Topic: [Discussion] Taro: A new protocol for multi-asset Bitcoin and Lightning - page 2. (Read 998 times)

This wallet is still in alpha experimental stage of development, but why do I need to create online account with username and password, instead of downloading wallet and installing it on my computer?
I am not interested in creating and using any altcoins or nft with this wallet, but I would consider using it as alternative for stable coins.
Another problem I have with this wallet is that I can't find any information about license, so you might want to add this on website.

IMO, this kind of stuff is not healthy for bitcoin right now, this will devalue the bitcoin itself as the money goes to things other than bitcoin. This could be useful when there are no more BTC to mine, in the future people could mint coins, use NFT to incentivize the nodes to keep mining the transactions. It is also worth mentioning that Satoshi made a NFT out of his post on P2P foundation forum.

I have created a web wallet for Taro that you can find here
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/

You can use it to test your taro nodes.

The wallet is now only active on testnet but will move to main net as soon as I can.

I have also created a Taro NFT faucet that you can find here
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=nft
(went with tarot cards as NFTs, sorry I know it is lame)

as well as some standard fungible asset faucets
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=294
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=293

Hope it helps you with testing and development.

Thanks. Unfortunately more than half of that presentation is about the question "why we need assets [tokens] on bitcoin?", which is not Taro-specific but could have also been said by a Counterparty/Omni speaker in 2013 or so (It's particularly funny he starts talking about "how to bring Tether to Bitcoin", if Tether started as an Omni asset on the Bitcoin chain!).

At 6:13:30 at least he speaks a bit about the technical side. It seems that in Taro transactions a merkle tree is included which can include dozens of token transactions (more specific: in the tree the balances are stored, so transactions seem to be "balance changes" according to some rules). This is very different from the coloured coin approach where each "asset tx" is represented by a Bitcoin tx of a few satoshis, which is nice; if I understand it right, then the Taro protocol would allow better scaling even on-chain (i.e. without using Lightning).

I'm one of those who think that protocols like this make definitively sense, they allow for example to use Bitcoin for crowdfunding/crowdinvesting purposes with ICO-style mechanisms, and thus connect "real values" from the real economy to the Bitcoin ecosystem. This could contribute to improve Bitcoin's liquidity and thus to its stability as a currency.

i was at the first german Bitcoin conference in innsbruck/austria in mid september and there was also a presentation about the taro protocol.
you can also watch this presentation again ... unfortunately it's only in german but you can change the subtitle to any language you like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwozFs6ieOY&t=22000s

There is no need for a strong consensus. On higher layers it's competition between protocols, implementation of the protocols and so on. It's a survival of the fittest. Risk aversion can be incredibly lower than on base layer. If you implement your protocol, this is going to attract user base and funds. No consensus required for that.

Interesting.

But we saw how unprepared people are for maintaining DeFi apps by the rate at which they collapse or get hacked on other chains. I am more in favor of a restricted DeFi environment where you need a document similar to a BIP to get approved by a consensus before you can host/bootstrap a DeFi app for all Taro/RGB nodes. Someone should probably tell this to Elizabeth Stark and other Lightning Labs people.

The point is recreating all the DeFi in the bitcoin ecosystem, thus leveraging the bitcoin decentralization.

If you want to follow more the RGB project, so you can learn more: https://t.me/rgbtelegram

That is the thing about these protocols, they do not directly solve an existing problem (except for maybe introducing smart contracts which is respectable so yeah).

If I were a developer researching projects (which I incidentally am), the questions i would ask myself before committing time to it are:

- Does it solve a problem?
- How important is the problem that is being solved?
- Is there an easier way to solve this problem? (the last one is very important. If the goal of these two things is to make bitcoin settlement occur faster than on-chain, there are better ways of doing this without LN, which has only a fraction of the liquidity as Layer 1).

Regarding 'virtual assets' in general (like NFTs), I'm not sure myself what to use them for / what they really make sense for. But I'm not against it, either, especially on top of Lightning (no messing with the blockchain for fun experimentation type of stuff).

I doubt that fetching exchange rates is a really good usage of these protocols.

Well, we don't have colored coins on Lightning. So that could be a reason for using these protocols.
I guess something like BSQ token could become compatible with Lightning through Taro or RGB.

