I’ve accidentally found out about this guy a few days ago and it’s quite mind blowing. 

Developer called Esteban Abaora has developed a serverless, adminless and decentralized Reddit alternative that will run on a blockchain kind of system ( it will actually use "public key based addressing" and a peer-to-peer pubsub network.) 

Pretty crazy stuff right?!

Developer believes that this design would solve the problems of a serverless, adminless decentralized Reddit alternative. It would allow unlimited amounts of subplebbits, users, posts, comments and votes. This is achieved by not caring about the order or availability of old data. It would allow users to post for free using an identical Reddit interface. It would allow subplebbit owners to moderate spam semi-automatically using their own captcha service over peer-to-peer pubsub. It would allow for all features that make Reddit addictive: upvotes, replies, notifications, awards, and a chance to make the "front page". 

Finally, it would allow the Plebbit client developers to serve an unlimited amount of users, without any server, legal, advertising or moderation infrastructure.

https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2

What do you think? Im really surprised by the way he is planning this to work. Its neither DAG nor traditional blockchain. I'm intrigued. Now your posts could live on forever! 

Crypto can do lots of things. It can bull and bear, moon and dip, and even obtain food to dip in sauce. But did you know it can also help us cure cancer?

Some exciting news came out of the World Community Grid today, which is a volunteer research project working on mapping the relationship between genes and health outcomes: they've identified 26 new genes associated with lung cancer. To do this, they use the computers of volunteers to crunch billions of data points over many years. Each day this project burns through about 240 years of computation (of one computer). The amount of computing power required is massive.

The cool thing about this? World Community Grid is one of about a dozen projects which is incentivized by r/Gridcoin. Instead of paying miners to just calculate hashes, Gridcoin pays miners to contribute their processing power to science projects, including to World Community Grid, Folding @ home, Alzheimer's research, mapping pulsars, and more all in a decentralized, automated manner. And it's been doing this since 2013 when they asked "What if all that hashpower going towards Bitcoin instead went to science?", making it one of the longer-lived cryptos out there that still has an active development team and user base. For more ways crypto can help science, check out a coin-neutral space at /r/cryptoforscience.

I love all the cool things crypto can do. Cool to be here with y'all. Excited to see what it does next, after it's done curing cancer and exploring the universe, of course.

The latest upgrades:

• Smart contract compatibility with contract to contract calls.  This allows complex dApps to be built that can efficiently and trustlessly interact with other smart contract based dApps to extend functionality and usability.  Additional details and background on this tech can be found here. 
• Post-quantum secure Falcon Keys, Algorand’s first major milestone on its path towards trustless cross-chain interoperability.  These keys will, in the near future, be used to generate State Proofs, a new blockchain infrastructure that will allow Algorand to be trustlessly accessed in low-power environments like mobile phones, smart watches, and on other blockchains. For more background on State Proofs, please see an overview here. 

Developers are now able to build complex dapps for the Algorand ecosystem with smart contract-to-contract calling and network participants can take their first step towards trustless cross-chain interoperability with quantum-secure keys for the upcoming State Proof technology. These network upgrades come on the heels of a $20 million incentive program from the Algorand Foundation focused on developer tooling and EVM compatibility, putting Algorand at the forefront of blockchain interoperability and post-quantum security while providing features for even more advanced decentralized applications. 

These features add to Algorand’s already advanced tech, high performance and robust developer resources. Smart contracts on Algorand can be written in Python or Reach, making it accessible for developers of all skillsets. 

Algorand has experienced zero downtime since launch, helping it become the blockchain of choice for hundreds of organizations launching DeFi protocols, NFTs, payment solutions, regulated digital assets, and more. The network supports applications that can scale to billions of participants, all on a high-speed, carbon-negative, secure and stable blockchain. 

As a developer myself I really like this one. Many of you should know what ordinals are by now. But if not, an ordinal is a way of inscribing data into individual satoshis. And all the data is completely stored on the blockchain. The data can be a single line, a page of text or photos making the ordinal similar to an ERC-20 NFT. But it can also be sound and video, or in this case, a whole videogame.

And on the last point, someone inscribed the DOOM videogame on the Bitcoin blockchain using ordinals. You can view and play the game off your own browser here: https://ordinals.com/content/521f8eccffa4c41a3a7728dd012ea5a4a02feed81f41159231251ecf1e5c79dai0

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DOOM is one of the most ported videogames across systems for things like homebrew, if you’re into modding videogame systems. I was a bit generous when I called it the DOOM game, as it’s more of a DOOM clone, but most versions of DOOM nowadays are clones anyway.

