Crypto
The U.S. Will Weaponize The Dollar By Backing It With Bitcoin
This is an opinion editorial by Luke Mikic, a writer, podcast host and macro analyst.
This is the second part in a two-part series about the Dollar Milkshake Theory and the natural progression of this to the “Bitcoin Milkshake.” In this piece, we’ll explore where bitcoin fits into a global sovereign debt crisis.
The Bitcoin Milkshake Theory
Most people believe the monetization of bitcoin will most hurt the United States as it’s the country with the current global reserve currency. I disagree.
The monetization of bitcoin benefits one nation disproportionally more than any other country. Like it, welcome it or ban it, the U.S. is the country that will benefit most from the monetization of bitcoin. Bitcoin will help to extend the life of the USD longer than many can conceptualize and this article explains why.
If we move forward on the assumption that the Dollar Milkshake Thesis continues to decimate weaker currencies around the world, these countries will have a decision to make when their currency goes through hyperinflation. Some of these countries will be forced to dollarize, like the more than 65 countries that are either dollarized or have their local currency pegged to the U.S. dollar.
Some may choose to adopt a quasi-gold standard like Russia recently has. Some may even choose to adopt the Chinese yuan or the euro as their local medium of exchange and unit of account. Some regions could copy what the shadow government of Myanmar have done and adopt the Tether stablecoin as legal tender. But most importantly, some of these countries will adopt bitcoin.
For the countries that may adopt bitcoin, it will be too volatile to make economic calculations and use as a unit of account when it’s still so early in its adoption curve.
Despite what the consensus narrative is surrounding those who say, “Bitcoin’s volatility is decreasing because the institutions have arrived,” I strongly believe this is not a take rooted in reality. In a previous article written in late 2021 analyzing bitcoin’s adoption curve, I outlined why I believe the volatility of bitcoin will continue to increase from here as it travels through $500,000, $1 million and even $5 million per coin. I think bitcoin will still be too volatile to use as a true unit of account until it breaches eight figures in today’s dollars — or once it absorbs 30% of the world’s wealth.
For this reason, I believe the countries who will adopt bitcoin, will also be forced to adopt the U.S. dollar specifically as a unit of account. Countries adopting a bitcoin standard will be a Trojan horse for continued global dollar dominance.
Put aside your opinions on whether stablecoins are shitcoins for just a second. With recent developments, such as Taro bringing stablecoins to the Lightning Network, imagine the possibility of moving stablecoins around the world, instantly and for nearly zero fees.
The Federal Reserve of Cleveland seems to be paying close attention to these developments, as they recently published a paper titled, “The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin Into Money.”
Zooming out, we can see that since March 2020, the stablecoin supply has grown from under $5 billion to over $150 billion.
What I find most interesting is not the rate of growth of stablecoins, but which stablecoins are growing the fastest. After the recent Terra/LUNA debacle, capital fled from what’s perceived to be more “risky” stablecoins like tether, to more “safe” ones like USDC.
This is because USDC is 100% backed by cash and short-term debt.
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager and recently headlined a $440 million fundraising round by investing in Circle. But it wasn’t just a funding round; BlackRock is going to be acting as the primary asset manager for USDC and their treasury reserves, which is now nearly $50 billion.
The aforementioned Tether appears to be following in the footsteps of USDC. Tether has long been criticized for its opaqueness and the fact it’s backed by risky commercial paper. Tether has been viewed as the unregulated offshore U.S. dollar stablecoin. That being said, Tether sold their riskier commercial paper for more pristine U.S. government debt. They also agreed to undergo a full audit to improve transparency.
If Tether is true to their word and continues to back USDT with U.S. government debt, we could see a scenario in the near future where 80% of the total stablecoin market is backed by U.S. government debt. Another stablecoin issuer, MakerDao, also capitulated this week, buying $500 million government bonds for its treasury.
It was crucial that the U.S. dollar was the main denomination for bitcoin during the first 13 years of its life during which 85% of the bitcoin supply had been released. Network effects are hard to change, and the U.S. dollar stands to benefit most from the proliferation of the overall “crypto” market.
