Topic: [Discussion] Taro: A new protocol for multi-asset Bitcoin and Lightning (Read 1000 times)

I find it's weird that Liquid (which is one of Bitcoin Sidechain) isn't mentioned as comparison. He holds position at Bifinex which support Liquid based USDT.


I find it's unsettling to see 2 similar protocol compete, especially when Taproot Asset is based on RGB. If people behind Taproot join RGB or vice versa, we could see faster/more efficient development.

As I understand, Ardoino is a fan of L2 solution, actually both of them:

The Block released an interview with the Tether CEO:
Bitfinex's Ardoino expects 'quantum leap' in Bitcoin scaling solution adoption

In this interview so he clarifies he is confident in the L2 scaling solutions, and open to the best protocol emerging from the competing one (TaAs and RGB) or even new ones that could emerge).

An exciting, yet puzzling news caught my attention the other day:

Paolo Ardoino sees RGB as 'best opportunity' to issue stablecoins on Bitcoi

tl;dr


Why RGB?
We know that Taproot Assets is a copycat of RGB, but we also know that it has better documentation and probably a better team. He was referring to RGB as the protocol per se or RGB as "Asstet transfer protocol on BTC L2?" opening the competitive race between RGB and TARO?

Thank you for linking the news

I think NostrAssets (mentioned in one of the articles) is quite an interesting approach. I've not looked at it in detail, but it seems to combine the Nostr communication protocol (which is used for messaging and similar communication activity, it has also a protocol extension for marketplaces) and Taproot Assets for DeFi-Lightning applications. There seems to be no whitepaper however, so investigating its inner workings could be a bit bothersome ...

There could be interesting synergies as Nostr uses the same kind of cryptography as Bitcoin (and thus, TA and Lightning) does. For example, I could imagine temporary addresses being used as identification in the Nostr network but only valid for one payment to maximize privacy when trading TA assets. (I'm willing to overlook that the NostrAssets team seems to come originally from the BRC-20 bubble )

for this release, there is also a very detailed article that also shows why TA provides builders with all the tools needed to make bitcoin a multi-asset network, but in a scalable manner that maintains bitcoin's core values
https://lightning.engineering/posts/2023-10-18-taproot-assets-v0.3/

Lightning Labs rebranded their first product rgb TARO as Taproot Assets, and today they are launching their first mainnet alpha.
 
Taproot assets is a protocol for issuing assets on the Bitcoin blockchain that can be transferred leveraging the Lightning network.

The protocol is described here:
Taproot Assets


For a brief explanation of the protocol, here there are the FAQ.

Today Lightning Labs released their first main net alpha of the product: Taproot Assets v 0.3 where developers and tester can start playing with financial assets issued on chain!

As for updates on Taproot Assets:

1.) Yes there has been a change because Tari Labs filed a lawsuit against Lightning Labs that Taro sounds too similar. as a result Lightning Labs decided to rebrand rather than fight the lawsuit.

2.) The Taproot Assets Protocol Deamon tapd that run on top of LND is now pretty stable. It sometimes crashes when you don't wait for one black between making transactions.

3.) Taro Assets now only works on-chain. The part with making lightning channels is not yet started but they have some blueprints on how to do it.

As for Tiramisu wallet:

1.) We deployed a test Taproot Assets store that can be found here
https://tapd-store.tarowallet.net
This can be used for testing of your TAPD node.

2.) We newly track testnet asset prices as you can see here
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/3

3.) We support a bunch of faucets also intended for testing
NFT faucet:
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=nft
Other currency faucets:
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=7
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=3
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=8

4.) We maintain a list of NFTs and fungible currencies that you can sell, buy, send, receive or mint your own:
Currencies
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/57
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/3
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/56
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/5
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/7
NFTs
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/121
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/94
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/102
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/115

5.) Here is our web wallet:
https://testnet.tarowallet.net

Someone from the Arabic local board just brought this to my attention[1]: It looks like Taro has rebranded to "The Taproot assets"[2] and released a new update (0.20.0v) a few days ago

[1] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5453391
[2] https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/taproot-assets
[3] https://github.com/lightninglabs/taproot-assets/releases

I do not see it as that big a deal, you can continue to develop and test and work on it, you just can't release market it. So development continues without public releases until they come up with a new name. Stupid, but this is why a lot of huge international mega corps spend more time working on naming and branding then they do on some products. Unless they have some other reason to stop development I don't see it being more then a waste of time and money. And having to give money to lawyers.