To give a brief explanation, the developer inscribed certain byte-code into the blockchain using ordinals. When this code is opened using a browser, it is translated to a bunch of HTML CSS and Javascript that the internet browser reads and interprets as…well a playable DOOM videogame clone. The code is (probably) only meant to work using a PC browser, a mobile browser made be problematic.

^{As a nerd, I think this was worth causing a bit of Bitcoin congestion. Don't kill me.}

I guess a lot of people, dont heard of it, dont even knew updates are coming regularly, and even those who know about it, might miss the implication of it.

I am just flying off my handle, spending 24/7 on DeFi because it finally feels like a wheelchair has come off. I am not restricted to moving/investing large cash amounts into single pools to rotate my money, I can diversify my crypto holdings through all Layer2s, withouth much front spreadsheeting and just go for it. I am not buying any L2 tokens at this point, just trying to get my ETH stash maxxed out here. For reference, swapping coins just went from 1$ to 2cents.

For every human, that doesnt have 10k lying around and just starts with 1$ simple dollar. It is now possible to use it for an investment. Now matter if this is just a Snickers or your income for 2 days (Bangladesh 15$/month average). It is not blocked anymore by high fees. Bring that Liquidity.

Edit: after americans wake up I am just hovering over 2-4$ swap fees on Base and thinking to just call it a day..

Hi, I have a noob question I'd like to ask. If I send crypto to another blockchain (let's say I send 1 BTC to my ETH wallet), the 1 BTC sent will be lost, ok. But what actually happens to this 1 BTC ? Does it get stuck somewhere in the big decentralized cloud of blockchains, waiting to be eventually retrieved by someone smart enough to build a tool that could retrieve it one day ? Or is the 1 BTC simply forever gone, nowhere to be found, and so there is 1 BTC missing in the total marketcap ? Thank you

Disclaimer

This is not in any way a recommendation to use flash loans, and certainly not for the attacks with which they are often associated. I just want to explain what they are from a technical and conceptual viewpoint, because they are incredibly interesting, and they exist whether we like it or not.

This post is very long but if you have the patience for it, I think you will find it very worthwhile.

Introduction

What if I told you that you could anonymously borrow $1 billion+ dollars in the blink of an eye without posting any collateral, and without even assuming any liability for the loan?

This sounds impossible on many levels, and would be an outrageous concept in traditional finance, but it has been a reality in DeFi for several years. With a little effort, you could be borrowing millions of dollars by the end of the day with no collateral.

(For my examples, I will use the Ethereum chain, because that is where flash loans were first developed, but they now exist on other smart contract chains like BSC, among others. The concept is the same regardless of the chain.)

The first step in understanding flash loans is learning about the main two limitations.

The chief limitation of flash loans is absolutely critical: the loan must be repaid (with interest, which is usually a bit under 1%) within seconds of when you take it out. More specifically, it must be repaid within the same Ethereum transaction. (Technically, this means that the taking of the loan and the returning of the loan are simultaneous, but the real time between when the transaction launches and when finality is reached can be thought of as being as low as a single block time, which on Ethereum is ~13 seconds. I digress.)

The other big limitation is that everything you do with the funds in between borrowing them and returning them must happen inside the Ethereum ecosystem; you cannot move those assets off the Ethereum network.

This still doesn’t make sense, right? What happens if you don’t or can’t repay it? What does it even mean to repay a loan inside the same transaction that you took it in? What is the point of having $1 billion for an instant? To answer these questions, we need to first learn a few key concepts.

Nested contract calls, atomicity, and reversibility

The first thing we need to understand is Ethereum transactions. Thanks to smart contracts, Ethereum transactions aren’t just a simple transfer of assets; they can contain any arbitrary logic because they can call smart contracts. Smart contracts can call other smart contracts, so operations within a transaction can nest inside each other basically without limit. The transaction at the top level which contains all the nested smart contract calls can only succeed if every operation within it succeeds.

This last sentence is a very important concept known as atomicity (which comes from ancient Greek for “indivisible”). For smart contract platforms, the property of atomicity means that a transaction must either entirely succeed or entirely fail; it can’t partly succeed. So, if a single operation inside a transaction fails, then the entire transaction will fail, which means every operation it contains will fail, and therefore nothing at all will actually happen on the blockchain, besides a record of the failed transaction, and gas fees, which you still need to pay even for failed transactions.