This Bretton Woods III framework correctly describes the issue facing the United States: The country needs to find someone to buy their debt. Many dollar doomsayers assume the Fed will have to monetize a lot of the debt. Others say that increased regulations are on the way for the U.S. commercial banking system, which was regulated to hold more Treasurys in the 2013-2014 era, as countries like Russia and China began divesting and slowing their purchases. However, what if a proliferating stablecoin market, backed by government debt, can help soak up that lost demand for U.S. Treasurys? Is this how the U.S. finds a solution to the unwinding petrodollar system?
Interestingly, the U.S. needs to find a solution to its debt problems, and fast. Nations around the world are racing to escape the dollar-centric petrodollar system that the U.S. for decades has been able to weaponize to entrench its hegemony. The BRICS nations have announced their intentions to create a new reserve currency and there are a host of other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Argentina that are applying to become a part of this BRICS partnership. To make matters worse, the United States has $9 trillion of debt that matures in the next 24 months.
Who is now going to buy all that debt?
The U.S. is once again backed into a corner like it was in the 1970s. How does the country protect its nearly 100-year hegemony as the global reserve currency issuer, and 250-year hegemony as the globe’s dominant empire?
Currency Wars And Economic Wild Cards
This is where the thesis becomes a lot more speculative. Why is the Fed continuing to aggressively raise interest rates, bankrupting its supposed allies like Europe and Japan, while seemingly sending the world into a global depression? “To fight inflation,” is what we’re told.
Let’s explore an alternative, possible reason why the Fed could be raising rates so aggressively. What options does the U.S. have to defend its hegemony?
In a world currently under a hot war, would it seem so far-fetched to speculate that we could be entering an economic cold war? A war of central banks, if you will? Have we forgotten about the “weapons of mass destruction?” Have we forgotten what we did to Libya and Iraq for attempting to route around the petrodollar system and stop using the U.S. dollar in the early 2000s?
Until six months ago, my base case was that the Fed and central banks around the globe would act in unison, pinning interest rates low and use the “financial repression sandwich” to inflate away the globe’s enormous and unsustainable 400% debt-to-GDP ratio. I expected them to follow the economic blueprints laid out by two economic white papers. The first one published by the IMF in 2011 titled, “The Liquidation Of Government Debt” and then the second paper published by BlackRock in 2019 titled, “Dealing With The Next Downturn.”
I also expected all the central banks to work in tandem to move toward implementing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and working together to implement the “Great Reset.” However, when the data changes, I change my opinions. Since the creepingly coordinated policies from governments and central banks around the world in early 2020, I think some countries are not so aligned as they once were.
Until late 2021, I held a strong view that it was mathematically impossible for the U.S. to raise rates — like Paul Volcker did in the 1970s — at this stage of the long-term debt cycle without crashing the global debt market.
Debt held by the public is nearly as high as times during WWII
But, what if the Fed wants to crash the global debt markets? What if the U.S. recognizes that a strengthening dollar causes more pain for its global competitors than for themselves? What if the U.S. recognizes that they would be the last domino left standing in a cascade of sovereign defaults? Would collapsing the global debt markets lead to hyperdollarization? Is this the only economic wild card the U.S. has up its sleeve to prolong its reign as the dominant global hegemon?
While everyone is waiting for the Fed pivot, I think the most important pivot has already happened: the Dalio pivot.
As a Ray Dalio disciple, I’ve built my entire macroeconomic framework on the idea that “cash is trash.” I believe that mantra still holds true for anyone using any other fiat currency, but has Dalio stumbled upon some new information about the USD that has changed his mind?
Dalio wrote a phenomenal book “The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail” that details how wars occur when global empires clash.
Has he concluded that the United States could be about to weaponize the dollar, making it not so trashy? Has he concluded that the U.S. isn’t going to willingly allow China to be the world’s next rising empire like he once proclaimed? Would the U.S. aggressively raising rates lead to a capital flight to the U.S., a country that has a comparatively healthier banking system than its competitors in China, Japan and Europe? Do we have any evidence for this outlandish left-field, hypothetical scenario?
Let’s also not forget, this is not just a race with the United States versus China. The second-most used foreign currency in the world — the euro — probably wouldn’t mind gaining power from a declining U.S. empire. We have to ask the question, why is Jerome Powell refusing to align monetary policies with one of our closest allies in Europe?
