not exempt from government intervention as their relationships with their customers are regulated. The regulations are ostensibly for the purposes of protecting one of the parties, but end up keeping out innovation and creativity. If you wonder why some industries, like airlines, haven’t progressed, it’s because of these regulations and unfortunately that’s most of the economy now.
Politics Overtakes Everything
Relationships that have money at the center, like employer-employee and producer-consumer relationships are not the only relationships affected by fiat money. Because politics overtakes everything in a fiat-money economy, politics makes its unwelcome entry into even personal relationships.
The prize of getting to print money is such a big incentive that everyone fights over the right to do it for their own group’s benefit. Rent-seeking is a lot easier than serving the needs of the market, so political action takes on an enormous importance. Politics is by nature zero-sum, meaning that getting political benefits requires someone to lose. Thus, advancing the needs of your group is naturally going to conflict with the needs of another group.
The political arguments also become morally charged. Every argument for money ends up being a moral argument. There’s a huge incentive to claim victimhood so that the moral argument for money becomes more viable. The bigger your victim status, the bigger moral claim to newly printed money you have.
Relationships are now tinged with that victimhood status and ultimately, become monetary. The balance of payment in victimhood becomes a monetary payment through fiat money. Thus, your relationship with people in another political group has an implied third party in fiat money.
People within your group create an echo-chamber quality in it, where saying something politically in opposition to that group is liable to get you ostracized. After all, you’re costing them money! Fiat money reduces our relationships to the surface-level support of political ends. They feel shallow because they are.
Status Games
The political and rent-seeking nature of relationships means that status takes on a huge importance. You cannot make money in a fiat economy without climbing the status ladder. Unlike a market economy where innovation, creativity and useful goods and services make you money, in a fiat economy, having the right opinions, having the right political skills and having the ability to make a good first impression are what get you in with the money printer.
This is reflected in the relationships we have. People are seeking your vote or support within your in-group so they can climb the status ladder. Organizations become larger versions of middle school with all the backstabbing, gossiping and shallowness. Even worse, relationships get dropped the minute they are no longer politically expedient. Thus, they tend to not last very long.
Contrast this to market economies, where the goods and services matter much more. The goods and services ultimately make the impression, not the political abilities of the person selling them. Further, market transactions tend to be much longer-term. Switching costs are real and people tend to want higher quality over time. Relationships in a market economy cannot afford to be fly-by-night. You can’t just burn bridges without it costing you money.
Friendship
Sadly this political game is all too common in friend groups and makes them have a much higher time-preference. Status within the group is more important than any bilateral relationship due to the group’s political nature and that means people come and go in a friend group way more often. After all, who wants to be at the bottom of a status hierarchy when they can try their luck elsewhere?
One of the sad things I’ve seen over the years is the proliferation of MLM-type schemes on Facebook where people sell goods to their friends for some kickback. People are seeing friendships as a resource to make money and are perfectly happy to exploit them for that purpose. Such behavior debases the relationship as it forces money into the equation and most people are too polite to call such people out. The result is a lot of burned bridges and relationships that shatter because of the attempt at rent-seeking.
Authority-Subject Relationships
The oddity of democracy is that, at least nominally, the authorities need the consent of the governed. Consent of the governed is a good thing. But unfortunately, when fiat money enters the equation, we get deceitful governance.
We are now constantly being propagandized to believe that everything is going swell — or at least that the authorities are doing a good job — when in fact, they are not. The incentives for authorities are to get our vote because the prize of newly printed money is so huge. If they can get our vote through deception, rhetoric and propaganda even while isolating 49% of the population, they will. The truth is not fun to swallow, so the incentive is to lie and deceive. That’s not a great foundation for a relationship. The cynicism, skepticism and outright hostility toward the political system reflects this.
Bitcoin Fixes This
One of the remarkable things about my journey in Bitcoin has been the quality of relationships I’ve had the pleasure of developing. There are a lot of good and interesting people in this space and I’m fortunate to be friends with many of them.
The incentives of Bitcoin are very different from fiat money. What I’ve seen is that the high time-preference people will show themselves. Indeed, many people recently have burned bridges by condemning Bitcoin Maximalists and their harsh truths. I see these people as still being under fiat influence. The people that have stayed, though, are many and they are not liable to go away easily because there’s simply more character and loyalty in this group.
Bitcoin is different and changes the incentives in relationships. We care more deeply about the long term because we have savings and can plan for that. Relationships matter and weeding out the bad ones is just as important as keeping the good ones. Bitcoiners instinctively know this from the many affinity-scamming altcoiners in our space. The relationships that last are self-selecting. It’s a beautiful system of how relationships ought to be.
Let’s make relationships deep again.
Ten Reasons You’re Lonely
- Meeting your MMORPG friends in real life just wasn’t as interesting as you thought it’d be.
- Zoom calls sadly don’t satisfy your need for warm human contact.
- You think changing your Tinder profile is improving yourself.
- You insist on watching part 15 of an anime series when people come over.
- Eating take-out at the office to make partner status has been a bigger priority than dates.
- You keep telling your life story to anyone that shows even minimal listening skills.
- You only meet people at political rallies.
- You insist on having only friends that envy your success.
- It’s hard to bring dates over to your parents’ basement.
- You’re not happy unless you’re miserable.
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.
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.