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Bitcoin’s Trustless Nature Adds Trust To The Internet

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By replacing reliance on third parties in a trustless way, Bitcoin adds a layer of non-intermediated trust to the infrastructure of the internet.

Stephen Thompson is a senior technical editor at LQwD Fintech Corp. He was a Bitcoin researcher and investigator at BIGG Digital Assets, carrying out Bitcoin investigations with analysis of on-chain and off-chain information.

Trust is the lifeblood of all social interactions. In an environment with high levels of trust, people can make transactions in full confidence that their counterparties are who they say they are, and will behave to both party’s satisfaction. If there is low trust in a society, the social consequences are manifold, unpredictable and often violent. People build structures and institutions that act as proxies for trust, but those structures can go wrong in ways that can become detrimental to everyday social life. For example, a bank’s network fails, leaving a transaction incomplete; a government that starts doing the opposite of what it says it will do; a website claiming to uphold free speech that starts censoring undesirable comments.

How The Internet Changed Trust

In our increasingly technologized world, society has come to see the use of electronic proxies for communication, commerce or even as a way of passing the time, as entirely normal. We have built networks that enable people to enter trusted relationships without ever having met each other. The most expansive network we have built is the internet. The internet’s most familiar app, the World Wide Web, started off as a platform that held vast amounts of information. However, there was so little going on with these early web pages that a 56k modem on a phone line was sufficient to call them up. The internet started to become more powerful and much more interactive in the mid-2000s with the arrival of e-commerce, social media and networking. It became possible for people to use the internet to transfer money and their personal information. This upgrade in the internet’s capability required a new kind of trust: trust that people’s money and personal information was safe in the hands, not of another person, but of a machine, and not just of one machine, but getting transferred between machines and sometimes across different networks.

A study by the Pew Research Center in 2017, surveyed people’s attitude to the kind of trust people had for holding money and personal information on a digital platform. The respondents answered a range of questions but here are some of the types of answers they gave:

  • A combination of better technology with people allowing it to play a more prominent role in their lives will improve trust.
  • Government and industry regulation tailored to the nature of the internet will improve trust.
  • Trust itself will be fluid depending on the context.
  • Compliance replaces trust as part of a “new normal” if users still want the fruits of the internet’s functions.
  • Blockchain can improve elements of the internet but it will not be so disruptive by the time it becomes universally adopted.
  • Governments and corporations have no interest in improving trust over the internet and criminal networks will undermine trust.

I have focused on money and personal information because, in the digital world, those two attributes have merged into what has become known as “digital assets.” Information has just as much value as money. Meanwhile, nefarious actors have organized themselves into networks which have become adept at attacking other networks. Such nefarious networks are just as likely to be seeking personally-identifiable information as they would be seeking money. The WannaCry virus of 2017 was one such example where the hackers were seeking digital information as well as funds.

Bitcoin As A New Trust Layer For The Internet

The internet currently has seven layers as expressed in this model below. This is the Open Systems Interconnections model (OSI). 

(Source)

The model describes seven layers (from bottom to top):

  • Physical layer for the transfer of raw data.
  • Data link layer which secures links between networked computers or nodes.
  • Network layer that controls the secure transfer of data packets from a node on one network to a node on another network (like what a VPN would do).
  • Transport layer which transfers data sequences of differing lengths from one application to another.
  • Session layer controls the setup of connections between computers which run logins, name lookup and logouts.
  • Presentation layer arranges the data into a format that the application layer can view.
  • Application layer is where the user manipulates software, such as Microsoft Office or web browsers, so that it communicates between the client and server to perform certain tasks.

It has been argued that this OSI model needs a trust layer that does not create a single point of failure — like downtime — at any stage of the user’s interaction with the internet.

