Why are you optimistic about RSK (root chain)? This is my point of view

This article is about 6900 words long and it takes 15 minutes to read. The directory is as follows:

• 00 What is the side chain?
• 01 Is Bitcoin's fast payment valuable?
• 02 RSK is highly compatible with virtual machine EVM
• 03 How do you understand the dual token mechanism of RIF and RBTC?
• 04 I saw the application scenario of the RSK ecosystem
• 05 RSK development
• 06 My little advice

This article mainly discloses my relatively comprehensive view of RSK. For the details of the technology, the reader can jump to the technical evaluation article of the previous period ( [Technical Review] RSK: Up to 40% of Bitcoin computing support, enhance the smart contract platform The security (BBB) ) is read, but the technical details are not repeated here.

00 What is the side chain?

RSK positioning is a side chain of bitcoin that continues the ecology of Bitcoin.

Everyone is relatively familiar with the public chain, and they can realize that the public chain is the "operating system" of Dapp or become a worldwide computer. But what about the side chain?

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In fact, it is very simple. The side chain is first of all a public blockchain that is independent of Bitcoin. It is technically not related to Bitcoin (that is, it is not developed using Bitcoin's underlying public chain). From this perspective, Ethereum and EOS can also be called the side chain of Bitcoin. Of course, we didn't call it that way, because they are not. This is because the local tokens of Ethereum and EOS are not related to Bitcoin, while RSK is the local token of Bitcoin as the RSK network. It is used for fast payment transfer of Bitcoin and smart contract calling fee, which makes RSK continue. The ecology of Bitcoin plays a complementary role to Bitcoin and continues its value.

Therefore, RSK technology is independent of Bitcoin, which expands the powerful function of "smart contract" for Bitcoin ecology and forms an operating system. At the same time, in this operating system, RSK chooses BTC as its local token and smart contract fee payment means, so that the value of Bitcoin is circulated in this operating system. This is why RSK is known as the side chain of Bitcoin.

01 Is Bitcoin's fast payment valuable?

The first meaning of the RSK network: the fast transfer of bitcoin.

After ten years of development, Bitcoin's decentralization approach has gradually gained public consensus, and through the powerful computing network, it has built a secure and reliable moat for the bottom layer of this value storage, so that users of cryptocurrencies can trust Bitcoin. Value: the value of the investment assets.

This is an unprecedented model. Bitcoin is recognized by many as a valuable asset in the absence of a centralization power, so it is often referred to as "digital gold." However, how far is Bitcoin from the "electronic cash" that Nakamoto had originally proposed?

To be precise, it should be relatively far.

Friends who have used Bitcoin transfers should be well aware of the Bitcoin experience. It takes 10 minutes for Bitcoin to transfer 1 account. If you encounter more congestion (increased number of users), this transfer may take more than half a day. What does it mean?

It is you go to the supermarket to buy instant noodles (the best partner for the speculators, after all, save money haha), take out Alipay payment, 10 seconds after the merchant confirms the account, you can go. However, if you take out the Bitcoin wallet payment (the merchant says that the cryptocurrency enthusiast accepts the payment), after the transfer, the merchant will ask you to wait 10 minutes or more to confirm the receipt. I believe that you are already very impatient. Said to give up this payment method.

Well, this is one of the reasons why Bitcoin can't form a popular payment method.

Of course, you may question me, is there any “payment” value for Bitcoin payments?

As a weak sovereign or super-sovereign currency, we live in a strong sovereign state. For the time being, we rarely use bitcoin to pay. More people just use bitcoin as a financial product for value storage and wealth management. There are two main reasons for this:

(1) Our legal currency system is relatively complete, and a strong sovereign government requires everyone to use it.

(2) The killer Dapp is still not popular, and the digital asset transaction has not yet formed a mainstream asset transfer method, resulting in the demand for asset transfer is still not strong.

However, if you have ever read an article I translated:

If you don't live in a broken country, you may not feel the importance of Bitcoin.