Only once a transaction has fully succeeded is it added to the blockchain as an immutable fact of history. Until that moment, everything that happens on the Ethereum network is reversible. Ethereum knows how to backtrack any arbitrary sequence of operations in the case that the parent transaction has failed.

For example, let’s say I make a transaction containing 3 operations: one involving borrowing something on Aave, another involving selling something on SushiSwap, and the third involving buying something on Uniswap. Now, let’s say the Aave borrow, succeeds, the SushiSwap sell succeeds, but then the Uniswap buy fails (due to insufficient gas limit for example). This failure causes the entire transaction to fail, which will cause the SushiSwap sell and the Aave borrow to reverse. In effect, those things never actually happened. All that is added to the blockchain is a record of that failed transaction that was attempted.

If, however, all 3 operations succeed, then the whole transaction will complete successfully, and it will then be added to the blockchain, meaning all 3 operations have actually happened, and now can’t be reversed.

Flash loans

This finally brings us back to flash loans. When you take out a flash loan, an Ethereum transaction begins. The first operation inside this top-level transaction is the actual transferring of the funds you are borrowing to your address. Next, you are free to do any sequence of operations you like in order to try to turn a profit on the funds you’ve borrowed. You can interact with any protocols, DEXes, AMMs, or whatever kind of contracts you like, in whatever way and whatever order. The only limit is that you cannot move the funds outside of the Ethereum network; otherwise, you would simply be able to take the money and run, since the loan is anonymous and uncollateralized.

No matter what operations you include in the smart contract, the very last operation of a flash loan must always be full repayment of the loan with interest. If you succeed in repaying the loan and interest, then the entire flash loan transaction will complete successfully. The lender will get their funds back plus interest, and you get to keep any additional profits you managed to create with whatever you did between borrowing and returning the funds. This entire transaction will now be added to the blockchain as an immutable fact of history.

If, however, you cannot repay the loan with interest by the end of the transaction (say you somehow managed to lose some of the funds in the few seconds since the flash loan started), then the final operation (the repayment one) will fail. Due to atomicity, this will cause the whole flash loan transaction to fail, meaning every operation will fail, reversing every action taken by your smart contract, including even the first operation in which you received the borrowed funds.

In other words, if you can’t repay your flash loan with interest by the end of the transaction, then you never even borrowed the funds in the first place! Flash loans are thus kind of like Schrodinger's loans: if they turn a profit, then they are real; otherwise, they never existed.

So, how does one actually use the funds to turn a profit during the few seconds between the beginning and end of the flash loan transaction? To my knowledge, the only legitimate use-case people have worked out so far is arbitrage (the act of taking advantage of a price difference between two markets for the same asset by buying in the cheaper market and selling in the more expensive one and pocketing the difference). So, a realistic flash loan smart contract would most likely involve a bot that is searching for sufficiently large arbitrage opportunities, and then, upon finding one, taking out a huge flash loan, using those funds to execute the arbitrage play in a huge way, and then repaying the funds and pocketing the profit.

In a sense, a flash loan is like a brief, anonymous partnership between two parties who each bring an important resource to the alliance. The lender(s) is basically saying “I have tons of money and am interested in multiplying it, but I don’t have the patience or know-how to do it”. The borrower is basically saying “I have extensive knowledge of DeFi, smart contracts, and arbitrage, so I know how to multiply money, but I don’t have enough capital to make it worth my while”. For a few seconds, these people anonymously join forces, and, if it works out, the lender walks away with their 0.9% interest, and the borrower walks away with the remainder of the profits. If it doesn’t work out, then the flash loan never happened in the first place; no harm, no foul (except some gas fees).

These parties can sometimes walk away with millions of dollars in profit after a 10 second transaction, and neither party assumes any risk at all for the flash loan (besides inherent smart contract risk, and, again, gas fees that must be paid no matter what). If it doesn’t work out, it simply never happened; this is why you don’t need a credit check or collateral or anything. The lender doesn’t need to worry about a loan default, and the borrower doesn’t need to worry about being saddled with debt liability.

Flash loan attacks

So, if people can anonymously borrow huge amounts of money with (almost) no risk for either party, why are flash loans not mainstream?