This is where Bitcoin comes in. You can speak of Bitcoin the network or bitcoin the asset, but in both cases, one can argue that Bitcoin combines money and information. The Bitcoin network is a trust protocol and we see it as the essential trust layer for the internet. The Bitcoin protocol is a set of rules that govern the network and protect it from attacks, like tampering with the blockchain, double-spending or spamming the network. We consider Bitcoin as a much-needed trust layer for the internet because it is trustless. How can this be? “Trustless” means that there are no entities that users have to trust in order to get their information from one node to another and its eventual confirmation onto the network. Instead, the decentralized nature and transparency of the network is the base on which Bitcoin’s trust protocol sits. Bitcoin’s own trust protocol runs on two levels: the transaction level, where users in a transaction swap their public keys and then sign transactions with their private keys so that both users can know that the transaction was genuine; the network level where thousands of nodes and miners confirm that the transaction was not spent twice and then broadcast to the blockchain.

Proof-Of-Work For Analytics

What would be the mechanism that can make Bitcoin a viable trust layer for the internet? In our book “Trust and the Rise of Bitcoin,” we have proposed “proof-of-work for analytics,” which refers to the amount of computational effort required to audit the Bitcoin ecosystem in real time. Users, individually or in a pool, can apply this proofing by running a full node that surveils internet data about the current state of the blockchain. At the moment, there are thousands of full nodes doing just that. Proof-of-work for analytics helps to deter world governments and their corporate agencies from mass surveillance as well as abusive data mining. The greater the number of full nodes analyzing the blockchain, the more data points there will be. Proof-of-work for analytics can be applied to those areas of the internet where users’ private information is most vulnerable to mass surveillance, such as on social media. Basically, we are proposing that the Bitcoin protocol, using the proof-of-work algorithm, can provide the internet with a much-needed layer of trust.

External Factors That Impact On Trust

There are other factors that will influence the prospects of the Bitcoin protocol in improving trust in the internet. The blockchain industry, financial regulators and law enforcement agencies will have an impact on Bitcoin as a trust layer for the internet. Will their interventions assist or hinder blockchain technology in being trustworthy from the public’s point of view?

This is where we move away slightly from the Bitcoin-centric notion of trust and toward the type of trust where new users are willing to use Bitcoin not only because they trust the network to carry out the functions that the protocol promises, but also because they have assessed their trust of Bitcoin based on what they have heard from the words and actions of blockchain companies, regulators and law enforcement agencies. We need to deal with this layman’s idea of trust because the computational trust of the Bitcoin protocol becomes a non-starter if users do not have conventional trust in Bitcoin.

When we look at the blockchain industry, centralized exchanges have been the shop window for bitcoin. If something goes wrong with an exchange anywhere, be it a denial-of-service attack, funds stolen or the like, the public tends to think that the Bitcoin blockchain itself has been hacked. The mainstream news loves personalities, so, individuals such as Gerald Cotten of QuadrigaCX, Alexander Vinnik of BTC-e and Ross Ulbricht of the Silk Road dark web marketplace, have all played their part in making bitcoin look like a currency that only renegades would use. The voice of the Bitcoin community is barely heard for two reasons: The community’s information is not the public’s go-to source and the emotive explanations that come from the mainstream news media overpower the technical explanations of the Bitcoiners. Instead, it is the mainstream news media who, as we all know, have a taste for remarking, “Bitcoin is going down to zero,” or “Bitcoin is too volatile,” or “Bitcoin is used by criminals,” or most recently, “Bitcoin uses too much energy.” With that level of discourse, where is the opening into which we can introduce the concept of computational trust? Or even that the energy consumption involved in Bitcoin mining — which is low compared to other industrial practices — is the price one pays for the decentralization and transparency that Bitcoin offers?

The public sees the evolving relationship between Bitcoin and regulators. Bitcoin has come under the scrutiny of financial regulators albeit at different times, depending on the region. For instance, the Mt. Gox collapse in 2014 awakened the East Asian regulators to Bitcoin, but it took the revelations from the Panama Papers in 2016, to bring cryptocurrencies to the attention of European regulators. Financial regulators around the world believe that bitcoin needs to come under financial regulation before it can ever hope to win people’s trust and then attain the mass adoption that Bitcoiners have so often promised themselves.