You may be able to feel the power of bitcoin payments. With the growing problem of many corrupt political or ethnic conflicts in the world, the legal currency system in many countries is not enough to protect citizens' assets. Just as Venezuela’s inflation reached 1,000,000% of the legal currency and the inflation reached 5 billion times in Africa, the labor income of these citizens was eroded by the inflationary currency. Therefore, bitcoin, which is resistant to censorship and has a relatively constant value, has become a popular "universal currency" for citizens.

In this country, bitcoin payments have become a necessity.

By issuing a RBTC token on its own public chain, RSK ensures that the RBTC on the RSK and the BTC on the Bitcoin network are 1:1 anchored by means of alliance guarantee. One way to do this is a semi-trusted third-party approach because Bitcoin lacks smart contracts.

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The specific process is that RSK selects 15 high-profile authentication nodes to form an alliance. When 1000 (for example numbers) RBTCs are to be issued on the RSK, the smart contract is required to get the signature of the majority of the 15 affiliate nodes before it can be issued. This practice is a universal and safe practice and does not require trust. In this process, you need to mortgage the corresponding 1000 bitcoins on Bitcoin to get the 1:1 release process with RBTC. This will be guaranteed by a key owned by 15 federations, since this is a specific address that needs to be recharged to Bitcoin, so on the bitcoin side, we need to trust the federation. Of course, 15 notary nodes will provide enough for this recharge.

Similarly, if you want to reverse the RBTC to BTC, then the union is responsible for the notarization process of this two-way exchange.

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Through the process of two-way redemption, RBTC is a bitcoin issued on the RSK network, which can have real bitcoin value.

And through the RBTC issued by the RSK network, we can still enjoy the value of Bitcoin, but have an unusual payment experience. On the RSK-constructed network, users will be able to enjoy the account within 30 seconds.

This means that in a supermarket where bitcoin payments are needed in Africa, you will be able to enjoy an experience similar to our Alipay today, but the bottom layer is still a safe and reliable Bitcoin system.

This process is actually similar to the relationship between our central bank and Alipay or local branches today. As described in the RSK white paper, Bitcoin, a secure network, will be able to assume the role of the central bank: asset liquidation. This asset clearing hub can sacrifice certain transfer efficiency, but ensure that transactions are highly secure. Bank branches or Alipay mainly face the scenes of personal deposit, transfer, and small transactions, which require high-frequency and real-time payment experience, so ensure security when ensuring sufficient security.

Therefore, the side chain constructed by RSK today will be able to respond to the payment needs of Bitcoin in real time, and through the highly secure alliance acceptance method, the process of clearing and settlement with the Bitcoin network will be realized.

This will greatly satisfy the needs of many people and enhance the value ecology of Bitcoin. With the gradual popularization of blockchain, the demand for high-frequency trading of digital assets has increased, and RSK will also meet the needs of the future development of bitcoin ecological development.

02 RSK is highly compatible with Ethereum virtual machine EVM

This meaning is very huge.

As a technology developer, I have always advocated in the industry:

Do not repeat the wheel.

This means that for programmers who develop applications, we must implement "takenism" (that is, things that are already in use and easy to use), and don't repeat what you have to build, otherwise efficiency will Very low.

We know that Bitcoin is very valuable, but it only has the function of money transfer and accounting. Therefore, Ethereum found a gap, based on the idea of ​​decentralized maintenance of data books, built a full-featured operating system underlying. To this day, Ethereum remains the community of the most developers in the blockchain industry. But the worse is that Ethereum's computing power is only 2 parts per million of bitcoin, not at a security level.

RSK sees this gap and wants to integrate the security of Bitcoin and the full functionality of Ethereum (the so-called "Turing Complete"). Therefore, the public chain created by RSK is also aimed at the intelligent contract platform, which can provide Turing completeness for developers.

At this time, RSK proposed a merger mining algorithm, which allows bitcoin miners to mine for bitcoin while also mining for RSK network, using Bitcoin's computing power to forge a highly secure network for RSK. force. By combining mining algorithms, RSK has gained 40% of Bitcoin's computing power, and this percentage is still rising. At this time, RSK became a smart contract network with Bitcoin security level. This network will be 145,000 times more powerful than Ethereum.

