Crypto
Bitcoin Education Is A Way Out Of Globalist Oppression For Ethiopia
This is an opinion editorial by Kal Kassa, the head of business development at hoseki and an Ethiopian Bitcoiner.
Various multinational institutions are failing to complete their intended missions and objectives. Institutions like the United Nations and the many offices they work with publish narratives of “sustainable finance reforms,” but recent events in Canada, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands share characteristics that may help the research of dynamic groups in various nation-states today.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is arguably the diplomatic capital of Africa. With increasing aid, investment and high-risk financing from various institutions over the past century, Ethiopia has trended toward being a feudalist monarchy and then a Marxist/Leninist State. Most recently, our history consists of revolutionary democracy under a collection of poly-ethnic federalist states.
As these dynamic populations gain greater access to freedom tools like telecommunications and bitcoin, I suspect there will be “good deflation,” as captured by Jeff Booth in “The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future.”
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
We are seeing innovations on the Lightning Network and most recently, with the FediMint scaling solution. To catalyze our imagination further, I assume we may see case-studies within tribes and villages living off-grid. As this education emerges, we will enter a new phase in our financial history where a village can request the audit of its village elders and receive a verifiable response on a trustless ledger. I imagine that will bring billions of people into this digital century.
Understanding channels and how they relate to community safety will yield a growing bounty. Social contracts and difficult questions of collective security will increasingly be negotiated without the interference of global institutions like the United Nations and the many more three-letter institutions that are proving to be cancerous, vestigial organs. Instead, decentralized tools and tech-savvy uncles will help groups and identities build consensus.
Through unknown events outlined in “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy” and unknown events that factor for data and coercion, I believe suspended pockets of value will become unlocked as cheaper microprocessors yield a growing market share. There are brave thinkers that imagine this will accelerate productivity across many industries across the world. I imagine more of this innovation will take place as source code that is freed from where it is currently hosted. I imagine recent failures of various non-fungible token (NFT) “tribes” will accelerate innovations and data value in cyberspace. Intellectual property rights, in addition to the trade agreements and unproductive tariff rates that govern global trade will also go through a worldwide reckoning. Negotiations with the World Trade Organization are ongoing and Ethiopia has yet to surrender its marketplace sovereignty. Poor countries like Ethiopia are positioned to benefit from these phugoid-like volatility cycles.
Most interesting to Ethiopia and Ethiopians will be what that means for institutions such as the United Nations. Beyond my limited conclusions, I suspect there will be more forensic audits of various institutions that claim to represent a state or flag. I highly suspect these institutions use online ad and promotion tools (both official and unofficial) to influence targeted populations. As detailed in “The Sovereign Individual,” some of these truths may be inconvenient and difficult to fathom for the statist or the central banker in all of us.
Community
“Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds, for riches do not last forever; and does a crown endure to all generations?” — Proverbs 27:23
In late 2017, at an overpriced brunch in Addis Ababa, I was made aware of something called “Bitcoin.” This wasn’t the first time I heard the word from a peer, but this was the first time I heard it referred to as a tool for Ethiopians. This may very well be a call to action to every principled member of the community. In the increasing number of countries where the State has become the enemy, or at best an untrusted third party, Bitcoin will be the tool of financial emancipation. Living in Addis Ababa as a privileged person of a diaspora gives me some views into these events. Most urgently, new peace treaties are inevitable during periods of collapse.
In the 14th century, hawala was being used to facilitate trade on the Silk Road, a trade route that involved much exchange between countries from Asia to the Mediterranean and North Africa — not to be confused with the Silk Road website.
As we move into a new era, I have a growing suspicion that trade routes will become unbound from archaic laws, and freedom between markets and large populations will catalyze the growth that the world desperately needs.
Before my family immigrated to the United States, my father, like his father before him, used open-source tools to protect his property in Ethiopia. Dubbed “Kalash” from its Russian translation, this tool was indispensable for various groups within this past century.
My father was a classically trained engineer during the 1970s and worked in search of petroleum deposits among unforgiving land formations in the Ogaden Region of Ethiopia that borders Somalia. He sporadically reminds me about energy data that was falsified in the name of an imagined collective during that period. In 1994, my father and our family were awarded a “diversity visa” and relocated to the U.S. For the next decade or so, working as a technician on the manufacturing floor at Tyco International in Silicon Valley was much more lucrative than digging empty ditches for oil barons in East Africa.
At present, the information and data wars in Ethiopia are most evident in ancient cities with various reinforcing cleavages and an inability to protect their properties and their lives. The Marxist/Leninist regime removed weapons from my parents’ home as they came into power throughout the cities and villages of Ethiopia. Today, I suspect open-source tools of peace and the patient, God-fearing education we practice daily will accelerate our gradual liberation.
