Author: Peter Todd 2023-06-05 18:09:21
Published on: 2023-06-05T18:09:21+00:00
On June 1, 2023, Dr. Maxim Orlovsky announced in a Bitcoin mailing list that LNP/BP Standards Association had released the RGB smart contract system, referencing that the introduction of client-side validation has the potential for upgrading the Bitcoin layer 1 - blockchain, which is limiting the Bitcoin ecosystem by creating both scaling and privacy problems. The organization has presented Prime, a proposal to upgrade Bitcoin protocol with a new scalable (up to billions of tx per minute) and completely anonymous (opaque) layer 1, moving most validation work into the client-side validation system. This proposal would leave BTC (Bitcoin as money) and the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem intact and may be deployed without a softfork and miners upgrade. It doesn't affect those users who are not willing to upgrade and doesn't require any consensus or majority for the initial deployment. It also makes Lightning Network and other layer 2 systems redundant. Finally, it will make things like BRC20, inscriptions, ordinals etc. impossible; all proper assets, NFTs etc. will be done with RGB smart contracts, not forcing non-users to store, validate and use their network bandwidth for unpaid third-party interests. The white paper for the Prime proposal can be found at https://github.com/LNP-BP/layer1/. However, there have been criticisms regarding the design of the timestamping service, which isn't detailed enough to understand what the timestamping service is exactly. Additionally, the section about proofs claims that "Each network user tracks all new PMTs," which does not scale, contradicting the scalability claims. To address this scalability problem, the creators of those merkle trees need to collaborate together in the creation of them to call the solution scalable. There is also a serious data availability problem with the proposal because being unable to access the publication data - even for a single step means you are unable to close the seal. The single-use-seal protocol providing protection from double-spending attacks is a mathematical abstraction, and the proposal needs to be clear about which specific type of single-use-seal it is proposing. In addition, the smart contract protocol operating with client-side-validated data and providing programmability and rich state needs more discussion about how double-spend prevention works. Finally, the P2P network section needs more work as well. To address these issues, the author suggests that they read two papers in detail: https://petertodd.org/2017/scalable-single-use-seal-asset-transfer and https://petertodd.org/2014/tree-chains-preliminary-summary.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T18:42:02.611034+00:00