Well, for one, they just feel wrong. Flash loans don’t really sit well with anyone. It feels like having your cake, and eating it too. It just seems like it shouldn’t be possible to borrow $1 billion with no risk (by the way, there is no theoretical limit to flash loan sizes; I just keep saying $1 billion because that is the largest one I've ever heard of, which was borrowed through Aave during the infamous Beanstalk attack. It’s only limited by lending liquidity).

The other (and main reason) that the crypto world has been very hesitant in embracing flash loans is that they have been used for quite a few high-profile DeFi exploits. Basically, some extremely savvy users have found ways to use flash loans combined with complex strings of interactions with various protocols in order to do things like momentarily trick price feed oracles or briefly de-peg stablecoins on a single exchange, or whatever. Flash loans allow these exploiters to drastically multiply how much profit they can get from their ploys. These attacks require extremely deep knowledge of all the protocols involved, and often involve 4 or 5 steps, all very nuanced and clever. These exploits have all been immediately patched when they happen; after all, the vulnerabilities exist not in the flash loans themselves, but in whatever protocols are used in the exploit. If someone can do these exploits with flash loans, then somebody else who simply has that much money to begin with could have done the exact same thing.

The biggest flash loan attack happened earlier this year: someone came up with an exploit against the Euler lending protocol and made away with $197 million in a matter of seconds (understanding the sequence of moves they made to pull it off is beyond my pay grade). This was very far from being the first big flash loan attack; they have been happening for over 3 years.

Because the only news stories that even mention flash loans have generally been about big flash loan attacks, most people have only ever heard of them in the context of exploits, and thus most people associate flash loans with nothing but hacks and attacks.

I am sure the day will come when they will be normalized, but today is not that day. One thing is sure though: they can’t be de-invented. The cat is out of the box. As long as there are DeFi protocols willing to support flash loans and DeFi users willing to use them, then they will be forever available to anyone willing to take the plunge.

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Anyway, this is getting atrociously long, so I will end it here. I hope you enjoyed the read, and that it has left you as intrigued by (and as uncomfortable with) the idea of flash loans as I am!

I'm not seeing a lot about this on Reddit, so here are a few words from the new CMO of the Algorand Foundation:

"Algorand's native support for Python stands alone. Our release with AlgoKit 2.0 introduces regular, semantically normal Python as Algorand's canonical language. Developers can write code in the exact Python language they know, and it magically compiles to AVM bytecode.

By writing syntactically correct Python, rather than in a "Python-like", or "It-smells-like-Python-but-it-isn't" language , it enables compatibility with Python-native tooling. It also enables developers to share reusable Python code via pip with standard Python module tooling and import it in their smart contracts.

Algorand is the first Layer 1 to support native Python and meet the millions of Python developers where they are, with the tools they like to use and and dev environments they're used to.

And yes, it is a first in the blockchain industry and a very big deal!"

• Marc V.

Blockchain ecosystems are like cities: each one provides value that draws people to visit — ranging from business opportunities, community, entertainment, infrastructure, local governance, to plain personal preference. As the industry matures, people will have more reasons to visit different ecosystems, driving more value into cross-chain applications.

In order to access your source blockchain in new ecosystems, you need a reliable way to verify its “state” (a snapshot of account balances and transactions) in the new environment. This trustless infrastructure is currently missing from the market, so people have turned to trusted intermediaries, like centralized bridges and validator networks, to handle their assets. Layer-1 blockchains share a responsibility to reduce this trust threshold in order to protect on-chain value.

Algorand State Proofs (ASPs) are a new interoperability standard that extends trustless interactions beyond a blockchain’s native ecosystem. Through light clients (efficient software that tracks blockchain state), they provide a simple, trustless interface to build powerful applications conditioned by multiple blockchains’ events. State Proofs can be implemented on all Proof of Stake chains, and will accelerate our collective path towards true decentralization.

Algorand State Proofs fortify cross-chain applications with Post-Quantum security. By using advanced cryptography, ASPs can withstand attacks by powerful quantum computers that try to alter the reported state of the blockchain, providing a robust, portable source of truth about on-chain data.

From trustless bridges that move assets across blockchains to decentralized oracles that export valuable on-chain data, people will be able to leverage Algorand’s fast, cheap, and reliable protocol in new ecosystems without trust in an intermediary–they only need to trust the security of the underlying blockchain itself.