In this illuminating 2021 webinar, at the Green Swan central banking conference, Powell blatantly refused to go along with the “green central banking” policies that were discussed. This visibly infuriated Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, who was also part of the event.
Some of the quotes from Powell in that interview are illuminating.
Is this a sign the U.S. is no longer a fan of the Great Reset ideologies coming out of Europe? Why is the Fed also ignoring the United Nations begging them to lower rates?
We can speculate about what Powell’s intentions may be all day, but I prefer to look at data. Since Powell’s initial heated debate with Lagarde and the Fed’s subsequent rate increase on the reverse repo days after, the dollar has decimated the euro.
Reverse repo rates initially increased on May 31, 2022
In April 2022, Powell was dragged into another “debate” with Lagarde, led by the head of the IMF. Powell reaffirmed his stance on climate change and central banking.
The plot thickens when we consider the implications of the LIBOR and SOFR interest rate transition that occurred at the beginning of 2022. Will this interest rate change enable the Fed to hike interest rates and insulate the banking system from the contagion that’ll ensue from a wave of global debt defaults in the wider eurodollar market?
I do think it’s interesting that by some metrics the U.S. banking system is showing comparatively fewer signs of stress than in Europe or the rest of the world, validating the thesis that SOFR is insulating the U.S. to a degree.
A New Reserve Asset
Whether the U.S. is at war with other central banks or not doesn’t change the fact that the country needs a new neutral reserve asset to back the dollar. Creating a global deflationary bust, and weaponizing the dollar is only a short-term play. Scooping up assets on the cheap and weaponizing the dollar will only force dollarization in the short term. The BRICS nations and others that are disillusioned with the SWIFT-centered financial system will continue to de-dollarize and try to create an alternative to the dollar.
The global reserve currency has been informally backed by the U.S. Treasury note for the past 50 years, since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. In times of risk, people run to the reserve asset as a way to get a hold of dollars. For the past 50 years, when equities sell off, investors fled to the “safety” of bonds which would appreciate in “risk off” environments. This dynamic built the foundation of the infamous 60/40 portfolio — until this trade ultimately broke in March 2020 when the Treasury market became illiquid.
As we transition into the Bretton Woods III era, the Triffin dilemma is finally becoming untenable. The U.S. needs to find something to back the dollar with. I find it unlikely that they will back the dollar with gold. This would be playing into the hands of Russia and China who have far larger gold reserves.
This leaves the U.S. with their backs against a wall. Faith is being lost in the dollar and they would surely want to retain their global reserve currency status. The last time the U.S. was in a similarly vulnerable position was in the 1970s with high inflation. It looked like the dollar would fail until the U.S. effectively pegged the dollar to oil through the petrodollar agreement with the Saudis in 1973.
The country is faced with a similar conundrum today but with a different set of variables. They no longer have the option of backing the dollar with oil or gold.
Enter Bitcoin!
Bitcoin can stabilize the dollar and even prolong its global reserve currency status for much longer than many people expect! Most importantly, bitcoin gives the U.S. the one thing it needs for the 21st-century monetary wars: trust.
Countries may trust a gold-backed (petro-)ruble/yuan more than a dollar backed by worthless paper. However, a bitcoin-backed dollar is far more trustworthy than a gold-backed (petro-)ruble/yuan.
As mentioned earlier, the monetization of bitcoin not only helps the U.S. economically, but it also directly hurts our monetary competitors, China and to a lesser degree, Europe — our supposed ally.
Will the U.S. realize that backing the dollar with energy directly hurts China and Europe? China and Europe are both facing significant energy-related headwinds and have both infamously banned Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mining. I made the case that the energy crisis in China was the real reason China banned bitcoin mining in 2021.
Today, as we transition into the digital age, I believe a fundamental shift is coming:
For thousands of years, money has been backed by trust and gold, and protected by ships. However, in this millennium, money will now be backed by encryption and math, and protected by chips.
