Connect with us

Crypto News

Decentralization and Localized Manufacturing: Bitcoin, AI and 3D printing

Published

on

In the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson make a convincing case that again and again throughout history, the dominant power of the day was disrupted by new technologies. Advances in agriculture meant that people and their property were often geographically stationary, making them sitting ducks for “specialists in violence”, the predecessors to modern governments, who back then, were both the plunderers and protectors against plunder. The stirrup, contoured saddle, spur, and curb bit had a combined similar disrupting effect, shifting power away from heavy cavalry to a single armed knight. The Gunpowder Revolution disrupted the feudal order of the day, reinforced in those days by the Catholic Church. Rees-Mogg and Davidson write, “the Church tended to make religious virtues of its own economic interests, while militating against the development of manufacturing and independent commercial wealth that were destined to destabilize the feudal system.” The printing press disrupted the Church even further: causing it to lose its monopoly on biblical narrative. The result was a major loss in its influence and power, which gave way to the modern nation state.

Rees-Mogg and Davidson argue that the microprocessor would inevitably disrupt the nation state in the same way that the printing press disrupted Christendom a few hundred years ago. The internet itself (a globally-interconnected community) and public key cryptography (which protects both communications and property of Bitcoin) are made possible by microprocessors.

The present and future

One major battlefront for decentralization is fought on the currency front. Since Bitcoin’s 2009 inception, we have been able to transact permissionlessly, borderlessly, and (often) anonymously. Nation states have long been jealous of any challenge to their monopoly on money, and they will spend vast sums of money to ensure that there are no serious monetary rivals. Bitcoin serves as an alternative to that trap, which is why it is under attack by the likes of politicians and the crumbling legacy media.

But to transact on Bitcoin, you need miners. No doubt, regulators in the United States and Europe observed as China outlawed Bitcoin mining in 2021, which only resulted in the majority of the hashing power moving from that country to the United States. So while they would probably wish to ban it in the United States and Europe outright, they know that they would only lose both regulatory control and tax revenue from Bitcoin miners by doing so. Thus, for now, not even Elizabeth Warren – the most Bitcoin-hostile legislator in Washington – proposes to outright ban Bitcoin. Instead, she proposes to expand know-your-customer (KYC) rules to essentially all parties within the Bitcoin ecosystem as well as discourage self-custody and privacy-enhancing technologies.

Bitcoin does have an important weak point of centralization (for now): the hardware. The University of Cambridge produces industry reports on Bitcoin mining and communicates that, hardware-wise, the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin miners report to use an “ASIC” chip for mining Bitcoin’s SHA-256 hashing algorithm produced by Singapore-based company Bitmain, with competitors MicroBT and Canaan trailing behind. Regardless of where Bitmain produces its ASIC chips, the ideal scenario for Bitcoin’s decentralization would be that production of ASIC miners (and the mining itself for that matter) would be dispersed around the world so that no specific region could have a definitive advantage, taking the majority control of the hashing power. A reasonable compromise would be one in which ASIC miners were produced, at scale and in high quality, by at least more manufacturers than there are now, especially across countries that are not politically aligned with one another so that collusion between them would be increasingly unlikely.

A second major battlefront for decentralization is fought on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) front. I once attended a conference in which Peter Thiel participated as a speaker. He said something very close to the following (quoted from my memory): “Bitcoin is a technology that, on net, favors the individual. AI is a technology that, on net, favors the state.” It is the latter technology and its favoring the state that emphasizes the importance of getting it into the hands of as many participants as possible if we are to build a truly decentralized world.

One risk to AI’s decentralization is one that Bitcoin has in common: a potential future scenario in which hardware is monitored and must be registered by law. In the case of Bitcoin, that would mean miners must register their ASIC chips. In the case of AI, it could mean that even you or I would need to register graphics processing units (GPUs) above a certain capacity (or, in the case of software, that matrices must be registered). Guillaume Verdon, the name behind the now doxed alias @BasedBeffJesos, highlighted this risk in a podcast with Lex Fridman, arguing that this could “[stop] the open source ecosystem from thriving… by executive order, claiming that open source LLMs are dual-use technologies and should be government-controlled.”