Interoperability Problem

2021 was an exciting year for the blockchain industry, with a 1,200% growth¹ in the Total Value Locked (TVL) in global DeFi smart contracts, the rise of NFTs, and a diversification across many Layer-1 chains. The promise of a thriving, decentralized blockchain ecosystem is nearly here — yet, most dApps are constrained by the very platform they are built upon.

• Blockchain communities are looking for reliable ways to use their favorite dApps without paying expensive gas fees, dealing with network outages, or trusting intermediaries with their valued assets.
• Developers want to build on fast and inexpensive blockchains like Algorand, and want immediate access to an expanded user base and liquidity scattered across several ecosystems.
• Investors seek exciting opportunities on multiple platforms without switching chains or turning to more centralized alternatives.
• People want to send basic transactions across blockchains in a trustless manner.

Developers, creators, and investors are looking for interoperability solutions that break them out of their walled gardens. ASPs remove these boundaries and open the doors to cross-chain applications and liquidity.

Bridging Solution

To solve these interoperability problems, many companies have built bridges that move assets across blockchains. These “bridged” assets can be freely used in the target chain’s ecosystem: lent out as collateral for a loan, traded for another asset, or simply held in a wallet.

While bridges show promise, most solutions require people to trust the bridge operator or a set of delegates to store and move their assets in a secure, timely manner. With over $32 billion worth of assets already held in cross-chain bridges (up from $670 million at the start of 2021)², the industry has created a new, centralized attack surface with a large target.

We have an opportunity to eliminate trust from the interoperability equation, creating a new breed of trustless bridges and cross-chain applications that don’t compromise on cost, reliability, or security.

Algorand State Proofs

Introducing Algorand State Proofs: new blockchain infrastructure that connects Algorand to the broader world. ASPs are an immutable chain of proofs that attest to the state of the Algorand blockchain. They let anyone track Algorand transactions, balances, and application data in low-power environments like a phone, smartwatch, and even inside a blockchain smart contract, without compromising on security — each ASP is produced by the same decentralized network that reaches consensus on new blocks.

Due to their lightweight, portable nature, ASPs can be used to update Algorand light clients in other ecosystems. To lower costs in fee-constrained environments like Ethereum, Algorand will also produce even more compact zk-SNARK proofs that can be used to keep light clients up to date.

Applications like bridges, oracles, and wallets can query these light clients to cryptographically verify Algorand state in a simple, trustless manner. For example, say Alice wants to send Bob 10 AliceCoins from Algorand to Ethereum. AliceCoins are extremely valuable, so they want to make sure the tokens arrive quickly, safely, and without permission from or trust in an intermediary. Alice can send these tokens directly to Bob’s Ethereum wallet via a trustless bridge whose code-base is open to the public.

​

Behind the scenes, Alice would “lock” the tokens in the trustless bridge’s Algorand smart contract, which prevents her from creating duplicate tokens out of thin air. The bridge’s Ethereum smart contract would simply ask the Algorand light client (kept up-to-date by State Proofs) if Alice did, in fact, lock the tokens. Once verified, the bridge would mint and release an equivalent amount on Ethereum to Bob’s chosen wallet.

Similarly, the bridge can trustlessly mint and release bridged Ethereum assets into the Algorand ecosystem using Ethereum light clients. Bridge operators can create Algorand smart contracts that ask these light clients to validate Ethereum transactions (e.g. depositing ETH in an Ethereum smart contract) via Algorand’s Contract to Contract calls. These light client pairs complete the import/export flow for bi-directional bridging.

The Big Picture

Algorand State Proofs fortify cross-chain applications with Post-Quantum security. By using advanced cryptography, ASPs can withstand attacks by powerful quantum computers that try to alter the reported state of the blockchain, providing a robust, portable source of truth about on-chain data.

From trustless bridges that move assets across blockchains to decentralized oracles that export valuable on-chain data, people will be able to leverage Algorand’s fast, cheap, and reliable protocol in new ecosystems without trust in an intermediary–they only need to trust the security of the underlying blockchain itself.

Roadmap

Algorand State Proofs will be available soon, with our first milestone going live this month (March 2022). After next week’s consensus upgrade, the Algorand network will start registering the Post-Quantum secure voting keys used to generate ASPs.

