Topic: [Discussion] Taro: A new protocol for multi-asset Bitcoin and Lightning - page 2. (Read 1165 times)

Is there something wrong with generating invoices? I filled in the description and clicked the button, but I wasn't given anything and the page just keeps refreshing every few seconds.

Hey hey hey, hold our horses! Check your facts mate. Taro and RGB are built on Lightning and not on L1. There are no contracts filling up the blockchain in any of this, that's the whole beauty of it.

Just something to get you started..

Hi,

thanks for your reply.

Yes. Right now it is a CUSTODIAL web wallet. Developing a non-custodial Taro wallet is possible but it would require more implicated approach. I know that privacy-wise there are MILES to go. I am planning to expose an API and release a web app but this is what we have for now.

As for the license - yes I will add this to my TODO list. You are correct this is kind of crucial.

As for username and password - I decided to only go with the basic necessities. I am intentionally not collecting emails.

Maybe this could be a sweet dream for miners when more people adopt NFT/ smart contracts on bitcoin, but this could also become their nightmare. Using block space to store contracts related to some marketplace and their business conduct, just because they pay the fees for it is not gonna cut it. If we could e.g. move 500KBTC and use 4MB of block space paying the normal fee, why should we allow someone to send a few 100 $ worth in bitcoin paying the normal fee and occupying the same amount of space?

Why on earth should the bitcoin community allow centralized third parties to use our buses to get home faster while leaving us waiting longer and longer, paying more and more as time passes? After all we only get 1 bus every 10 minutes. We need to either shut up and get used to it ( not happening ) or *we should do something about it.

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There are countless shitcoins out there, if people are interested in NFT/ smart contracts, they should start hugging them instead.


*= either stop this before it's too late, or scale up the network.

That's wrong on a few levels.
For one: technologically (my main field), there is nothing wrong with NFT or other experiments on L2, since it doesn't touch (i.e. bloat, spam, block, sabotage in any way) the blockchain.

Secondly, Bitcoin's value (in terms of dollar valuation) is not dependent on development money at all. No matter whether there is more or less development going on in a certain time frame and whether or how high that development is funded, the dollar valuation fluctuates completely independently.

Lastly, it is not guaranteed that 'money going into Taro / higher layer protocols' reduces 'money going into Bitcoin L1 development'. People investing into Taro / NFTs on L2 development are actually most probably not the same ones who donate to Bitcoin Core developers.
Even though that's not a guarantee either, it is far from guaranteed that 'the money goes to things other than bitcoin'; there is not one 'the' money.

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)