Jul 14, 2020
AMA Recap With Dieogo Zaldivar (RIF/RSK Project CEO)
It was a moment of enjoying $800 after learning from CEO of RIF/RSK Project on AMA event that happened on satoshi telegram on Monday afternoon 13th July 2020.
The event started with Diego Zaldivar RIF CEO introduction. He has been in crypto since 2011 though he didn’t get it and almost a year later a good friend brought him back to it. He explained, back then in Argentina how they had capital controls and his friend made him open an account at Blockchain.info, sent him 5K BTC which he sent them back to him and all happened within an hour. The experience was revealing because he had the feeling of how a truly open and permissionless financial system would work and since then he decided to devote himself in full to understand Bitcoin and foster its knowledge in Latin America.
A question came in!
How is it related to RSK? what was the original idea behind it?
Diego Said, well as I started with 2 partners to create the Bitcoin communities across 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 currencies backed by Bitcoin, much like a digital gold standard.
An Interruption: So, you are basically one of the pioneers of crypto :)
Diego finished up the first question with: 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. He attended to an interrupted question: You can say so 🙂 but I think the true pioneers are Nick Szabos and Adam Backs 🙂. Even Sergio that started in 2011 and found 9 bugs in Bitcoin protecting it from some important threats
The deliverable brought in another question from the moderator
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 answered:
Well I think he is for sure one of the intellectual fathers of Bitcoin but I think is a great thing that Satoshi is unknown, otherwise, any characteristics (bad or good) of the individual or collective behind the alias would be used to attack Bitcoin
or to create sides. Is great that Satoshi is anonymous so we all can be Satoshi
Before I continue with the AMA questions, quick info about RSK.
RSK is known as the RootStock platform and RSK is the first Bitcoin sidechain in production that provides Turing-complete Smart Contracts, compatible with the Ethereum standards, and secured by Bitcoin merge mining. It is a Turing-complete smart contract that gives the opportunity to developers working on Ethereum to benefit from the robustness of the Bitcoin currency and the security of the RSK blockchain. Read More
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 are RDOC and RIFP? Are there any more tokens?
Answer:
Well, those two additional tokens were 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 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. 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 they get deeper into the crypto economy
So, if I sell services worth 10,000 USD, I have to also buy tokens worth of this value for insurance?
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 Telegram 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?
Answer:
Well as with Bitcoin all transactions on the RIF Marketplace are pseudonymous and we are designing some privacy-enhancing features. I think in the current state of affairs going fully anonymous would bring a level of confrontation with the government that could be detrimental for the development of the RIF economy. We should find a balance where we stop mass surveillance systems from operating but if there is a crime involving the information can be followed by a forensics specialist, that’s where Bitcoin is today and we follow the same ethos/balance
At the moment, do you have any relationships/deals with governments? is your platform regulated?
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)
what do you mean by bringing a level of confrontation with the government then? like they can ban its usage?
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
that’s cool. Can you tell us which governments are those? Or it’s a secret at the moment?
Some are public like the project we did to create secure communications channels to report complaints 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?
Answer:
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.
How do you know which transactions will need a subjective evaluation?
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 are 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
Q4 from Telegram 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?
Answer:
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 (incentivized secure communications protocol). All this is integrated around the RIF Marketplace.
Q5 from Telegram 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
Answer:
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 decentralized 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 efficiently.
Can you tell us more details about the storage? Is it also decentralized?
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 Telegram 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?
Answer:
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 micropayments 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 a unified technical interface and a sharing economy to all the protocols needed to build fully decentralized applications.
The AMA was ended with a load of questions from the participants and RIF CEO was able to deal with most of them. You may want to know more about the project, visit the official website below, and study the project closely.