The financial regulators have, for the most part, aimed at the centralized exchanges as they are the largest businesses that stand at the bridge between fiat currency and cryptocurrencies. But regulators faced a fundamental problem: Bitcoin is a global network which runs the same protocol wherever in the world the user might be. Regulators are nation-state-level organizations whose existence predates Web 2.0 and, for some, the internet itself: The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority was established as the Financial Services Authority in 1997, the United States’ Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — that has been recently assigned the regulation of bitcoin — was set up in 1974. Those two organizations were set up to regulate specific forms of financial activity. The success of their efforts to cover bitcoin with their regulations (beyond centralized exchanges), remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin keeps evolving away from these attempts. An even bigger challenge is it has so far proven difficult for regulators to coordinate their policies to emulate Bitcoin’s global protocols. In 2018, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) offered regulators some hope when it published global guidelines that governments could apply to their own legislation and give their regulators a better degree of synergy when dealing with cryptocurrencies.

The FATF published its first set of recommendations applying to bitcoin in 2018. It required businesses that transferred any form of digital currency to be termed as VASPs (virtual asset service providers). Centralized exchanges were among those businesses facing these new requirements. Most significantly for bitcoin, the FATF was looking to apply the “travel rule” to bitcoin transactions. Those VASPs receiving bitcoin worth $10,000 or more were required to report the transaction amount, the payer’s real information and account number to their local law enforcement agencies and financial intelligence units as though the transaction was an act of money laundering or terrorism financing. This points to the FATF’s belief that labeling bitcoin transactions with real information will improve trust in bitcoin.

The nature of their attempts at cryptocurrency regulation have focused on money laundering and terrorist financing, so a key focus of regulation has been to require the exchanges to complete know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) checks on new users.

Conclusion

Bitcoin is an open-source monetary network that conceives of trust as computational effort in the form of proof-of-work. The effort by regulators to achieve trust involves breaking of Bitcoin’s trust protocols that make it secure — pseudonymity being one of them. In effect, regulators’ trust requires the breakup of Bitcoin’s trust. The blockchain industry really is caught in the middle as they try to persuade the public to adopt this new kind of money while under pressure to comply with regulators’ conception of trust, during which, they may be called upon to run public-relations damage-limitation exercises whenever their platforms are attacked. We look forward to the success of Bitcoin, as it provides an avenue of computational trust that vouchsafes the security of the network — something that central bank-controlled fiat currencies are not designed to do.

This is a guest post by Stephen Thompson. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Circle Says USDC Reserve Backed Entirely in Cash and Short-Dated US Treasuries

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On May 13, Circle’s chief financial officer Jeremy Fox-Geen published a blog post called “How to Be Stable,” following the aftermath of Terra’s stablecoin implosion. Circle’s CFO explained that since usd coin’s inception, the stablecoin aims to be “the most transparent and trusted dollar digital currency.”

Terra’s Stablecoin De-Pegging Incident Has Cast a Spotlight on the Entire Stablecoin Economy

For a few years now, stablecoin assets have been a popular hedging vehicle among many participants within the cryptocurrency community. In more recent times, stablecoins are being loaned out in great numbers in order to gather interest and high yield returns. In the early days, stablecoins were centralized projects and these days there are a few decentralized and algorithmic stablecoin tokens among the giants.

Tether (USDT) and usd coin (USDC) are the two largest stablecoin projects in terms of market valuation. Both of them are centralized, which means the company guarantees the stablecoins are redeemable for the $1 parity by holding reserves that cover the funds in circulation. Even before Terra’s stablecoin de-pegging event, more confidence has been placed in the top two stablecoins because they are centralized.