(As of press time, the total network computing power of ETH is 175TH/S, the total network computing power of BTC is 65EH/S, and the RSK corresponds to 26EH/S, then the computing power of RSK is 145,000 times of ETH.)

At the same time, as a smart contract platform, RSK's RVM virtual machine is highly compatible with Ethernet's EVM at the bytecode level. This means that the cost of migrating to RSK from DAPP developed by Ethereum developers is extremely low. This allows developers to enjoy:

One development and full operation.

This is very friendly to the developer because it is extremely efficient and requires no further modifications. For the RSK network, it will be easy to get acceptance and support from the Ethereum developer community.

For the public, how is this highly compatible understanding?

Let me give you an example.

We know that the trade war between China and the United States was severe in the past, because the technical blockade of Huawei, the domestic communications giant, caused Huawei to only make strategic reserves and replace the current Android system provided by the United States. Of course, the people are applauding. After all, the patriotic sentiment makes us very excited. However, as a technology company, switching the underlying system is very painful, which means giving up the entire good Android ecosystem. After all, users like to use WeChat and Taobao, if they are gone on the new system, then I believe that Huawei mobile phones are no longer used. Therefore, Huawei announced that the upcoming "Hongmeng" operating system is actually highly compatible with Android, so that the APP application currently running on Android will continue to run in the "Hongmeng" operating system.

This means that Huawei's self-developed system has been able to accommodate users and developers of the Android ecosystem. This makes Huawei mobile phones continue to develop and strengthen.

Therefore, RSK's choice of a virtual machine mechanism that is highly compatible with EVM is a very sensible piece that allows Ethereum developers and users to quickly integrate into the RSK ecosystem and reverse traffic to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

03 How do you understand the dual token mechanism of RIF and RBTC?

Because both RIF and RBTC tokens exist in the RSK network, many friends will feel very embarrassed.

But if I give a simple example, I believe you will understand. In the real world, we often live in the mechanism of double tokens or even multiple tokens:

If you are a relatively high-level employee of Ali, often your income per year is:

Part of the legal token + part of the company's shares. Even if you are not an employee of Ali, you can buy shares in Ali through the stock market.

The legal currency is the renminbi, which is a currency with a wide consensus. The degree of depreciation is related to the country's economy and is relatively stable.

The company's shares (ie stocks) is an internal ecological proof of equity, which can obtain certain rights of the ecology (such as stocks have decision-making power and dividend rights). It is a barometer of this economy, and it has a large added value if it develops well.

With this concept, it may be relatively simple to understand the RSK dual-generation currency:

(But the concept of RBTC+RIF is still quite different from the concept of legal currency + stocks, but there are some similar features.)

RBTC is 1:1 exchanged with Bitcoin and is the hard currency of the entire encryption ecosystem. The RSK ecosystem is similar to the concept of “currency” as a transaction, transfer of bitcoin and payment of RSK smart contract calling fees.

RIF is the ecological token of the entire RIF operating system, used to pay for the value of the computing and storage resources of the RIF operating system. If more people use the RIF operating system for DAPP, and more and more users use DAPP on the RIF operating system, it means that the RIF can be worth more than "money."

We give a frame diagram, which is the framework picture given by the official white paper of RIF OS.

Throughout the RSK ecosystem, Bitcoin and the Smart Bitcoin protocol (green part) are used to construct a secure and reliable level of intelligent contracts. This level will be compatible with Ethereum's EVM virtual machine through the RVM virtual machine, allowing Ethereum DAPP to seamlessly switch to RSK's smart contract platform. At this level, we need RBTC to pay the smart contract fee (ie, Ethereum's Gas, Bitcoin block packing fee). At this level, RBTC shows lower transaction costs, faster transaction speeds, and lower deployment costs at the smart contract level.

Based on this level of intelligent contracts, RIF Labs has developed a complete set of "operating system RIF OS" (the blue part). This operating system is not the same as the development level of Ethereum.

