Author: Billy Tetrud 2021-07-07 03:20:38
Published on: 2021-07-07T03:20:38+00:00
The Sabu protocol is a proposed solution that allows users to send and receive Bitcoin without opening channels or paying transaction fees. It involves two types of actors: issuers who own Bitcoin and creditors who receive Bitcoin in exchange for goods or services. Transactions are recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain only in case of fraudulent activity by an issuer. The network is pure peer-to-peer, so there is no centralization or routing, and communications between wallets are PGP encrypted. Mobile wallets can add friends to their phonebook using email addresses or scanning email and PGP public keys. Each transaction is a small money transfer with 40,000 Satoshi as input and a maximum of 20,000 Satoshi as credit and minimum 10,000 Satoshi as Bitcoin transaction fee. Creditors pay 10 Satoshi as Sabu-transaction-fee to the issuer for each transaction received.The security model of Sabu is based on the guarantee transaction, which both issuer and creditor sign alongside the main transaction. Before sending a transaction to the Bitcoin network, it acts as a liability of the issuer. The issuer creates and signs a valid Bitcoin transaction by spending their UTXO and creating an output for the creditor's address equal to the money they have been paid. Alongside the main transaction (MT), the issuer creates and signs a guarantee transaction (GT) where the creditor will get 15% of their MT amount, and the rest of the creditor's money will be added to the transaction fee. The new transaction fee will then be sent to the issuer account address. Creditors prefer to spend their credit inside the Sabu protocol, and if they want to buy something, they ask the issuer to nullify previous MT and GT, create and sign a new transaction, and transfer the amount to the new creditor. Sabu aims to improve Bitcoin circulation while providing self-sovereignty and decentralized pure peer-to-peer communication network (with some resolvable privacy issues).The proposal also assumes that miners always control transactions with doc-watchers and avoid accepting transactions with the same UTXO but different output. However, miners have different mempool policies for the transactions they themselves mine, and all miners must mine on the most work chain of valid blocks, or risk having their blocks orphaned. Additionally, when a new transaction is broadcast, there can be significant latency before miners switch to mining on top of it due to batch updates of stratum templates/jobs. While the proposal offers some interesting ideas for improving Bitcoin TPS and privacy, it raises several concerns and assumptions that need to be addressed.In response to Billy Tetrud's suggestion about the possibility of claw-back mechanisms for miners who abuse the system, Raymo explains that this mechanism doesn't exist in Bitcoin and would add too many complexities to the system. Instead, he focuses on reducing cheating risks by putting penalties for both issuers, creditors, and miners. While theoretically possible, the risk-to-reward ratio of potential malevolent attacks is high enough to hinder practical action. Raymo is actively working on realizing the Sabu protocol and Gazin wallet, and later, the Sabu community will carry the BIPxxx.Regarding Erik's concern about the compromised email system, Raymo argues that every client/server model has inherent flaws, and Sabu's passive listener can only discover who communicates with whom and make a graph of connections, which is a threat to privacy. However, all communication between mobile wallets via emails are asymmetric PGP encrypted, which is controlled by end-users. In the Sabu protocol, each mobile wallet has one email address as its handler and identifier in the mobile-wallets-network, and each mobile can send messages to another mobile by knowing its email address and PGP public key. Users will decide between Sabu's decentralized pure peer-to-peer communication network or some efficient, privacy-mimic central limited network.In a recent post on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, a proposal was made to improve Bitcoin transaction per second and privacy. The author of the proposal suggests that using a specific protocol would allow for a higher number of transactions per second while also improving privacy. However, some members of the community have raised concerns about the assumptions made in the proposal and the feasibility of implementing such a protocol. One member suggested that it would be easier to evaluate the protocol against the claims if it were transport-agnostic, allowing users to choose any transport they want. Another member pointed out that the assumption that corrupted miners would only represent a small percentage of the hash power may not be accurate. They also noted that the current mining infrastructure is based on the assumption that all miners will mine on top of the latest valid block, which makes it difficult to implement a decentralized way of reaching consensus on what defines a valid block.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T22:59:26.829856+00:00