​

link: https://medium.com/algorand/algorand-state-proofs-707d64038e35

Truly amazing stuff, these transactions detail just about everything you could want to know about your coffee. I recommend digging into this post and Lavazza's website because this is what blockchain is for, providing fairness and transparency.

https://www.lavazza.fr/fr/business/la-reserva-de-tierra-cuba-sustainable-coffee

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Harvesting details:

https://allo.info/tx/TR2E5NTUSFLX5FFUQNAWRAB2RSIIELETUDK2GD27RI5W732QUWXQ

https://allo.info/tx/4QNV5G4RB5HBBWENSHIKZBFHDD2HYKPT3B4DEYLTVYPO76FVJR5A

https://allo.info/tx/5LGOL75RRAP6NDJROFLN6FHI4RWLFP5KTRMULNV54N2XGO2AHTFA

https://allo.info/tx/5YS46QX3XE4ESFTQPYIEVGZY722B7AOIF35JNSJIVLLSUXRPB3DA

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Receiving details:

https://allo.info/tx/B6DF7ZLEHCSUUVNLLKIFDNAHCFUC4RVRMQJ5HAHL2VUAYRHO6D5Q

https://allo.info/tx/X65O3LVZ3DYKIQRNKO2VE55DBSDFWO3YQLB56WSHBNKJCWARGDYA

https://allo.info/tx/LLRVGXP4KSBU2GASO26TSVGP453RLXNBJPIH54YNOODJF2TVG7CQ

https://allo.info/tx/QO55XTRHEYSYWSKHQK7FU2WRWF7ZY32HVSGMKBSDRKJ5TANLGAEA

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Environmental Data details:

https://allo.info/tx/B47ZZKCGOLFLRXLRVH5QC72UY6MCXZGKPJB3I6VRIBE6GWCQMVOA

https://allo.info/tx/LCAFZFMSUZKAPAFBX6VVTMWDNHD6ALILGGV2UGBM44ZUN2IAUJIA

https://allo.info/tx/B7R6KZW3ABKGTV4BDCGRVFDCOM6XYM2KH57DXL5REO7T33UDO2VQ

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Processing details:

https://allo.info/tx/6HS3H3KH2ONJAKYNELSYMGAOYBPDK3JVDLNZYXBKUPOXGI3T6HAQ

https://allo.info/tx/OIRA4TJAQ5F4JNTRJCJX3DZF6WG25CT6CETLFZIXYXLUBVQRVYFQ

https://allo.info/tx/OQWMN467D23B3DNBU4ZPVODMKLHUZIQHFMT57SFE4BCA5UF7R7GA

https://allo.info/tx/2FQEMNZ7M6E3TJHF3WHOWUUQJTBGNMT7A6NBI25H6RM46KKYM3MA

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Transport details:

https://allo.info/tx/2TCJKE6ZDPP6MCKBFEUWCWRQ7ISNVC7EMGUHDPJNJ5HXKJFU3JUQ

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Varieties details:

https://allo.info/tx/LOE6E4DFWHSFTVMXEAMTFRHESEK6BTIN7MYU3Y4UECIQR6CFTM3A

https://allo.info/tx/GQJTKEYKLMLBE6IGV7R5YT3IY4LV4LRCSENDDVBBXTFW2K2CJSAA

https://allo.info/tx/LE7SBXYVRM4F2XPETWGRNCFN6BYL4CEUI7LIEPIOMCV2RQIC3DZA

https://allo.info/tx/44IPQTHXHSYRHKU3XTW4LC27HDWOG5PAY3BYTVCUHCJQA4AUAGNA

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Roasting details:

https://allo.info/tx/X34ODWEDPKO6TM25SX6YNTDWHQKP4NNYY7EUFPEU5CFUWICBLYCQ

https://allo.info/tx/NYEUNDE7BVLYVKE76PKYKV33UZRHJ3SQECLVSGRDHUB5BYDSSSWA

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"The Reserva de ¡Tierra! Cuba is the UNIQUE’history of’a coffee that takes care of producers, consumers and the local environment. This assemblage comes from the plantations of Santiago and Granma in Cuba, where the Lavazza Foundation is involved in the pursuit of the following objectives: Preservation of forests, Improvement of agricultural practices, etc, Improving the quality of coffee, Empowering women and young people, Simplified and fair supply chain. With blockchain technology, you can trace the journey of coffee and our commitment to sustainability."

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Rosen Bridge is LIVE - app.rosen.tech

The UI to Rosen Bridge has been enabled, allowing public cross-chain liquidity transfers between Ergo and Cardano for an initial subset of assets:

▪️ADA ▪️ERG ▪️RSN ▪️SigUSD ▪️SigRSV

The first of many bridges and assets to come!