 

Three days ago, Bitcoin.com News reported on the stablecoin shuffle after the recent editorial our newsdesk published, showing that for the first time in history, three stablecoins entered the crypto top ten. That is still the case today, except that terrausd (UST) has been knocked out of the top-ten largest crypto market caps and the stablecoin BUSD has replaced the token’s position. After the terrausd (UST) implosion, Circle Financial’s CEO Jeremy Allaire has been speaking to the press about what makes USDC different, and he believes there needs to be “more regulatory framework around stablecoins.”

Circle CEO Says Company Is Ramping Up Trust and Transparency Efforts, Firm Says ‘USDC Is Always Redeemable 1:1 for US Dollars’

On Friday, Allaire tweeted that Circle was “ramping up our efforts” when it comes to USDC “trust and transparency.” Allaire also shared a blog post written by the firm’s CFO Jeremy Fox-Geen, who gives a summary of what Allaire means about transparency. Fox-Geen’s blog post explains “USDC has always been backed by the equivalent value of U.S. dollar-denominated assets.” The CFO further notes that the funds are held by America’s leading financial institutions such as Bank of New York Mellon and Blackrock. The Circle executive’s report adds:

The USDC reserve is held entirely in cash and short-dated U.S. government obligations, consisting of U.S. Treasuries with maturities of 3 months or less.

Circle’s CFO detailed that the company has been publishing monthly attestations from the leading accounting firm Grant Thornton International. “The USDC reserve is worth at least as much as the number of USDC in circulation, providing reputable third-party assurance of this fact to the USDC ecosystem,” Fox-Geen summarized in the blog post. “USDC is always redeemable 1:1 for U.S. dollars,” the Circle executive adds. The blog post concludes that there are thousands of projects and entities that support and facilitate the exchange of USDC in 190 countries.

While Terra’s Algorithmic Stablecoin Shuddered, a Few Decentralized Fiat-Pegged Tokens Still Exist, Many Crypto Supporters Believe They Are Needed

Meanwhile, there are a few decentralized and algorithmic stablecoin assets that exist today like LUSD, DAI, FEI, MIM, USDV, and USDD. For instance, the Ethereum-based Makerdao project leverages an over-collateralization method to back the stablecoin DAI. Tron recently introduced an algorithmic stablecoin token called USDD, and a blockchain project called Vader has a native algorithmic stablecoin called USDV. Another stablecoin asset, dubbed magic internet money (MIM), is built on top of Avalanche (AVAX) and is issued by the decentralized lending platform Abracadabra.

Decentralized and algorithmic stablecoin proponents believe they are needed among the centralized heavyweights like USDT and USDC. Supporters of such assets think that centralized stablecoins are subject to the same failure, and others believe decentralized and algorithmic stablecoins trump centralized models because they cannot be frozen by the issuer. Despite these benefits, centralized stablecoins have ruled the roost and crypto users, at least for now, have more confidence in them.

What do you think about centralized stablecoins and Circle’s recent blog post about transparency and the token’s reserve backing? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Why Bitcoin Works For Latin America

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The trustless nature of Bitcoin allows tremendous societal growth and development in places with low trust in the government and institutions.

With El Salvador’s recent transition of making bitcoin legal tender, people are beginning to take the cryptocurrency more seriously. One important consideration about President Nayib Bukele’s incorporation of Bitcoin into the country is the ability to solve numerous issues unique to Latin American economies and markets, namely, the issue of trust. While Bitcoin’s usefulness as a technology and investment vehicle is clear to market participants in the United States and other English-speaking economies, Bitcoin has special relevance to the people of Latin America. This is due to numerous social, cultural and historical precedents, not necessarily shared or fully understood by those outside of the region.

Understanding these topics and their implications for investment strategies is crucial for anyone looking for asymmetric advantage among English-speaking investors. This is simply because these elements are not fully understood or written about outside of Latin America (or even in languages other than Spanish, period). Indeed, many of these concepts are taken for granted by those who live there, thus not even making them newsworthy. This is inside information the average American is lacking, information which makes Bitcoin a smart decision for anyone betting on the future of Latin America.

