Hi everyone,
My name is Robin Linus and I am doing an AMA for the next hour.
For people that don't follow my work, I am the creator of things like BitVM, BitStream, Stakechains, and zkCoins and I co-founded ZeroSync. For more details check out robinlinus.com
Happy to answer questions if anyone has any!
  1. What will be the next steps for BitVM and Bitstream?
  2. When will we have ZeroSync and RGB?
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I don't really work much on BitStream currently. The idea is already almost half a year old. I've mostly written it up for a friend who wants to implement it. He kept bugging me about it (which I am grateful for). However, for me it was just the predecessor that lead to BitVM.
Next step for BitVM is to complete a toy-implementation of the universal VM-circuit. Then we can compile Rust and C++ to the VM and run stuff like ZKP verifiers. All of that intends to enable bridging BTC to sidechains.
The ZeroSync header chain proof already exists zerosync.org/demo Hopefully, next year we'll complete the first full chain state proof. The good thing here is that it becomes easier over time because proof systems are currently advancing very rapidly.
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Cool. Thanks for answers Robin!
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Why do you focus your efforts on the things that you do?
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The monetary system strongly effects almost all aspects of our existence. It is the most fundamental infrastructure of society. It is painfully obvious to me that our current societies are sick and self-destructive, and it seems like the most effective way to help heal is to accelerate the transition to a strong monetary system, that is based in math, to recover from this weak fiat money that is toxic to everyone, even including the people who think they'd profit from printing it...
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What aren't bitcoin developers working on that they should be working on?
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IMO, our primary goal should be to scale Bitcoin to become the most used currency on earth. It's crucial not to leave the payments market to CBDCs as they are inferior money that is toxic to free societies. To the best of my knowledge, sidechains are the most plausible scalability solution we currently have.
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Regarding ZeroSync, what do you think about the feasibility of mobile bitcoin/lightning wallets embedding a fullnode utilizing ZeroSync?
My understanding is that mobile is one of the focus areas of the project and tech?
I don't fully grasp how the technology works regarding constructing the UTXO set. What is the bandwidth and disk space requirements etc? What would be required in order to scan and/or keep track of your own bitcoin addresses?
Cheers and good job on BitVM, I'm still in shock that it's even real.
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The high-level idea of ZeroSync is to make it trivial to verify the chain state. Even on phones. However, that proof does not contain the UTXO set, but only a commitment to the UTXO set. The most simple UTXO set commitment would be Utreexo. A more sophisticated approach is to use something like a Merkle-Patricia Tree, which allows you to query all UTXOs of a particular address. This way light clients can sync by downloading less than a megabyte of data. Of course, that requires some kind of bridge nodes, which serve these inclusion proofs to the light clients. Moreover, in this model, clients sacrifice their privacy.
Still, that's the baseline idea and from there we can improve the properties with different tradeoffs. E.g. downloading more data than what you really need can give you much better privacy
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Truly hypothetical at that point:
If LN would not exist as of today, would you consider building something like Lightning on top of BitVM implementations?
If so, which benefits could this bring?
In my mind this depends on whatever this BitVM implementations would do. Are there viable models in your mind?
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What excites me is using BitVM to build trust-minimized bridges to sidechains or zkCSV protocols like zkCoins, because that allows us to scale BTC payments
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Could these sidechains interact in between each other or only via the mainchain then?
How trust minimised would it possibly be?
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @hampus 3 Jan
Presumably yes. At the very least Lightning being used over multiple BitVM sidechains (all using BTC as the unit) should work.
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Welcome! I'm looking forward to the AMA.
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384 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 14 Nov 2023
If you had to squint into the future and imagine the most popular use case for BitStream in a decade, what would it be?
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It's hard to predict what will be in a decade because technology evolves so quickly. However, in an ideal world, decentralized platforms, like Nostr, would take over YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc, and then host their multimedia content on BitStream servers.
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I am very excited by ZeroSync project! Waiting to see it working on mainnet and real life scenario. I understand that will be implemented first with Electrum? Can you tell us more details? How a regular user will use ZeroSync?
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The first wallet will actually probably be Mutiny wallet. We're talking to others to integrate it too, but it just recently got completed to the stage where it made sense for us to reach out to wallet developers
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Here it's 21:21 now. Good time to end the AMA. Thanks for all your interesting questions!
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Is calling him 'Sir Robin' a mistimed Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference as he's 'Buggered off'?
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You have created a lot of things in the Bitcoin space, are you a polymath?
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I'm just trying to save myself from CBDC-slavery :D
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Your solutions might just be the way out
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What's something you believe about bitcoin that practically no other bitcoiners believe?
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Maybe someone belonging to the "PayPal Mafia" was involved in the creation of bitcoin.
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Not Levchin, right?! I refuse to believe Satoshi would create a buy now pay later company.
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What's your approach to learning? What would you advise to somebody starting from scratch that wants to contribute to projects like the ones you've worked on?
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But you learn the most by building things. Also, toying around with building your own bitcoin library is a great way to learn about how things work under the hood
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Thank you!
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Do you have any interest in hardware? Or other industries like mesh networking?
Are we thinking enough about the current internet infrastructure or will we be sufficiently insulated & enpowered by the P2P software you are working on?
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great question. I don't know anything really about hardware, but I am a big fan of ideas like mesh networking to decentralize ISPs. Unfortunately, I am not quite sure if that can really work in practice though
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What are Stakechains? The name worries me
Why are you not in Nostr?
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Should we activate the next Bitcoin soft-fork using adjacent consensus-enforcer daemons like suggested at the end of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKh7OS8nrHc ?
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Is zkCoins really possible or is it just an idea under research?
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I read your BitVM paper, kudos on a unique and forward-thinking idea. I found the paper rather terse though, and struggled to grasp it intuitively.
Is there anywhere I can read about BitVM in more detail, with more worked-out examples?
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What are zkcoins and how do you know they are not fake coin and not inflated tokens, as we know zero knowledge is known for blockchain blote
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Hi Robin
Why so many projects?
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Why do you do, what you do?
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when poker onchain?
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What are you doing to introduce bitcoin to those around you? How are you participating in the development of bitcoin?
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hello! this is my first time
Hi Robin Linus and welcome.
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