Lawyers gotta lawyer, but there is a solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35rErQtJ6uA  (warning some a lot bad words)

-Dave

Bad news for the project. It looks like they're not going to be able to develop the project any further or even announce the next stage of the protocol until this is sorted out:

This is an incredibly well done work.
I will play on this, and for sure I can see this kind of use being moved up quickly from base layer to L2 solutions, due to fees.
OF course I hope that people will exchange more interesting stuff than jpg's on TARO, but I understand futile uses are a necessity in the first place.

For those who are interested here are a few NFTs and currencies that I have minted on Taro represented as summary website pages.

An initial test NFT
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/308

A girl investing in Bitcoin NFT
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/332

Diamond hands NFT
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/328

You can get more NFT for testing of your node here https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=nft

A test fungible currency called Beckycoin
https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/currencies_public/294
there is a faucet for this currency as well here https://testnet.tarowallet.net/walletapp/faucet/?currency=294

Right now I am including the images into metadata resulting in pretty long genesis_bootstrap_info as well as long invoices. Lightning Labs have a PR to fix this https://github.com/lightninglabs/taro/pull/249 .

[ Sorry the images are not showing here ]

Hi,

sorry, I am now only supporting the testnet legacy adresses (P2PKH) .

Not ideal I know.

Thanks for the response. I've also tried to send BTC from the wallet, and apparently, there's a problem decoding the address (tb1....):


Or should the address be a taproot one in order for this to work?

Hi,

thanks for the feedback.

Right now some operations can be kind of slow.

It is because at the time I wrote the web app tarod would crash if you tried to mint and generate invoices at the same time.

It would also break if you try to mint multiple assets in the same block.

So the web app waits with generating the invoice until all minting requests are processed.

It is a very shitty UX I am sorry and have added this on my list of things to fix.

Also thanks a lot for giving this a test ride - very helpful.

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.

---

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

---

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.

I think it’s worth making a slight digression on TARO vs RGB.
TARO is plagiarism of RGB concept, with a different, yet incompatible, implementation.
When RGB devs discovered that LL (Lightning Labs) was working on an implementation of their works, they offered a collaboration, but calls were never returned.
LL code-named their TARO project “CMYK”, an apparent reference to RGB, yet they refused any credit at launch.

Well, everything is open source and not patented, so no legal thread can be issued, but I think LL actions were, to say the least, unethical.
No doubt they wanted to attract capital. Seventy million is a lot of money, and they could have credited RGB ideas, then state the implementation was rubbish and start with a new one. That would have been ok.
Explicitly mocking a rival project (not funded/little funded) to attract hype and VC funding is something that is not in the best interest of the movement.

Having said that, I wish all the best to them.

I think you mean the Tether transaction on Lightning on March 22.

However, I think both RGB and Taro seem to be more expressive than OmniBOLT; it looks like OmniBOLT is a pure token protocol (which allows centralized stablecoins where the issuer controls the supply, so you've to trust it), while Taro and RGB would allow more complex smart contracts, perhaps even algorithmic stablecoins - if this is possible via Lightning (I guess there can be problems if something like Dai's "global settlement" is needed, i.e. that stablecoins are automatically "back-converted" into the base asset).

I've also only now heard of both protocols and it's really interesting stuff

According to link you send it looks like they are working on adding stable coins and other assets on Lightning Network, but this was already done recently using OMNI Layer and Bitcoin-powered service provider Synonym.
Competition is always good, especially when we see Lightning Network adoption is getting better every day with services and exchanges, but I would like to see more regular people  using it.

It's as much a game changer as RGB is:

https://www.rgbfaq.com/faq/what-is-rgb

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/2020-09-14-rgb-continues-its-work-to-bring-better-smart-contracts-to-bitcoin-5275891

Like you I’m surprised that this hasn’t been mentioned anywhere. Thanks for starting this topic.
I understand NFTs can produced/utilised too - sorry I’m not too technical 
Again, like you I want to know if this is a “game changer” ??

I read about this a couple of days ago, and I also saw Micheal Saylor mentioning it today at the Miami conference, so I wanted to share this with you since I couldn't find any mentions of it on the forum:




What are your thoughts on this? And do you think this could eventually end the use of stablecoins on the other blockchains?

For anyone interested in the technical details: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/taro