Without a doubt, Latin America is one of the final frontiers of serious economic development left in the world, and it’s attracting money fast. Atlantico reported an “$18.6 billion investment into the region through the end of 2021, a staggering 250% increase in investments when compared to $5.3 billion deployed in 2020.” Those looking for outsized investment opportunities have flocked to developing economies and stock markets for decades, but the stage is set for advanced growth in this part of the world now more than ever.

Bitcoin offers unique advantages over foreign stock portfolios for several reasons. One advantage is that bitcoin is sound, unconfiscatable money that acts more like a bearer asset than a market fund or stock portfolio. Indeed, bitcoin is currently outgrowing the phrase “cryptocurrency” with its ever-growing functionality, incorporating benefits that resemble stocks, currency and bearer assets like gold all at the same time. It is quickly becoming its own unique asset class. There is not one, centralized authority that can control, stop, confiscate or inflate bitcoin. Instead, the system is distributed among millions of participants across the Earth, making it “trustless.”

A “Trustless” System Is The Perfect Solution For Low-Trust Societies

An excellent resource on societal differences in trust is Erin Meyer’s “The Culture Map” (a must-read for anyone doing cross-cultural business). As an international business consultant, Meyer points out important differences between Latin American and United States–based firms that go well beyond corporate culture; they go straight to the core of interpersonal relations.

Meyer describes how trust between business associates differs dramatically from one culture to another. She outlines the difference between “cognitive trust” and “affective trust:”

“Cognitive trust is based on the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills and reliability. This is trust that comes from the head. It is often built through business interactions: We work together, you do your work well and you demonstrate through the work that you are reliable, pleasant, consistent, intelligent and transparent. Result: I trust you.

“Affective trust, on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy or friendship. This type of trust comes from the heart. We laugh together, relax together, and see each other at a personal level, so that I feel affection or empathy for you and sense that you feel the same for me. Result: I trust you.”

Countries in Latin American function much more on an “affective trust” paradigm. Meyer explains that because of very low faith in institutions and the legal system, residents of these societies need a sense of personal trust in their associates before working together. In comparison to the lawsuit-happy United States, many Latin Americans have good reason to believe that if they are jilted in a deal, there will be no legal recourse to get their money back. As such, personal references and bonding are important in a way that the average American just doesn’t really understand. In fact, this is the opposite of the U.S., where “business is business.” In the words of Meyer, in lower-trust societies, “Business is personal.”

As a result, this obviously creates a slowdown in many processes. Add this to Latin America’s stunning record of central bank hyperinflations and widespread political corruption and you would be a lot slower to trust too. Bitcoin is important in Latin America because it takes large institutions, governments, powerful corporations and central banks out of the picture and allows direct, instant, peer-to-peer transactions between individuals and businesses alike.

Bitcoin Removes The Trust Factor Entirely

The implications for this are huge. There’s a reason that Bukele — president of a country with hyperinflation so severe that they just gave up on having their own money — has instituted bitcoin as national currency. It solves the trust factor that Latin Americans know so well, of all their life savings becoming worthless in a matter of months. Yes, Bitcoin has volatility, but no volatility so extreme as that of the Venezuelan bolivar, the Argentine peso, the Mexican peso or indeed, the Salvadoran colón over the past few decades. In a volatile environment, people seek out solutions that deprioritize trust in outside institutions and maximize trust in trusted personal transactions. With Bitcoin, there is no middleman, government or otherwise, to get in the way of said transaction.

Just imagine when smart contracts go live in earnest on the Liquid network, and you will see for the first time an enforcement of contracts that is only enabled in the U.S. by our trusted court and police systems. These will encourage economic development and opportunity that has been stifled for many years in Latin America. These are guaranteed contracts built on the hardest money ever created. This is a cultural difference that gives dimensions of value to bitcoin that few in the U.S. can even comprehend. They are not factoring that into their bitcoin price predictions. This is not even to mention the utility of being able to move money across borders with safety and ease, another common Latin American business requirement that most Americans do not account for.