If you will allow me to once again engage in some speculation, I believe the U.S. understands this reality, and is preparing for a deglobalized world in many different ways. The U.S. appears to be the Western nation taking the friendliest approach to Bitcoin. We have senators all across the U.S. tripping over themselves to make their states Bitcoin hubs by enacting friendly regulation for mining. The great hash migration of 2021 has seen the lion’s share of the Chinese hash being transferred to the U.S., which now houses over 35% of the world’s hash rate.
Recent sanctions on Russian miners could only further accelerate this hash migration. Apart from some noise in New York, and the delayed spot ETF decision, the U.S. looks as though it’s embracing bitcoin.
In this video, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen talks about Satoshi Nakamoto’s innovation. The SEC Chair Gary Gensler continually differentiates Bitcoin from “crypto” and has also praised Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention.
ExxonMobil is the largest oil company in the U.S. and announced it was using bitcoin mining to offset its carbon emissions.
Then there’s the question, why has Michael Saylor been allowed to wage a speculative attack on the dollar to buy bitcoin? Why is the Fed releasing tools highlighting how to price eggs (and other goods) in bitcoin terms? If the U.S. was so opposed to banning bitcoin, why has all of this been allowed in the country?
We’re transitioning from an oil-backed dollar to a bitcoin-backed dollar reserve asset. Crypto-eurodollars, aka stablecoins backed by U.S. debt, will provide the bridge between the existing energy-backed dollar system and this new energy-backed bitcoin/dollar system. I find it awfully poetic that the country founded on the ideology of freedom and self-sovereignty appears to be positioning itself to be the one that most takes advantage of this technological innovation. The bitcoin-backed dollar is the only alternative to a rising Chinese threat positioning for the global reserve currency.
Yes, the United States has committed many atrocities, I’d argue that at times they’ve been guilty of abusing their power as the global hegemon. However, in a world that’s being rapidly consumed by ramped totalitarianism, what happens if the mighty U.S. experiment fails? What happens to our civilization if we allow a social-credit-scoring Chinese empire to rise and export its CBDC-backed digital panopticon to the world? I was once one of these people cheering for the demise of the U.S. empire, but I now fear the survival of our very civilization is dependent upon the survival of the country that was originally founded on the principles of life, liberty and property.
Conclusions
Zooming out, I stand by my original thesis that we are in a new monetary order by the end of the decade. However, the events of the previous months have certainly accelerated that already-rapid 2030 timeline. I also stand by my original thesis from the 2021 article surrounding how bitcoin’s adoption curve unfolds because of how broken the current monetary regime is.
I believe 2020 was the monetary inflection point that will be the catalyst that takes bitcoin from 3.9% global adoption to 90% adoption this decade. This is what crossing the chasm entails for all transformative technologies that reach mainstream penetration.
There will however be many “hopeful moments” along the way, like there was in the German Weimar hyperinflationary event of the 1920s.
There will be dips and spikes in inflation, like there was in the 1940s during U.S. government deleveraging.
Deglobalization will be the perfect scapegoat for what was always going to be a decade of government debt deleveraging. The monetary contractions and spasms are becoming more frequent and more violent with each drawdown we encounter. I believe the majority of fiat currencies are in the 1917 stages of the Weimar hyperinflation.
This article was very centered on nation-state adoption of bitcoin, but don’t lose sight of what’s truly unfolding here. Bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom and self-sovereignty in the digital age. Interestingly, I also feel that hyperdollarization will accelerate this peaceful revolution.
Hyperinflation is the event that causes people to do the work and learn about money. Once many of these power-hungry dictators are forced to dollarize and no longer have the control of their local money printer, they may be more incentivized to take a bet on something like bitcoin. Some may even do it out of spite, not wanting to have their monetary policy dictated to them by the U.S.
Money is the primary tool used by states to exercise their autocratic, authoritarian powers. Bitcoin is the technological innovation that’ll dissolve the nation-state, and fracture the power the state has, by removing its monopoly on the money supply. In the same way the printing press fractured the power of the dynamic duo that was the church and state, bitcoin will separate money from state for the first time in 5,000+ years of monetary history.
So, to answer the dollar doomsdayers, “Is the dollar going to die?” Yes! But what will we see in the interim? De-dollarization? Maybe on the margins, but I believe we will see hyperdollarization followed by hyperbitcoinization.
This is a guest post by Luke Mikic. 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.