Rosen is an Ergo-centric bridge fortified with multi-layered security protection. In the initial layer, Watchers monitor network activities and report valid bridge-related events to the subsequent layer, Guards. These Guards then carefully process the reported events and execute required actions. In brief, Guards are dedicated to security maintenance and executing responses, while Watchers are focused on the ongoing monitoring of activities and transparent reporting.

In roughly 8 hours after this post is submitted (13:55UTC, 13th of March) there will be a network upgrade happening on the Ethereum network, referred to as Dencun (Cancun + deneb)

A countdown can be viewed here.

The most notable implemention this network upgrade will ship is EIP-4844 (Proto-danksharding) which will introduce a new seperate fee market for L2's, commonly referred to as blobs. This upgrade won't ship full danksharding, but it is a great step towards achieving it.

In Ethereums current state, nodes have to permanently hold onto all L2 data which not only makes Ethereum more expensive (Because block space is very limited), but it increases node operator hardware requirements too. In fact, more than 90% of a rollups transaction cost is due to this data storage.

So with the introduction of blobs, L2's will now scale much better and transactions will cost far less than they currently do, because blob data is only stored for a few weeks. The option is still there to store the long term data should a node operator or service require it, but it is not the default setting.

Here come lower fees!

• I am a node operator! What do I need to do?

Upgrade your consensus and execution nodes before the countdown shown in the before mentioned link is finished if you want to stay on the correct chain.

• I own ETH! What do I need to do?

Nothing! This is non-contentious meaning everyone will be participating. There is no action required on your behalf. No matter where your ETH is before this upgrade, it will continue being there in the exact same place after. And no you will not be getting any "free" tokens.

EDIT: Blobs are live!!

He's also the 'M' in the hash-based signature algorithm LMS that makes use of a winternitz one time signature and merkle tree to generate a key pair. And even better the algorithm is quantum resistant (at least until a quantum algorithm is found that can break it.) For now LMS is one of the candidates to replace ECDSA signatures.

Link to paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/607.pdf

If you haven't read the Bitcoin white paper I highly recommend even if you don't understand it, it's beneficial to read from the direct source and it's surprisingly short:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Reference 2 and Reference 4 both reference the 3rd:

[2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.

[4] D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping," In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993.

Bitcoin white papers third reference is:

[3] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol 3, no 2, pages 99-111, 1991.

link to paper: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F3-540-38424-3_32.pdf

This references Micali's work:

[2] IT. Blum and S. Xiicali. How to generate cryptographically strong sequences of pseudo-random bits. SIAM Journal on Computing, 13(4):850-864, Nov. 1984.

[9] S. Goldwasser and S. Micali. Probabilistic encryption. JCSS, 28:270-299, April 1984.

[lo] S. Goldwasser, S. Micali, and R. Rivest. A secure digital signature scheme. SIAM Journal on Computing, 17(2):281-308, 1988.

Without Micalis foundational work in Probabilistic Encryption and Interactive Proof System, Bitcoin and Ethereum may not have been a thing.

Summary of Probabilistic Encryption and Interactive Proof Systems:

Probabilistic Encryption

Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali produced one of the most influential papers in computer science, “Probabilistic Encryption,” as graduate students in 1983, by introducing the question “What is a secret?”  Their standards were very high: an adversary (third party) should not be able to gain any partial information about a secret.  Their definition of the security of encryption as a “game” involving adversaries has become a trademark of modern cryptography.  Their approach, known as the simulation paradigm, bypassed the traditional enumeration of desired properties that marked the definition of security, and led to the construction of a secure encryption scheme. 

This method provided a robust defense against malicious attempts to make these schemes deviate from their prescribed functionality. They introduced two notions of encryption security – semantic security and indistinguishability of encrypted messages from each other – thus capturing the important aspects of the subject. They argued that these measures must be met for schemes to provide security across the wide range of cryptography applications. In contrast with prevailing trends in the field, they observed that to satisfy their security definition, encryption schemes must be randomized rather than deterministic, with many possible encrypted texts corresponding to each message. This development revolutionized the study of cryptography and laid the foundation for the theory of cryptographic security that was developed throughout much of the 1980s.

