ANNOUNCEMENT 8 - IDentabit Will Sharedrop on BitShares CommunityThe industrial grade blockchain technology of BitShares 2.0 has put it in a class by itself, but that won’t last for long. Several new “Bitcoin 2.0” blockchains are expected to adopt the same great technology this fall, and the crypto world will never be the same.Today we are pleased to announce our partnership with IDentabit, the third in a series of revolutionary new blockchains based on Cryptonomex Graphene™ technology. If you’re new to Graphene, here's a thumbnail summary:
Graphene in a Nutshell
On June 8th, 2015 Cryptonomex shocked the crypto-currency world by introducing its third generation of blockchain technology code-named Graphene™. Graphene averages transaction confirmations in 1 second compared to what can take Bitcoin more than an hour. And with 100,000 transactions per second compared to Bitcoin’s current 7 tps, Graphene is able to support a host of new features, like a NASDAQ-class asset exchange, with enough throughput left over to upgrade Bitcoin and most of the 600+ other altcoins to a common interoperable cryptocurrency network. All this is old news at bitshares.org.
IDentabit is the brainchild of John Underwood, who has been working on this with us behind the scenes since last fall. You can review the
Underwood forum thread if you are interested in the history of the relationship. He has decided to field IDentabit as a key precursor for his original Remitabit vision discussed there. IDentabit will be controversial, by design.
"Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name."
One of the best features of living in a small town is that everybody knows everybody.
Because of that, reputation matters and everybody behaves to guard their reputation.
How do we achieve that dynamic on a global scale?
IDentabit is John’s vision of how to implement what he calls a “neutral world reserve currency” –
designed intentionally to be one that the current system of governments and banks will be happy to accept. As the name implies, a key distinction is how identity is handled. With BitShares, a verified identity is optional and only needed if you want to trade an asset that has restrictions on who can own it. With IDentabit, every account must have a verified identity. This means in IDentabit there is no such thing as an anonymous transaction.
Everyone can be held responsible for every thing they do. This puts it philosophically at odds with BitShares and most freedom-oriented blockchains.
And that is its key niche in the marketplace.
A potentially big niche.
IDentabit is positioning itself as a coin, not an exchange, because John wants to have a pure debate with Bitcoin about identity vs anonymity without any unnecessary complex distractions – coin on coin, so to speak. But, we feel that John’s impassioned three-way comparison between
Bitcoin vs. IDentabit vs. BitShares will attract a lot of attention and may actually draw more new believers
to BitShares instead. Naturally, we are delighted to see him engaging in such a debate. This community wins either way.
Architecturally, IDentabit is an example of what Vitalik Buterin recently defined as a
partially private consortium blockchain where the right to read and write the blockchain is limited to those elected and bonded to preserve the privacy of the public from the public but not necessarily from a government authority with a “legitimate” need to know. Another challenge to tradition.
Nevertheless, IDentabit was judged eligible for a Graphene™ license for the same reasons that MUSE got one in
Announcement 7:
- It does not compete directly with BitShares – it is in many ways its antithesis.
- It will do more than the minimum expected share drop. (See IDentabit press release.)
- It has good reasons for being a separate chain – its policies are incompatible.
- We have a long-standing agreement to support Underwood as a partner.
Concerning its rationale for being a separate chain, IDentabit meets just about every criteria we mentioned in
Announcement 7 for why a separate chain might be needed:
“But there can be good reasons why some potential partners might need independent chains. Sometimes there’s a compelling philosophical incompatibility, or differences in business model, global parameters, rule set, governance system, privacy policy or fee structure. Perhaps a different distribution is needed to capture support from essential partners, funding sources or other user demographics. And of course everyone has different perceptions of the risks and benefits of sharing a common block chain.”
IDentabit is a clear example of what you get when you challenge orthodox doctrine. It was, in fact, part of the inspiration behind a recent forum article entitled, “
Non-Bitcoinian Geometry.” The premise of that article was that, “if you are willing to violate the sacred axioms and doctrine you learned back in the Bitcoin Theological Seminary, you might just discover a whole new universe of opportunities – one that the competition has not yet dared to explore. For example:
If we sacrifice anonymity, we can gain adoption by large institutions that are constrained by KYC/AML regulations.
Those of us who are out to tame tyranny aren’t likely to budge on this one. Still, if your only interest is in making money, then why not offer a blockchain that The System can adopt? I’d rather have The System put all its information out on a public blockchain where smart contracts on other Sovereign block chains can watch them, trigger transactions on them, and otherwise do business quietly on the side. Why would I want to stop The System from doing that? We need to think bigger, Pinky!
John has even decided to violate some of our own most strongly-held beliefs,
and we plan to relentlessly take him to task on that here and in future debates.