RGB/TARO and all the other solution build on top of the Lightning network are the possibility to evolve bitcoin to something else, without compromising the base layer, and the attached monetary functions.
The amount of research, experimentation and testing on the LN and corollary layers is unprecedented, and dwarfs what is being done on all the shitcoins combined.

This is why.

Grudge matches aside, am I the only one here who doesn't see the point of either TARO or RGB?

If I were developing a wallet, why would I use these over just fetching fiat rates from an exchange and display the currency conversion like Electrum already does?

Yeah sure, everyone likes smart contracts and all that, but I believe colored coins largely address this already.

The alpha release of the Taro daemon is officially here[1][2] and It should now be possible for developers to experiment with it on the bitcoin testnet.

[1] https://lightning.engineering/posts/2022-9-28-taro-launch/
[2] https://github.com/lightninglabs/taro/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha

After the initial shock from the RGB community, and the rancorous sarcastic passive/aggressive reaction, luckily this tends to be the main spirit right now.
 They acknowledged their specific wasn't ready for implementation, difficult to read, and poorly documented.
LL came out with a fully documented, completely rewritten, and functioning^{pinch of salt here} protocol.
Se they are now willing to contribute to make the final objective of a good implementation reality. Cooperation seems the only way forward, but now the ball is in LL court.

a somewhat strange position for LL to take... Osuntokun claimed on the lightning-dev mailing list to have read the spec for RGB, but failed to (fully) understand it. Another dev (not working on Taro, but commenting generally) replied in concurrence with that statement (that the RGB spec was not an easy read).

If it's difficult for to read and/or understand a specification document. surely it's not easy to produce a spec for a very similar system and claim it as one's own original work? Unless we all read these documents (both RGB and Taro specs), it's not easy to know for sure.

It's amazing how prone these technical professions are to descend into, frankly, public hair-pulling spats. Dear oh dear

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None of this will matter in the long term; if Taro is too commerically-driven somehow, or RGB is too difficult for devs or users to fathom, or both, then someone will one day come along with something better anyway, assuming that the whole concept is not cat-vids-on-teh-blockchain froth (which it slightly sounds like, in fairness)

Looks awesome and seems like a new layer that will unleash a lot of potential. BTC

In an interview in Italian, Giacomo Zucco came back to the Taro affair.
He stood by his previous stance (LL stole their code, and they even mocked their RGB name) to obtain funding with a stringer proposition "we invented a protocol to transfer assets over the bitcoin network", instead of saying, "we decided to rewrite an almost identical implementation of an open protocol to transfer assets over the Lighting Network".
He also added that now the funding has been secured, "Her Starkness" finally returned calls to Giacomo Zucco to find an agreement about recognizing (some) credits to RGB devs.

This is my impression, too. To say that I'm not a fan of Lightning Labs might be an understatement; considering I see big issues with lnd due to scaling (may lead to centralization due to high resource utilization), them holding back https://bolt12.org/ and similar great ideas from the C-Lightning community.

They also get VC funding if I'm not mistaken and have potential WEF involvement; sure they can always claim otherwise, but then I'm wondering why they're still on the WEF website. That's besides the point here; just some examples that illustrate why I don't trust them to have come up with the idea by themselves and do believe they had a good look at RGB before developing Taro.

It's sad when people don't give credit in this open-source cypherpunk community; this is what often happens when VC meets open-source volunteers though, so in a way it's nothing new.

That is the point: they didn't post any credit.

Some high-level profile in the RGB community posted this:



https://twitter.com/olukolova/status/1511877112617127947?s=21&t=0VMXz-adrvffNCxXZqtctw

I was not researching any of this options deeply and I don't know exactly how they work, but if something is more complex like you say for Taro protocol, than it means it can potentially have more bugs.
Algorithmic stablecoins can lose peg much more easy that other type of stablecoins and I don't want to use something like that if they are connected with other altcoins in any way.
And I think that whole point of lightning network was supposed to be elimination of need for using bunch of altcoins, and saving on fees.

Interesting story and I didnt know about it until now, but there is no real plagiarism in open source if you post correct credits for original authors, or if you fork it.