A trustless transactional system built on sound money that cannot be reversed, confiscated or inflated away fixes the fundamental obstacles to widespread Latin American economic development. Latin America is a powerhouse of industry with over half a billion consumers and rich natural resources; however, because of complex economic obstacles, it has not yet been able to fulfill its potential on a global scale. We are quite possibly on the edge of seeing that potential fulfilled and experiencing a type of growth that has not been witnessed in our lifetimes.

If bitcoin becomes the new gold standard for this entire region’s economic development, do you want to be late to the party?

This is a guest post by Nico Antuna Cooper. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

The Importance Of Having An Estate Plan For Your Bitcoin

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Bitcoin users need to seriously consider their plan for what will happen to their bitcoin when they pass away. Having an estate plan is necessary.

Have you thought about what will happen to your bitcoin when you die? For many of us, the thought has at least crossed our mind. But the number of HODLers we know that have actually put in place a legally sound plan of action ensuring both the sovereignty and privacy of their holdings is very few. This is understandable. For starters, most of us don’t expect to die anytime soon. Even those of us who have planned ahead with a well-crafted testamentary device still likely haven’t considered the nuance of proper estate planning for digital assets. And there is no digital asset we know of whose custody and conveyance requires more nuance than bitcoin.

Most people think about trusts in terms of an irrevocable trust. These trusts can be an excellent tool to confer tax advantages to both your estate and beneficiaries if crafted properly. Under such circumstances, legal and equitable title must be split between trustee and beneficiary, meaning the grantor necessarily cedes either legal control or, perhaps more commonly, a portion of his equitable claim to the trust property. While this may be perfectly acceptable for some, others may balk at the mere thought of imposing any limitations on the use and enjoyment of their bitcoin while alive. Here we will examine the revocable living trust as an estate planning instrument for your bitcoin.

Do you know what will happen to your bitcoin when you’re gone? (source)

Will Your Bitcoin Be Secure If You Die Tomorrow?

For those of us that have gone through the trouble of setting up a properly executed will, there’s a tendency to treat our bitcoin in the same manner we treat dollars in an account. This may work out just fine if our assets are held on an exchange like Coinbase or Gemini, but what if they’re not? If you died tomorrow, would your next of kin know how to access your funds? Would they know what to do with the seed phrases you buried next to the tree in the backyard, or how to interpret BIP39 punched into steel?

In a rapidly growing number of instances, proper estate planning requires a level of technical competence and understanding that the majority of estate planners do not possess. With the trend continuing towards technological decentralization, an increasingly significant portion of a decedent’s assets will no longer be accessible with a mere email or letter to the decedent’s bank, stockbroker or bitcoin exchange.

Self-custodied bitcoin requires more than an account password to assume ownership. (source)

Digital Asset Protection Trusts And How They Function

Digital Asset Protection Trusts are a relatively new element of an estate plan. Lawyers in the estate planning community are beginning to realize that an increasing portion of an individual’s net worth can be found in this rapidly-evolving asset class. The legal community has been forced to account for cryptocurrencies, NFTs, digital photo accounts, email accounts, social media profiles and so on. While lawyers react to the idea that someone’s Twitter profile, or Bored Ape NFT is worthy of new regulation, we look to these regulations in the context of the primary digital asset we believe is worthy of preservation: bitcoin.

Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access To Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA)

Most states have either adopted the RUFADAA or plan to. In many instances, RUFADAA will empower the executor of your estate with the authority to request access to most of your digital assets in a manner that takes into account your privacy interests and the terms of service agreements of the big tech companies. But when it comes to permissionless, decentralized monetary energy, e.g., bitcoin, the RUFADAA will be of little use on its own.

This is why we at BTC Trusts recommend placing your bitcoin into a living trust. A living trust will allow you to maintain access to your assets in the same manner as you do today, but also rest assured that if the unexpected happens, those assets won’t be lost, forgotten or misused.

