On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 06:16:20AM -0700, Greg Sanders wrote: > > If we need two networks, one for stuff like what Citrea is doing and the > other for finance with a technological fence around it, I'm all for it. Has > Citrea heard of nostr? > > Citrea, like Lightning, is relying on Bitcoin's proof of publication to > ultimately move bitcoin. Moving the data elsewhere would change the L2's > security model drastically.
FYI I wrote a fair bit about proof-of-publication started in 2013, over a decade ago: https://petertodd.org/2013/disentangling-crypto-coin-mining https://petertodd.org/2014/setting-the-record-proof-of-publication Putting data in the Bitcoin chain creates a proof that an overwhelming amount of hash power has "seen" the data; in practice it's proof that everyone who could ever want a copy of that data has a copy of it. Lesser schemes simply can't provide that kind of guarantee. So it should be no surprise that high-value use-cases like Citrea - or even NFTs - choose to use Bitcoin as a publication layer. That said, it would be interesting to see some schemes with lesser security guarantees get developed. Bitmessage for example tried to develop a message publication layer for anonymous messaging. But, notably, the last release of Bitmessage is over 7 years ago, and I've been told that the software basically doesn't work any more and old messages have all been lost. Data published to the Bitcoin chain a decade ago can still easily be recovered. A case in point: https://bitcoinstrings.com/ If someone does want to make a serious attempt at developing a new type of proof-of-publication system, I'd strongly suggest focusing on the proof aspect: make sure that your underlying cryptography actually proves that a given bit of data is widely published. For example, if the system is based on sacrificing Bitcoin to make data valuable, prove that other, previously published, data was also published by using some kind of proof-of-posession like a random sampling of a merkle tree of previously published data to show that all data in the system had reached the wide audience that it is supposed to. -- https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/aD18J2cP4x-ddzwD%40petertodd.org.
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