For example, in the Ethereum, an "artificial intelligence" algorithm engine DAPP (the token name is AI coin) and a "database" call service DAPP (the token name is DB coin) were developed, and then the developer wanted to be based on artificial intelligence. The algorithm engine and the database call service to make a short video recommendation DAPP, then I need to buy AI coins, DB coins and ETH coins to pay for DAPP and system level fees. However, on the RIF OS, some common DAPP components are integrated into the operating system, including storage, payment, gateway, naming system, etc., so that developers can use only RIF tokens to get a friendly bottom layer. Resources to focus on developing core business logic.

Since RIF OS provides services for enterprise developers similar to today's cloud service providers, RIF OS should provide a higher level than Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud, which mainly provide IaaS services, according to the service level provided by RIF OS. The PaaS layer allows developers to focus more on core business logic development.

This level of design ideas, in fact, is similar to the current EOS design ideas. EOS is designed with the goal of blockchain cloud services, and the resources of CPU, network and memory can be obtained by mortgage EOS tokens. In contrast, the RIF OS provides a complete set of system resources that are more complete and rich, providing a convenient entry point for DAPP developers.

04 I saw the application scenario of the RSK ecosystem

This part is due to the author's limited knowledge, I believe that can only portray the future scene of RSK one or two, only when throwing bricks and jade.

In the future, the field of public blockchain is inevitably not a form of generalism. Even in the Internet industry that is developing today, there are 3-4 large-scale suppliers in the mobile operating system and computer operating system. In essence, the blockchain industry with its own dispersion is not accelerating the monopoly of the Internet, but forming a more subdivided market under the guidance of the certification economy and technology development.

Therefore, the ecology of RSK construction is not closed, but rather open, which is conducive to a more friendly cooperation with the project parties with large flows. Therefore, in the future, RSK may form a coexistence and win-win relationship with high-quality public blockchains such as ETH, EOS and TRX.

According to this inference, what is my prediction of the development advantages of the RSK network?

In my knowledge, DEFI (Distributed Finance) is a very advantageous direction for RSK networks.

The RSK network, which shares the same level of security as Bitcoin, is the most secure in the smart contract platform. This means that DEFI, a product that is in high demand for high security requirements, is very suitable for deployment in RSK.

Imagine a decentralized exchange (DEX) where many users' digital assets are traded through blockchains. At this time, you need to pay close attention to asset security and prevent hackers from stealing. This DAPP should be deployed via RSK. Similarly, many DEFI products use smart contracts to deploy digital asset management products. This distribution of many assets should be more securely deployed on the RSK.

At the same time, asset-winding is also the core direction of the future.

The use of blockchain to achieve similar real estate, bulk futures products and other on-chain transactions is one of the key development directions in the future. Think about real estate with trillions of value. If you are on the chain, then the public blockchain you choose should be highly secure. At this time, RSK has a very big advantage.

In addition, the enterprise-level blockchain deployment plan should be based on the advantages of Ethereum and RSK.

As a traditional enterprise, if you want to adopt the public blockchain as one of its development directions, the two important indicators for its assessment should be:

(1) Rich developer community support.

(2) A relatively complete underlying application tool.

First, RSK uses a virtual machine compatible with Ethereum. This means that RSK and Ethereum share the developer traffic of the Ethereum community and can quickly gain technical support from the developer community, enabling enterprise developers to get rich open source community documentation and tool support.

Second, the similar Paas service created by RIF OS will provide a convenient solution for enterprise blockchain deployment blockchain applications. As long as RIF OS is relatively complete, it means that enterprise developers only need to focus on their own business logic development without worrying about the underlying facility logic.

It is also this choice, we see Microsoft's Azure cloud service, the first to integrate RSK's smart contract protocol and Ethereum ETH in the cloud service , so that enterprise-level cloud users can choose to develop.

05 RSK development

As a technology developer, I am concerned about the actual progress of the project's technology, and I hope to observe the true value of the project through the technical progress of the project. During the RSK research process, I looked at the code of the RSK.

RSK as an open source technology project, we can view the entire open source community through Github.

RSK's Github address: https://github.com/rsksmart

Screenshot from: RSK's Github screenshot time: July 7, 2019

RSK as an open source technology project, we can view the entire open source community through Github.

