Hey everyone.
I'm pretty interested in learning more about that Bitcoin Bond that was floating around a few years back.
I found this link that has some info: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Distributed_markets
I’m trying to find some examples of this hashmap file.
Are there any nodes that still run this? What made the project go away?
I checked out Jgarzik's bitcoin bond library, but I’d really like to dive deeper into this.
Instead of waiting for specific bonds to pop up and then evaluating each one manually, we could create a decentralized investment fund by sending funds to a Bitcoin private key that’s encrypted according to a policy and then uploaded into the financial hashmap.
The policy-locked ciphertexts might get pretty hefty, especially with large policies (like dates can take over a kilobyte), so it seems smart to use the same hash disassociation as in the bond protocol to keep the blockchain size down.
That hash would actually point to a data structure with the encrypted private key:
}
As the bond market client scans the blockchain, it might find these policy-locked coins. By grabbing the ciphertext from the hashmap, it can figure out what needs to happen to unlock those coins and display that info in the client. So, someone scouting for business chances might see a notification like that in their interface.
Thanks in advance.
It was an old method of doing the more modern atomic swap construct that you see in some programs, but it's not used anymore.
One of the problems with the bond is that since it required adding more messages to the bitcoin network, it was never actually implemented or published to mainnet or even testnet.
Nowadays, most people are using OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY for this. Biggest project using this is the Lightning Network.
There were only working on building a distributed version of GLBSE - a centralized bitcoin stock market that was later killed in 2012 due to tax. Technically, a distributed bond market would need smart property to operate perfectly, which won't be clear for properties owners to understand how to integrate their assets to run on the blockchain, unless they're technically trained.
In addition, Mike Hearn in this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92421.0 confirmed that smart properties still require more facilities to work properly in tackling loan and collateral, yet it's theoretically proven to be achieved. On the other hand Jgarzik (if i'm not mistaken) was only working on smartcoin (initially pybond) to prove that distributed market is achievable.
I would tag it as a fictional project, that can still be finished, but not when end users will have to do technical works to sign transactions on distributed contract.
It could be finished, but nobody is interested in doing so and most new devs have not even heard of this. Even so, it would be an uphill battle getting this in as a soft fork given that there is already a superior solution in place.
Thanks for the extra info on it.
I thought maybe it had made it's way to main net for testing at some point was curious to see if that was the case.
Thanks again!
Of course, developers enjoy working on the cutting edge of any project, not on existing ideas that has been abandoned for years. Notwithstanding, those old projects serves well as a reference to derive new objectives that could be innovated to solve problems in recent times. For example, smart cars are now here (self driven cars) which would be a great fit in helping smart properties work properly, also more innovative projects could immerge that'll drive developers to fetch up such a project and work it to their own taste.
However, what's the superior solution already in place for this?