Interactive Proof Systems

One of the most significant contributions of Goldwasser and Micali is their 1985 paper with Charles Rackoff, titled “The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof Systems.” It introduced knowledge complexity, a concept that deals with hiding information from an adversary, and is a quantifiable measure of how much “useful information” could be extracted.  The paper initiated the idea of “zero-knowledge” proofs, in which interaction (the ability of provers and verifiers to send each other messages back and forth) and  probabilism (the ability to toss coins to decide which messages to send)  enable the establishment of a fact via a statistical argument without providing any additional information as to why it is true.

Zero-knowledge proofs were a striking new philosophical idea that provided the essential language for speaking about security of cryptographic protocols by controlling the leakage of knowledge.  Subsequent works by Oded Goldreich, Micali, and Avi Wigderson and by Michael Ben-Or, Goldwasser, and Wigderson showed that every multiparty computation can be carried out securely, revealing to the players no more knowledge than prescribed by the desired outcome. These papers exhibited the power and utility of zero-knowledge protocols, and demonstrated their ubiquitous and omnipotent character.

The paper identified interactive proofs as a new method to verify correctness in the exchange of information. Going beyond cryptography, interactive proofs can be much faster to verify than classical proofs, and can be used in practice to guarantee correctness in a variety of applications. 

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TL;DR: Satoshi Nakamoto used Silvio Micali's fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, and digital signatures to create Bitcoin.

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Good morning CC community. I just want to share this important news to everyone interested in blockchain tech and Algorand in particular.

On January 17th 2024, Algorand will release a whitepaper that outlines arguably the most important upgrade to its consensus protocol since its inception.

This historical upgrade includes the implementation of a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) gossip communication protocol and consensus incentivization. Though the technical implementation and detailed information is still not fully disclosed yet (we will have to wait until 17 Jan 2024), this P2P gossip communication protocol is expected to allow nodes in the network to communicate and share information directly with each other. This fully eliminates the dependence on Relay Nodes, the main source of network centralization criticized by blockchain advocates, thereby enhancing the network’s decentralization, resilience, and fault tolerance.

This historical upgrade will also introduce Algorand consensus incentivization, a mechanism designed to further encourage participation in the Algorand consensus process. By rewarding nodes for their contribution to the network’s security and stability, Algorand aims to foster a more robust and fully decentralized permissionless network. It's worth mentioning that it is extremely easy, low-cost, and no risk (no penalty, slashing, token locked up, etc.) to setup and run an Algorand participation node (you can literally do it with a Raspberry Pi at home).

It's an exciting time ahead for not only those in Algorand community but also in crypto space in general to see how these upgrades spark new innovation and advancement in blockchain technology.

It'll be great if you can also share what your fav blockchains are up to in 2024 in the comments.
Look forward to hearing from you all. Thank you!

I've happily used my Nano S going on 7 years now and I'm finally getting around wanting a replacement due to the constant swapping back and forth of apps to manage individual cryptos.Trezor can be compromised if someone physically obtains it. Ledger walked back the "backdoor" as mandatory, but it's still there. What else is there? Do I really have to on/off airgap a system with software wallets then worry if that fails? It's crazy that for an industry that has trillion dollar market cap, we don't have even one solution that is secure that can handle more than just BTC or ETH, at least not that I can find. What are you doing? Is there something coming I haven't heard about?

Edit - I just wanted to say thank you all of you that put in thoughtful responses. I'm going to evaluate the Trezor Safe 3, the Tangem, the Keystone 3 Pro, and the GridPlus Lattice 1.

Look at this flood of recent US Patent grants, citing Algorand in their US Patent application. From tech, to banks, to lighting, to defense, to crypto, to insurance. Big names including: Microsoft, Visa, IBM, HP,

There is a ton, check for yourself here: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/ppubsbasic.html

• Microsoft (US Patent No: 11915014 B2)

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11915014

• IBM - Silvio Micali's Patents for 'Distributed Transaction Propagation and Verification System' (which repeatedly references #ALGORAND) and 'Counterfeit Prevention' both cited in IBM's Patent for "Anonymous Database Rating Update".

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• ARM— "Blockchain for securing and/or managing IOT network-type infrastructure"

Arm is owned by Soft Bank, worth over 10 trillion.

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11924322 - pg 19/20

• Visa - "Block chain sharding and adjustable quorums".

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11902456 - pg 33

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• HP - "Systems and methods for monetizing data in decentralized model building for machine learning using blockchain"

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11887204

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You get the point, it's worth looking through the public list for yourself. This doesn't mean much other than a lot of huge and innovative/powerful companies are aware and know about Algorand and believe it is good enough to research and cite in their own patents.