SatoshiClub doesn’t stop to create opportunities for its members to meet with the most interesting projects and personalities in crypto space. Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from RSK. The AMA took place on July 13 and our guest was Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar, CEO IOVLabs, RSK, rif, Taringa,| Cofounder Bitcoin Iberoamérica NGO & Koibanx.
The total reward pool was 800$ and has been splitted in 3 parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.
Part 1 — introduction and questions from the Telegram&Bitcointalk community
Serg: HI! We are pleased to have @dieguitogz as a guest today. Our AMA will be about RSK. Welcome, Diego!
Ciprian Ciubotaru: Hi everyone!
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Hello Satoshi clubbers!!! Very happy to be here!
Serg: Nice to meet you 🙂 Before we start to discuss the questions of the community, please tell us a bit about yourself, your background in crypto
Ciprian Ciubotaru: Thanks for joining and thank you for your time 😊
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Happy to, I’ve got in touch with Bitcoin in 2011
But I didn’t get it :joy:, and almost a year later a good friend of mine brought me back to it
Serg: So, you are basically one of the pioneers of crypto 🙂
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: You can say so 🙂 but I think the true pioneers are the Nick Szabos and Adam Backs 🙂 Even Sergio that started in 2011 and found 9 bugs in Bitcoin protecting it from some important threats
Serg: It happened to me as well 🙂 Back then in Argentina we had capital controls and my friend made me open an account at Blockchain.info, sent me 5K BTC, I sent them back to him and all happened witin an hour
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: For me that experience was revealing because I had the feeling of how a truly open and permissionless financial system would work. So since then I decided to devote myself in full to understand Bitcoin and foster its knowledge in Latin America. Well as I started with 2 partners to create the Bitcoin communities accross Latin America, I was defining where I wanted to apply my efforts. And at the end of 2013 I decided I wanted to focus on solving the problem of financial exclusion. As I started some experiences in the slums I realized that Bitcoin alone was not enough. That we needed representations of the local currencies and decentralized business logic. And I wanted to have those local curriencies backed by Bitcoin, much like a digital gold standard
So at the end of 2014 after a talk with Nick Szabo that triggered the question on how we could bring all those functionalities to Bitcoin I contacted Sergio Lerner our Chief Scientist and cofounder to discuss these ideas
Serg: wow, you are in contact with Nick Szabo, some people speculate he is behind the creation of BTC. What is your opinion about it?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Well I think he is for sure one of the intelectual fathers of Bitcoin but I think is a great thing that Satoshi is unknown, otherwise any charasterictic (bad or good) of the individual or collective behind the alias would be used to attack Bitcoin or to create sides
Serg: totally agree 🙂
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Is great that Satoshi is anonymous so we all can be Satoshi
Serg: Thanks for this awesome introduction. Shall we proceed to the questions of the community?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: My pleasure 😊Absolutely
Q1 from Bitcointalk user pedronino
Hi! Please explain why you added 2 tokens beside RIF? I have read but it is not fully clear. What is RDOC and RIFP? Are there any more tokens?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Well those two additional tokens where not created by us, they are tokens created by the MoneyOnChain protocol, and both are backed by RIF. RDOC is a stable asset that follows the dollar price and is over collateralized by RIF. So it will always will be worth 1 dollar of RIF regardless of the RIF fluctuations.
If you have RIF you can obtain them on the RIFonChain platform rif.moneyonchain.com
It is essential for the RIF economy for the following reasons
As all services in the RIF Economy are structured around a sharing economy engine (RIF Marketplace). The Service providers need to stake RIF or RIF denominated assets as insurance if they don’t deliver their services. So for Service Providers having RDOC ensures them they can preserve their working capital.
On the user side as we designed the RIF Services to serve the mainstream audience it helps new users have a token that is connected to something they already know until the get deeper into the crypto economy
Serg: So, if I sell services worth of 10,000 USD, I have to also buy tokens woth of this value for insurance?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Conceptually yes, the ratio of staking might not be 1 to 1 but yes, all RIF service providers need to stake RIF or RIF backed tokens
Q2 from Telgram user @bambusvero
Do you think that there might be a problem if on your marketplace you can “exchange information, value and services with full control and transparency”. What if I want my transaction on the marketplace to be anonymous? What if a governmental institution can see it and ask me to pay taxes for the transaction?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Well as with Bitcoin all transactions on the RIF Marketplace are pseudonymous and we are designing some privacy enhancing features. I think in current state of affairs going fully anonymous would bring a level of confrontation with government that could be detrimental for the development of the RIF economy.