Although executive orders could not kill Bitcoin (but could discourage some people from using it), similar reporting requirements for miners would likely, to some degree, impact Bitcoin’s open source ecosystem.

A third major battleground worth highlighting is 3D printers, assemblers, and other tools in the “maker” arsenal. This “maker” movement hints at a future solution to the problem of centralization tendencies for Bitcoin and AI.

Imagine a world with 3D printers and accompanying tools in most people’s homes. If you could print your own high-quality ASIC Bitcoin miners and GPUs for running large language models (LLMs), decentralization is light-years ahead.

We can ignore for a moment the futuristic scenario in which 3D printers and other “maker” tools are used to produce hardware for Bitcoin and AI applications. Even at present, at least one government is looking at the 3D printer with the same skeptical eye that the Catholic Church had for the printing press in the 15th and 16th centuries. New York State’s Assembly Bill A8132, if passed into law, would require criminal background checks, with fingerprints sent to the FBI, in order to purchase 3D printers “capable of creating firearms.” It is reasonable to expect that various governments, fearing loss of their own centralized power, will continue to push registration and “KYC” requirements to maintain control of real-space tools that facilitate decentralization in cyberspace.

Note: The Soviet Union had similar controls on seemingly harmless products such as books, photocopiers, fax machines – all of which facilitated the spread of information, and thus, threatened the regime. There were similar efforts to control the sale of fabric that could be used to build hot air balloons in East Germany, to stop people from escaping to West Germany. (See the 1982 American film Night Crossing and the 2018 German film Balloon that both document a real escape).

Localized manufacturing, whether at home or in a so-called community fabrication laboratory or “fab lab”, is likely to come under increased hostility by various governments as 3D printers and other “maker” tools are able to produce even more sophisticated electronics. But, for now at least, fab labs are growing exponentially in number, with well over 2,000 of them spread around the world so far, and even receive various levels of support by governments. These fab labs, by the way, don’t account for the many more personalized labs in people’s homes.

Neil Gershenfeld at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms tries to understand what the world looks like when almost anybody can make almost anything and when machines can make other machines, even machines more sophisticated than themselves, and often with locally-sourced materials.

Gershenfeld argues in a podcast appearance that localized manufacturing doesn’t scale and that production is generally for personal use, not commercial sale. But when many thousands of people around the world learn how to locally produce their own 3D-printed and home-assembled Bitcoin miner and then combine their individual hashing power with others in a mining pool and coordinate with one another over the Tor network… then the world starts to look much more decentralized.

Conclusion

Bitcoin, AI, and 3D printers share a common theme of decentralization and disruptive potential for the nation state. As both Bitcoin’s ASIC mining chips and GPUs used to run LLMs exist in real-space where nation states are most dominant, governments may become increasingly hostile towards such hardware: requiring criminal background checks, KYC, etc. Interestingly, 3D printers, assemblers, and other “maker” tools could be used now or in the future for localized manufacturing (whether at home or in so-called “fab labs”), enabling a much more decentralized world.

Meanwhile, on the policy front, criminal background checks and registration requirements for 3D printers and other “maker” tools such as those proposed in New York’s Assembly Bill A8132 deserve a skeptical eye and strong political pushback.

This is a guest post by Emile Phaneuf. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

​ A look at the similarities between AI, 3D printing, and Bitcoin in terms of their disruptive potential as decentralized technologies. 

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Crypto News

BitVM Just Got A Massive Upgrade

Published

on

By

The introduction of BitVM smart contracts has marked a significant milestone in the path for scalability and programmability of Bitcoin. Rooted in the original BitVM protocol, Bitlayer’s Finality Bridge introduces the first version of the protocol live on testnet, which is a good starting point for realizing the promises of the Bitcoin Renaissance or “Season 2”.

Follow GG on X

Unlike earlier BTC bridges that often required reliance on centralized entities or questionable trust assumptions, the Finality Bridge leverages a blend of BitVM smart contracts, fraud proofs, and zero-knowledge proofs. This combination not only enhances security but also significantly reduces the need for trust in third parties. We’re not at the trustless level that Lightning provides, but this is a million times better than current sidechains designs claiming to be Bitcoin Layers 2s (in addition to significantly increasing the design space for Bitcoin applications).