As you can see, the RSK has a code base of up to 35. Each of these code bases is a separate function module. Such as RSK blockchain browser (explorer), RSK mining cost API (mining-fees-information-api), RSK test network (faucet), RSK proposal reserve library (RSKIPs) and so on.

Then I opened the recently updated RSK java extension package (rskj), you can see that the technical explanation document (READ.md) is very clear, every time the code upload also has the relevant update content, in line with the software. Development specifications. Due to limited time, I can't confidently look at each line of code (this workload is very large…), but from the technical documentation and commit notes of these specifications, let us see the professionalism of the RSK development team. .

Screenshot from: RSK's Github screenshot time: July 7, 2019

At the same time, I look at the update of the rskj codebase, you can see the number of times the code is updated weekly:

Screenshot from: RSK's Github screenshot time: July 7, 2019

It can be clearly seen that since July last year, rskj has kept the code updated, keeping the code update 10-30 every week. This level is a relatively good level in the entire blockchain industry, indicating that the technical team is working hard to develop things, and no longer do white papers and cryptocurrencies.

As a technology developer, I am concerned about the actual progress of the project's technology, and I hope to observe the true value of the project through the technical progress of the project. In the course of RSK research, I also looked at the code of the RSK.

Screenshot from: RSK's Github screenshot time: July 7, 2019

At the same time, I observed the amount of additions and deletions of the weekly delivery code. You can see that the code has increased or deleted the code to 4.5 million lines of code when it was opened, and it has not changed much every week. But because Github's visualization is not good enough, you can't look at the details in detail. But from the first version of the 4.5 million lines of code, this engineering volume is already very large, indicating that the RSK technical team has done a lot of work in development, such a technical team is worthy of respect.

In this part, out of recognition of peers, I feel that RSK's technical team should receive a greater degree of public recognition.

06 My little advice

I talked a lot about what I agree with RSK, but I still have some suggestions to communicate to the RSK project side.

(1) Accelerate deployment of WAsm virtual machine

RVM is highly compatible with EVM and is a very good practice. But we must face it, there is a very big competition on the track of the public chain. The well-developed EOS and the upcoming cross-chain project Polkadot (Poca) all use WAsm virtual machines because WAsm is compatible with more development languages ​​such as C, C++ and Ruby. Accelerating the deployment of WAsm virtual machines will not only allow the EOS development community to join the RSK development community, but also enable traditional Internet developers to join the blockchain industry.

(2) RSK should speed up the landing of major assets and transactions

As a smart contract platform and an integrated operating system (RIF OS), RSK can develop in many directions, but only by cultivating a killer-level public chain can it be able to break through on the public track. As the safest smart contract platform, it is the most reliable platform for implementing DEXs (decentralized exchanges) and asset-winding. It should be used as a breakthrough point to increase the pace of landing.

(3) Make an acceptance gateway for more public-chain digital currency cross-chains

At present, the development of DEX in EOS is better, but because DEX can only trade digital currency on its own public chain and cannot trade other public chain assets, this leads to limited development. RSK has made a very trusting acceptance gateway on BTC and RBTC. This influence should be exerted on more public-chain digital assets, and the high-quality digital assets on the public links such as ETH, EOS and TRX should be accepted. Trading on the RSK enables the establishment of a greater impact and liquidity of DEX in the RSK.

(4) Increase the promotion of bitcoin payment in countries with political margins

Bitcoin fast payment function is a great selling point of RSK. This feature is extremely needed in countries with political margins, so RSK should pay attention to the traffic of these countries and accelerate the landing of bitcoin payments in these countries, making the RSK network a popular payment channel.

(5) Technology is very important, and operation and promotion are also important

As a technology developer, I am very convinced of RSK, but this is from the technical analysis. However, as a platform to carry commercial value, decentralized community operations and product promotion are also very important. As a star project launched in 2017, the integrity of the RSK platform and products is very high, but I found that the discussion in the blockchain industry is still not high. This shows that the marketing promotion is not paying enough attention, which needs to be strengthened. After all, product development is for the commercial market, not just to meet the needs of geeks.

Statement of Interest: This article is the author's view of RSK and does not constitute investment advice. Market risk, the investment need to be cautious

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