We should find a balance where we stop mass surveilance systems from operating but if there is a crime involved the information can be followed by a forensics specialist, that’s where Bitcoin is today and we follow the same ethos / balance
Serg: At the moment, do you have any relationships/deals with governments? is your platform regulated?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: The platform is protected by proof of work and is fully decentralized so we don’t control what runs in it. Our organization (IOVLabs) that is the original creator of the protocol is working with some governments to streamline certain areas of the government functions (drivers license)
Serg: what do you mean by bringing a level of confrontation with the government then? like they can ban its usage?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Well I think the governments, even if they can stop a platform, can create a lot of friction. Good examples of that are happening with Zcash, Monero, Dash, etc and the IRS
Serg: that’s cool. Can you tell us which governments are those? Or it’s a secret at the moment?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Some is public like the project we did to create secure communications channels to report complains about commercial banks to the Central Bank in Argentina or a circular economy implemented in Marcos Paz, a 50K citizens city in the province of Buenos Aires. Others are still secret
Q3 from Bitcointalk user mirsiyanova
Because RSK creates a sharing economy without a third-party, how will RSK solve cases of disputes between buyers and sellers?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: I think I answered that partially before, in the case of services that can be automatically validated (ie: storage, secure data transport, transaction processing, monitoring, etc.) the staking mechanism takes care of it. For the case of disputes that require subjective evaluation we are going to integrate Kleros and use the RIF Gateways oracle protocols to also integrate information markets or paid arbitrage in the future.
Serg: How do you know which transactions will need subjective evaluation?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Oh that’s something each sharing economy decides the initial RIF Services we created are all self enforceable
But the RIF Marketplace is open so others can create their own sharing economies
Our roles is to provide the building blocks so others can combine it
We are in the process of turning a Social Network (Taringa!) into a Social Marketplace and we will showcase subjective dispute resolution there
My pleasure, in that sense is important to understand that our role is to create the protocols, transfer them to the community and demonstrate the potential via some use cases but final goal is to create an ecosystem where many are creating solutions around the world and make this technology their own
Q4 from Telgram user @vasekmures
What services are compatible with the RIF infrastructure? I know that if I am token hodler I can use them, but where can I find the list?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: For a complete list of services and their goal you can go to rifos.org and for a more technical view (libraries, dev tutorials, etc) you can go to developers.rsk.co
The first ones we are focusing on are RIF Identity (includes RIF Directory, and RSK Name Services), RIF Data (includes Storage and Streaming), RIF Payments (includes Lumino equivalent to Lightning on Bitcoin and other 3rd layer payment scaling protocols), RIF Gateways (oracles, schedulers and triggers outside the Blockchain) and RIF Communications (incentivised secure communications protocol)
All this is integrated around the RIF Marketplace.
RIFP is the asset that RIF holders get when they provide the collateral for the issuance of RDOC and it gets revenue sharing from the operation of the RIFonChain platform and a slight leverage on the RIF volatily so its a good option for long term RIF holders
Q5 from Telgram user @bitociok
I
have a question about RIF Publish. As I understand, it is a place
free of censorship. Can you explain to us why you needed to develop
such a platform when we already have alternatives on the market? like
steemit for example.
And what are the differences
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: RIF Publish is a demonstration of what can be done combining multiple RIF Protocols: RNS for decentralized name resolution (so nobody can stop people from finding the page), RIF Data Storage (to store the data in a censorship resistant and decentrlized medium) and soon we will be able to integrate it with RIF Marketplace and Gateways for people to pay for specific journalist research on topics. RIF Publish is not trying to compete with Steemit and other although it has a bigger level of decentralization but to showcase the potential of the protocols we are building.
As the toolchain (protocol, libraries and documentation) grow creating something like RIF Publish will be a matter of weeks and that’s our objective to enable developers to deliver value very effiently.