The system operates on a principle where funds are securely locked in addresses governed by a BitVM smart contract, functioning under the premise that at least one participant in the system will act honestly. This setup inherently reduces the trust requirements but has to introduce additional complexities that Bitlayer aims to manage with this version of the bridge.

Source: https://blog.bitlayer.org/introducing_finality_bridge/

The Mechanics of Trust

In practical terms, when Bitcoin is locked into the BitVM smart contract through the Finality Bridge, users are issued YBTC – a token that maintains a strict 1:1 peg with Bitcoin. This peg is not just a promise but is enforced by the underlying smart contract logic, ensuring that each YBTC represents a real, locked Bitcoin on the main chain (no fake “restacked” BTC metrics). This mechanism allows users to participate in DeFi activities like lending, borrowing, and yield farming within the Bitlayer ecosystem without compromising on the security and settlement assurances that Bitcoin provides.

While some in the community might find these activities objectionable, this type of architecture allows users to get some guarantees that they previously could not hope to get with traditional sidechain designs, with the added bonus that we do not need to “change” Bitcoin to make it happen (although covenants would make this bridge design completely “trust-minimized, which would effectively make it a “True” Bitcoin Layer 2). For more details about the different levels of risks associated with sidechains designs, take a look at Bitcoin Layers assessment of Bitlayer here.

However, until such advancements come to fruition, the Bitlayer Finality Bridge serves as the best realization of the BitVM 2 paradigm. It’s a testament to what’s possible after the dev “brain drain” from centralized chains back to Bitcoin. Despite all the challenges that BitVM chains will face, I remain exceptionally excited at the prospect of Bitcoin fulfilling its destiny as the Ultimate Settlement Chain for all economic activity.

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Guillaume’s articles in particular may discuss topics or companies that are part of his firm’s investment portfolio (UTXO Management). The views expressed are solely his own and do not represent the opinions of his employer or its affiliates. He’s receiving no financial compensation for these Takes. Readers should not consider this content as financial advice or an endorsement of any particular company or investment. Always do your own research before making financial decisions. 

 The BitLayer Finality Bridge is Delivering On The Promises of BitVM – While still far from a fully trustless system, the progress made over the past year is remarkable 

Continue Reading

Crypto News

Bitcoin Banks: We Should Build Them Ourselves

Published

on

By

Bitcoin banks are going to happen. We already have a few of them. We’re going to have more of them. Existing legacy banks are going to start offering services. New banks are going to be founded around Bitcoin. This is completely unavoidable at this point. Bitcoin doesn’t scale. Even absent that, people value other services that inherently require other parties. Debt being the chief one.

This is an inescapable reality.

Even if we could snap our fingers and roll out every well specified opcode and covenant proposal at once, it would still take a lot of time to begin building out self-custodial layers that could compete with something like credit unions and banks offering bitcoin accounts at scale. That is not a problem that can be trivially solved overnight.

So what can we do? We need to embrace a localist attitude around making interaction with your bitcoin easy. This requires a two pronged approach, one involving technical development and the other involving, I hate to say it, lobbying.

There already exist pieces of software like LNDHub or LNBits that allow people to offer custodial accounts for Lightning. We need a lot more software like this, and we need it to be miles better. It needs to not involve tinkering around on the command line and hooking up independent software, or perusing Github to follow manual installation instructions, or fumbling around trying to fix dependencies mismatches.

It needs to just work.

Click, sync to the network, done. It needs to be something that power users who are still not very tech savvy can run safely, and not lose other people’s money. It needs to support more than basic accounts for Lightning. Ecash offers privacy, which would be something important when it comes to small groups of people who know each other. You don’t want your friend seeing what you spend your money on. It needs to support things like Unchained or Nunchuck style on-chain self custody. People aren’t going to want to hold all their friends and family’s life savings, but holding a recovery key to safeguard them from their own mistakes is another matter.