Achieving Maximum Flexibility With A Revocable Trust

With a revocable trust, you may elect to act as the trustee of your digital assets pending a future event, e.g., death or disability. As both the grantor and trustee, you are free to change or amend the trust as often as you like. Unlike an irrevocable trust, the property is not protected from creditors and even though it technically belongs to the trust, it will not receive any special tax treatment while you’re alive. However, provided these assets can be managed distinctly from non-trust property, a revocable living trust can be crafted to convey your bitcoin to your heirs without limiting your use or enjoyment of those assets while you’re alive.

Documenting A Secession Plan Without Compromising Privacy

“Privacy is neces­sary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selec­tively reveal oneself to the world.” — “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” Eric Hughes

Is privacy important to you? You may or may not be aware that whether you have a will or not, the assets of your estate will pass through a legal process known as probate. Probate is a legal process that becomes public record. If you don’t want the public to know how many bitcoin your next of kin just took possession of, probate is something you want to avoid. Setting up a revocable trust or testamentary trust for your bitcoin will allow you to maintain the privacy of your holdings — something your heirs are likely to appreciate.

Disposition through probate could expose the contents of your estate to the world. (source)

How you store and manage your bitcoin while you’re alive is up to you. At BTC Trusts, we find that most of our clients with significant holdings will choose to secure their digital trust property via noncustodial, cold storage solutions. While this provides the highest level of security and privacy, it also introduces a level of technical complexity into the conveyance. Accounting for this is an aspect often overlooked at traditional estate planning firms. That’s why it’s important to select an estate planning firm that can ensure the conveyance is well documented not just legally, but in a technically sound manner as well. A competent digital-estate planner will work with clients to craft the best possible conveyance plan that will maximize security without introducing uncertainty or confusion. Don’t forget — you won’t be around to answer questions if something is unclear. Your estate planner should consider the use of smart contracts, multisignature cold storage and encryption when crafting the optimal manner to effect the conveyance.

Get In Touch For A Free Consult

Now is the time to plan for the unexpected. If you hold significant value in bitcoin, a proper estate plan is going to be needed at some point. The sooner this is in place, the more protection and more value it will provide. Take the first step and reach out today. We’ll be able to share our insights to tailor a plan that works for you and your family.

(Source)

This is a guest post by Scott Worden. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Federated Chaumian Mints Provide A Way For Bitcoin Users To Distribute Trust

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FediMint could provide the Bitcoin stack with an open source, distributed, censorship resistant custody layer for less technical Bitcoin users.

The below is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1193: “I am very bullish on Chaumian Mints.” Sign up for the newsletter here.

An example of how the FediMint protocol works.

We’ve talked about Chaumian Mints in this rag before in the past, specifically MiniMint (built on the FediMint protocol), and expressed how bullish we are on the concept and the benefits it could bring Bitcoiners in terms of privacy and scalability. Well, we meet here in this dark corner of the internet again to reiterate our bullishness on the project and to provide you freaks with an update from the people working on the protocol.

Above is a timestamped YouTube video that begins with a keynote speech from Obi Nwosu describing why he believes that FediMint can provide the Bitcoin open source ecosystem with the missing third pillar of the decentralized stack: custody. The Bitcoin base layer provides an open source, distributed, censorship resistant, store of value settlement layer. The Lightning Network provides a second layer, distributed, censorship resistant payments layer. FediMint, if successful, could provide the stack with an open source, distributed, censorship resistant custody layer.

FediMint achieves this by creating a Chaumian Mint that makes it easy for competent technical leaders in a given community to create a multisignature federation to process transactions for less technically competent community members. Federation members don’t know who is entering or leaving their mint and they can’t tell who is transacting within it. Making it impossible to target and censor specific individuals leveraging a mint. These are but a few of the benefits that come with Chaumian Mints.

I highly recommend you freaks check out Obi’s talk and the panel with Eric Sirion and Casey Rodarmor led by Aaron van Wirdum that follows. Very high signal over the course of forty minutes.