Serg: Can you tell us more details about the storage? Is it also decentralized?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Yes, RIF Data Storage is a decentralized meta protocol that enables to create economic incentives for service providers using different storage protocols. Currently we have integrated Swarm and IPFS but once the incentive model is stabilized other protocols can be included
Q6 from Telgram user @Lorax14
RIF OS wants to “manage to use one framework to solve all the developer’s need”, how will you be able to do that?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Well I’m not sure if that definition is accurate.
RIF OS is a framework (RSK Infrastructure Framework) and as such it has some synergies between components for example we try to make all RIF protocols leverage on the RIF Communications protocol and the RIF Communication protocol leverages on the RIF Storage protocol for privacy, the RIF Storage protocol leverages on the RIF Payments protocol to make micro payments possible and so on and so on.
Also what all the protocols have in common is that their economies are integrated around the RIF Marketplace backed by the RIF token or derived assets.
And in all cases we build libraries in the most used languages (javascript, java, python, C#, etc) on top of the protocols so non blockchain developers can use the technology without becoming experts
So I would say what RIF offers is unified technical interface and a share economy to all the protocols needed to build fully decentralized applications
Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community
Q1 from Telgram user @buduh11
What was your motivation for starting this project? and what is your vision for $RIF?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Our motivation at IOVLabs has always been the same: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/rootstock-merges-bitcoin-ethereum-help-world-bank-drive-financial-inclusion-1528902 .As you can see we are prety consistent over time.
Our main goal is to create the financial infrastructure that will serve anyone regardless the conditions they were born into.
And we decided to create that on top of Bitcoin because we wanted the foundations (Store of Value) to be as censorship resistant and solid as possible.
That’s why we choose to make bitcoin the RSK native currency and use merge mining to protect the network (stats.rsk.co)
Our vision is that we are part of a greater construction that we called the Internet of Value and that by definition is a network of networks to protect and transfer value. In our vision this Internet of Value will be built in a layered way being decentralised store of value Layer 1, agreement settlement Layer 2, P2P infrastructure services Layer 3 and above that the application level.
So year after year we go building block by block our vision and demonstrating the potential of the stack as it grows
Q2 from Telgram user @Magoy12
In looking over the whitepaper there is both “Smart Bitcoin”, RBTC, the native token for, RSK Smart Contracts, which appears to be only to pay for tx fees/gas. Is there a reason that RIF Token is truly necessary, or in theory could everything have been done with RBTC?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: The reason why we create RIF is because we envision the RIF economy serving all the smart contract crypto economies and we plan to port RIF token and the RIF Marketplace to other crypto economies like Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, EOS, Cardano, etc
We are also working on Enveloping transactions what will enable RIF applications to operate fully with RIF while Enveloping providers pay the Bitcoin miners in RBTC
That will be available for any token running on RSK so developers will be able to have single token applications while RSK remains in full alignment with Bitcoin
Q3 from Telgram user @nyo_cant
Hi, one of the main goals of your project is helping the less-favoured people, which is really praiseworthy and could be of great help for developing countries. However, you decided to establish your organization in Gibraltar, which seems to be quite the opposite. What advantages brings Gibraltar in for your project? Thanks!
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Well we choose Gibraltar for the HQ of our purpose driven organization because after evaluating multiple jurisdictions we found one where the government and regulator really understood the nature of what we were building and was willing to collaborate to also implement this technologies. Small jurisdictions have the motivation innovate faster and we found in Gibraltar a place that not only had this motivation but that also took the time to properly study the technology.
Regarding helping the less favored I think although we have them as our main focus I want to say that we don’t want to create a financial system for the poor, we want to create a financial system that is so efficient and open that is inclusive by nature
Q4 from Telgram user @CryptoZaratustra
Please share key performance indicators of the chain, such as the Number of blocks per second, time to completion of a transaction, transaction speed, cost per transaction, or something else? Can you compete with other payment networks?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: You can check most of this info here: stats.rsk.co but on average RSK validates a block every 30 seconds, has the potential of scaling to 100 transactions per second (tps) in its current state but with improvement we have in progress and reach 2000 tps preserving the ethos of Bitcoin of independent and affordable validation for an individual. Cost per transaction for bitcoin is 1 cent USD and for tokens around 4 cents USD. We are building the RIF Payment protocols in order to achieve levels on pair with Payment Networks like Paypal (190 tps), VISA (~3K tps on average) or even Alipay (85K peak tps).