We need the software that will actually scale this type of user interaction beyond a bunch of activist nerds online.

We also need a regulatory carve out. There needs to be a clear acknowledgement that running this type of software for friends and family with trivial amounts of money, say thousands of dollars, and without charging anything for it, is an unregulated activity. Helping friends and family interact with Bitcoin safely and easily, and for free, does not make you a bank. The idea of a few thousand dollars needing to comply with the regulations banks managing billions of dollars do is frankly absurd.

This is the path forward given the current constraints of Bitcoin, and the reality of growing and accelerating adoption, that leads us away from a system that eventually becomes completely captured and neutered by legacy financial institutions.

Instead of depending on them to deal with the current scaling limitations of Bitcoin, we depend on each other. 

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

 Bitcoiners shouldn’t sit around and wait for fiat banks and financial companies to offer services built on Bitcoin, we should do it ourselves. 

Continue Reading

Crypto News

Galoy Launches Bitcoin-Backed Loan Software, Sets Groundwork For Open-Source Banking

Published

on

By

Founder: Nicolas Burtey

Date Founded: September 2019

Location of Headquarters: United States

Number of Employees: 11

Website: https://www.galoy.io/

Public or Private? Private

Last week, Galoy launched Lana, software that enables banks to accept bitcoin as collateral for loans.

Lana helps community and challenger banks (the banks with which Galoy is looking to work) to offer bitcoin-backed loans to various types of customers.

“Some banks might want to use it to sell to retail, and some might want to use it to sell commercial customers or high-net-worth individuals,” Burtey told Bitcoin Magazine.

In offering such loans to a wide array of customers, Burtey believes that the high cost of borrowing currently associated with such products will come down.

“Today’s interest rates are 12% to 15% if you want to get a loan using your bitcoin as collateral,” said Burtey.

“The rates are high because there are so few financial institutions offering this type of product. We see an opportunity now that the regulations are allowing banks to do things with bitcoin,” he added.

“We think a lot of banks will want to enter this market.”

If Burtey is correct in his prediction that banks are keen to offer bitcoin-backed loans, this will not only lower rates for such loans, but it will also introduce open-source Bitcoin software into the world of banking, which could initiate a new trend in the industry.

But more on that in just a minute. First, some background on Galoy.

Galoy’s History: From Blink Wallet To Lana

Founded in September 2019, Galoy had intentions to enable banks to use bitcoin from the start, but it had to hold off on doing so due to an unfriendly regulatory environment.

So, instead, it focused its efforts on creating and supporting Blink wallet (which was originally called the Bitcoin Beach wallet and which Galoy recently sold), a custodial Bitcoin and Lightning wallet predominantly used at first in El Salvador and then in Bitcoin circular economies globally.

“Galoy’s mission was to onboard banks to Bitcoin five years ago,” said Burtey.

“But the regulatory environment was so bad during the last five years that we decided to create Blink. The reason we are now focusing on our original mission is because with the end of Choke Point 2.0 and the repeal of SAB 121, we think now is the perfect time to help banks adopt Bitcoin.”

Burtey spoke about his work in creating and growing Blink fondly and shared that he had to stop working on the project only because it would be too difficult to continue managing it while also aiming to serve a new type of clientele.

“Blink is a B2C (Business-To-Customer) play, and it’s hard as an early-stage startup to focus on too many things,” explained Burtey.

“Galoy is a B2B (Business-To-Business)-driven business, and we want to work with banks and financial institutions,” he added.

“It’s good to be focused on just one thing.”

And, as mentioned, that one thing will now be Lana.

How Lana Works

Lana is software that Galoy helps banks integrate and manage for a subscription fee. With this software, banks can issue bitcoin-backed loans under the terms they create.

“We’re not the ones deciding how much interest will be charged or anything like that,” explained Burtey.

“We give banks the platform to do this, and then they can figure out their cost of capital, the duration of the loan, the liquidation price for the bitcoin in the loan and the rate at which they want to lend,” he added.

“We’re giving you software, and helping you run and automate that software.”

Something else that Galoy doesn’t do for banks is custody the bitcoin provided as collateral for the loans they issue. Each of the banks with whom the company works is responsible for selecting their own custodian.