Education
“For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” — Ecclesiastes 9:4
Officially crowned in 1930, the most peculiar appointment of the late-Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was that “He held the portfolio of Minister of Education in his own hands until 1966.” Historians today are left with his relentless pursuit of education, donating his palace to the nation’s first university and sending students into study abroad programs all around the world. His Imperial Majesty was if nothing else an educator of principle and dignity.
Less than 10 years later, after easing the educational influences of Ethiopian students, a flurry of Soviet-sponsored and student-led protests, seasoned with an unhealthy reaction of American-led intervention, spurred a dark age from which we have yet to fully emerge.
From 1974 to 1991 Ethiopia became a communist state. At the base layer of our modern education, our successes (and modern disappointments) are captured best by Dr. Aklilu Habte as he lectured at the Library of Congress — the context of which is that he left Ethiopia shortly after the Marxist-Leninist revolution. The content more directly discusses compromised quality at institutions of higher education. Politically appointed educators, as our nation’s first Minister of Education repeatedly observed, is a very troubling and worrying trend. Today, Ethiopia’s education has been arguably debased beyond recognition.
This separation of principles from the monetary base continues to cause a disproportionate amount of pain in Ethiopia. Most evident and most paralyzing may be the debasement of human life. I suspect this may have something to do with the state-sponsored historical legacy of ethnic federalism. It may be beyond mercy that in the ’90s (just a few years following Rwanda’s history) our institution-led leaders requested Ethiopians to identify themselves beyond name and the various information fields we are used to in the West. Instead, in Ethiopia, we must always be reminded that the ethnic identity of each citizen was branded on state-issued identification cards. This statist culture of control and labeling at the ethnic level equates to racism and catalyzes violent tendencies to unprotected nationality’s tribes in rural Ethiopia. It is my view that digital, bot-like and undefined identities react in similar wave patterns and frequencies across networks and channels. Dishonesty at centralized institutions will continue to misrepresent price and information into a cascading flame. Research into the algorithmic decisions of certain technologies and the sudden flare of identity-based massacres should be exhaustively and apolitically studied. In my limited capacity, I also suspect there is an upsetting relationship regarding various keywords drilled into charity-led recruits — most observable to the Ethiopian citizen are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” For context, these “SDGs” were set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and are intended to be achieved by 2030.
In my view, the United Nations has failed to achieve various milestones of progress as an organization. Furthermore, the United Nations and its countless offices, projects and crosscutting programs can no longer function in any civilized trajectory due to an inability to fully account for direct employees and beneficiaries of their funding. Additionally, the location and activities of its various digital and physical assets are difficult to secure against attack vectors, both domestic and foreign.
Remedies should be considered given these UN-held assets are sitting in an arguably unproductive manner and further draining our nation’s weak economic growth. As we conclude on the effectiveness of these institutions, my view is that the meek students at Qala Bitcoin are good and will inherit the world, as they are perfectly positioned to become future contributors and maintainers of Bitcoin.
Recommendations
“Only a few years ago, meetings to consider African problems were held outside Africa, and the fate of its peoples were decided by non-Africans. Today, … thanks to the conference of Accra and now of Addis Ababa, the peoples of Africa can, at long last, deliberate on their own problems and future.” – Haile Selassie I at the Summit for the Charter of the Organization of African Unity in 1963.
Location-based information campaigns and institution-led propaganda will continue in this wicked, digital world. As the bounty widens, outsized rewards for productive activities will naturally conspire. Unintentional actions and political events will guide us toward any real institutional collapse as needed. Personal values will begin to take on a moral paradigm and treaties de jure will need to be revisited at every level.
I may be blinded by patriotic duty or my background in audit services, but I remember that in 1963, Emperor Haile Selassie gifted more than 200,000 square meters of land to the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Over the next few decades, these assets were transferred to the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa (UN–ECA). The OAU quietly dissolved to become the Africa Union (AU). Today, the AU painfully sits in a Chinese-built headquarters that uses Huawei-sponsored cameras.
I propose that any of these assets, deemed to be unproductive or misplaced by Addis Ababa’s land administrators, should be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The amount raised will most definitely support Ethiopia’s climb out of debt. I also suspect that this natural and sudden evolution will yield a surplus to further investment in hydroelectric power facilities as part of Ethiopia’s continued push to become energy independent. Project Mano and the Ethiopian Bitcoin community would like to harness this energy into the Bitcoin network. As we see continued moral collapse on one extreme and a financial collapse on another, suspended human energy will reveal itself and add value to our growing world.
As these truths and events unfold, people in the Global South are faced with new tools. Take back custody in every sense and be completely unapologetic to old paradigms as a matter of international consensus. These conclusions are not new, but may need some added urgency given the quickly increasing annual trade deficit within Ethiopia and many countries in similar conditions.
This is a guest post by Kal Kassa. 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.