Q5 from Telgram user @konditer_rolex
Is RSK Mainnet another layer for the BTC blockchain? Do you want to improve BTC or use it to secure R-BTC and your network?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: RSK Mainnet is a separate Blockchain with a different consensus protocol (DECOR+) that has currently 40% of the economical security of Bitcoin and twice the economical security of Ethereum. Given its native currency RBTC is backed 1 to 1 with bitcoin and the network is secured by the Bitcoin miners via merge mining we see RSK as part of the Bitcoin Ecosystem and as an extension to core Bitcoin capabilities.
Q6 from Telgram user @carlos3766
How are the important decisions taken on the platform? through the Federation?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Nope the RSK Federation is only used by the Bitcoin peg the RSK platform itself is protected by proof of work and upgrades to the protocol are proposed by us or the community and independently accepted by miners and node operators in the same fashion as Bitcoin but of course without the same level of decentralization yet 🙂
Q7 from Telgram user @sangmark1
For a project development first of all main priority is having enough fund. Are RSK team financially capable to run this project? Does RSK have enough fund for it’s developement? Can you tell us that how RSK generate the profit? ?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: IOVLabs (RSK is open network) is purpose drive organization so all the revenue is invested back into Ecosystem and protocol development, it has more than 5 years of runway which is enough to fulfill its objectives. IOVLabs supports core projects in the RSK ecosystem and has revenue sharing with them so as the ecosystem succeeds IOVLabs sustainability is assured. On top of that IOVLabs has a pool of RIF tokens that will use to promote ecosystem and protocol development and also receives revenue sharing from miners transaction fees.
Q8 from Telgram user @Bit_Top
What do you think of a public chain with privacy features? Many public chains are considering adding privacy features, such as adding zero-knowledge proofs, will RIF develop in this field?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Zero Knowledge proof are already possible on RSK and a team already implemented the Zokrates libraries succesfully. On the protocol level we are fully pro privacy and we have a couple projects that go in that direction. As I stated before I think we need to find the balance where we avoid the platforms to be used as mass surveillance systems while also avoiding full confrontation with enforcing agencies but that’s my personal opinion, as I said full privacy solutions can be build on top of RSK regardless of my point of view 😊
Q9 from Telgram user @Rifat118molla
Most platforms take a substantial cut, meaning creators only a see a portion of their rewards. So How does the RSK Platform solve this problem? Is the value that creators receive on the RSK platform always optimal?
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Yes in RSK creators only pay per use of the platform to miners and as I shared before the costs are very low and stable (http://rskgasstation.info/), around 1 cent for an RBTC transfer, 4 cents for a RIF or any other token transfer and some pretty complex contracts cost 1 USD to use. IOVLabs has no control on who uses the platform is a truly P2P platform run by the community
Q10 from Telgram user @malachi456
have been working with ETH solidity, what is the modalities involved and incentive for me to Port my Ethereum projects to RSK. WHAT’S THE competitive advantage for me,
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar: Well on one side you have to do zero modifications to your contracts, recently a project ported to RSK and they were happily surprised that they only had to change their private keys :). On the cost side the cost in RSK is most of the time much cheaper than on Ethereum but more important because of the fees model they are extremly stable so you have predictability on your running cost. The other key element is all the things you get solved out of the box thanks to RIF, a great example is the rWallet one of the few Bitcoin and RSK open source wallets for Android and iOS (https://developers.rsk.co/wallet/rwallet/). Finally you have the second safest network after Bitcoin and the safest more efficient way to interact with bitcoin using Smart Contracts
Serg: I think it is the longest AMA I’ve seen 🙂 It was a great AMArathon, Diego! We had a great time! Thank you for being here with us today!
PART 3 – Quiz Results
This time users had to connect to thecryptoquiz.com, the game can support the first 2,000 users that join. They saw a short countdown before the game begins. There were 3 rounds of questions on IOVLabs and DeFi. The quicker the user responded to each question, the more points they got. The Top 3 players of the ranking at the end of all questions got a prize: 1st prize $100 split beween RIFP and RDOC, 2nd prize $75 between RIFP and RDOC and 3rd $25 between RDOC, RIFP.
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