“You can go to BitGo or Fireblocks or each loan can have its own multisig,” said Burtey. “We’re agnostic on custody.”

With that said, Lana helps banks monitor the bitcoin in custody so that banks can be aware of whether or not collateral is nearing liquidation levels.

“A key piece of this product is risk management,” said Burtey.

“Bitcoin is volatile, and the bank will need a tool to show that it’s taking calculated risk. So, we’ll provide banks with a dashboard to monitor this risk,” he added.

An example of the risk-monitoring dashboard for bitcoin-backed loans that Galoy has created

Who Will Use Lana?

Galoy is targeting community banks and other smaller financial institutions with this new product mostly because they think these smaller players will benefit most from it — and because the big banks likely won’t need such a product.

“We don’t think JP Morgan will really want to work with us,” said Burtey. “They’re probably building something like this themselves, whereas a smaller bank, a credit union or small company probably isn’t.”

Burtey also understands that smaller lenders’ incorporating Lana as opposed to building something comparable themselves can save these financial institutions a significant amount of time and effort.

“Our goal is to say, ‘Look, you can develop this internally, and it will take you six months, a year or longer depending on how much you know about Bitcoin,’” said Burtey. “‘Or we have a lending product as a service for you, and you can launch it much more quickly.’”

And as Burtey and his team onboard their first round of smaller banks, they’ll not only be making history in enabling more banks to accept bitcoin as collateral for loans, but they’ll potentially be altering the trajectory of banking in general by introducing open-source software to it.

Open-Source Bitcoin Banking

Burtey’s long-term vision for Galoy is to do much more than just help banks issue bitcoin-backed loans. He’s looking to introduce open-source software into banking as more banks begin to embrace Bitcoin.

However, it’s important to note that Lana isn’t open-source just yet. It’s fair-source software, and, under such a license, code becomes open-source after two years.

“It’s a delayed open-source system, but it’s all available on GitHub,” said Burtey. “You can go and try it, test it, and play with it on your own.

Under the fair-source license, no company other than Galoy can sell the product to a bank right now, allowing Galoy to profit while still building with auditable code.

“We sell the deployment, and we help banks to plug in to their custodian,” explained Burtey. “We’re building in the open — but we also want to generate revenue.”

Beyond helping banks implement Lana, Burtey’s wants to develop open-source “core banking software,” as he’s looking to disrupt the “core ledger” oligopoly.

“The core ledger is where banks store the account data, customer information and transaction details,” said Burtey. “It’s the source of truth for banks.”

And only three companies — FIS, Fiserv and Jack Henry — have the core ledger market cornered.

“These are all like hundred billion dollar companies that you’ve probably never heard about because all they do is focus on selling software to banks,” said Burtey.

“Our long-term goal is to disrupt this industry by making something that is open source,” said Burtey. “Today, there is no company that does core banking with the idea of open source, and so we’re working towards this.”

Burtey envisions a world in which open-source software can make it much easier for someone to start a Bitcoin bank. (For those who wince at the words “Bitcoin” and “bank” being used in tandem, might I remind you that it was the legendary Hal Finney himself who wrote that bitcoin-backed banks would serve as a scaling solution.)

“To start a bank today is a very expensive and complicated process,” said Burtey. “You have to pay $100,000 plus just to purchase the core ledger technology.”

Burtey then referenced his own experience in starting Blink wallet, essentially a bitcoin bank run on open-source code, before continuing.

“I just went to El Salvador and started what was effectively my own bank because I wanted to,” said Burtey.

“We need to reinvent how core banking software is being made in the world of Bitcoin, and I think this is where open-source becomes relevant,” he added.

“This is really why I think the world of banking and Bitcoin will be very different from the world of banking with fiat, and I think we’re one of the companies at the forefront of this.”

 Galoy founder and CEO Nicolas Burtey wants to help more borrowers use bitcoin as collateral for loans while introducing open-source software into the traditional banking stack. 

Continue Reading

Shadow Banned

Copyright © 2023 mesh news project // awake, not woke // news, not narrative // deep inside the filter bubble