Nevertheless, we have to respect his ideas. After all, he clearly has recognized the world’s best blockchain technology and a nice big niche where competition has failed to explore for mostly ideological reasons. He even has a viable plan to use that competitive blind spot to overtake Bitcoin before anybody else does. John has definitely been able to find many Bitcoinian doctrines worth violating.
The premise of IDentabit is to anticipate where the regulators will wind up and get there first with a solution that gives them what they need to do their “legitimate” jobs while protecting the public from overreaching abuses. That’s a tall order and may be the crypto equivalent of Icarus flying too close to the sun. Underwood shuns the accepted strategy of avoiding the beast, and boldly walks into its lair with a leash.
Do not mistakenly believe that John is a servant of that beast. For example, he is planning a head-on attack on the reprehensibly corrupt, bankster-drafted New York BitLicense and he really did name his son “Snowden”.
Underwood makes other points that some may grudgingly accept:
- Anonymous transactions make it easier for bad guys to do bad things.
- It’s better to design our own shackles than to wait for governments to do it.
- Mandatory identity is the most likely place where regulators will wind up.
- The New York BitLicense shamelessly restricts bank competition, not bad guys.
- Advocating regulatory compliance is a good way to attract big allies for strategic partners and investors – IDentabit sees such allies as critical for unseating Bitcoin.
- Mainstream crypto markets are off limits to most blockchains for self-imposed philosophical reasons – and therefore easy pickings for those who dare.
- Pursuing technology that blocks government from doing anything other than its “legitimate” sheep dog duties could be more useful than a flux capacitor.
That said, we disagree with John on many points about his strategic approach. That’s why IDentabit cannot,
ever, be hosted on BitShares (at least, not with our help). We side with Bitcoin against IDentabit on the role of government and case for anonymity, among other things.
Here’s the essence of where we differ: We simply don’t agree on which of the following two boogiemen is the most existentially dangerous.
His priority is to stop crime, and then do his best to limit tyranny.
Our priority is to stop tyranny, and then do our best to limit crime.
That’s it. It’s a seemingly minor difference with huge implications. Other than that I’d be willing to buy the fellow a frosty cold mug of Tooheys New and even fly to the Land Down Under to drink one with him.
The unavoidable problem is in the definition of “crime”. Tyrants define it as anything that doesn’t submit to their tyranny. So all well-meaning crime prevention measures can be used to suppress anything – including contract killers, kidnappers, child molesters, hemp growers, inconvenient minorities, disapproved religions and opposing political parties. Blockchains are global but crime definitions are local and frequently change 180 degrees with who holds power.For this reason alone, IDentabit is not something I personally want to use.
But I do want to own it, because I think much of the world will find it attractive. Sadly, much of the world would happily sacrifice its actual freedom for a mere illusion of safety. These masses are not likely to quickly adopt BitShares, but they might just adopt IDentabit – if John can get their overseeing governments and banks to assure them it's ok.
Underwood's approach to finding partners is very different from ours, so he will undoubtedly pursue many leads that we would not. His share reserve also gives him some flexibility in making big deals. This is one of the strengths of licensing Graphene to separate chains run by different entrepreneurs. More parallel coverage of all the opportunities in the world!
So, let IDentabit light the other end of the winnable customers fuse [cue the
Mission Impossible music] and pursue the people least likely to use BitShares. In a few years, when that fuse burns to the middle, we’ll see whether it’s easier to convince newly trained industrial grade DPOS users to move
to or from freedom. Outrages like Cyprus and Greece should ultimately tip the scales in BitShares’ favor. Meanwhile, we need DPOS allies and it may be easier to teach happy IDentabit users about freedom than to teach traditional Bank users about crypto.
For everyone who holds onto both BitShares and IDentabit, it won’t matter that much where the sparks meet on that fuse. If they ever do meet and begin to compete, we will all have prospered greatly, our technology will have become an interoperable, widely used standard that is tightly integrated with whatever the remainder of the world has chosen. And BitShares will still be there as the ultimate safe haven, relentlessly engineered to guard against any beasts that remain unleashed.
John Underwood is opening a new front in the crypto revolution – a front deep behind enemy lines. It will seek to affect revolution from the inside, by “
stroking, not poking, the beast.” If he succeeds, it may be easier for BitShares to implement a cross-chain interface to the fiat world
via IDentabit, than gaining direct cooperation with the closed banking system we must work around today.
Nah, who would think of something
that far outside the box?
SUMMARY
IDentabit is positioning itself as
a new bitcoin freed of everything that holds the original back;
a responsible collaborator with governments and banks;
and a more transparent interface for
better visibility and integration with today’s opaque financial institutions.
IDentabit. Because some folks will pick the blue chain.
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Every one of those markets is an opportunity to earn resources with which to pursue our nefarious Real Goals. Every one is an opportunity to reach other groups of people with other priorities. Every one is a way to attract multitudes out of the Old System where, free at last, they can see and perhaps understand our Philosophically Pure Systems for the first time.