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Emin Gün Sirer Profile picture
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15 Jan, 12 tweets, 4 min read
Back with another #FreeLoveFriday. My first thread focused on what I love about Bitcoin, and features we borrowed for @avalancheavax. Today, let's focus on @Omni_Layer, or as OGs knew it, Mastercoin

Let’s wind back the clock to early 2010s. Bitcoin is just getting started. Deep techies and cryptography people are hearing whispers, reading Satoshi’s whitepaper, and many are getting hooked on the idea that money can be decentralized.

But why stop at money?
In January 2012, J.R. Willett publishes “The Second Bitcoin Whitepaper v0.5”, which laid the foundation for what has always been the absolute killer app for blockchains: digital asset issuance sites.google.com/site/2ndbtcwpa…
By July 2013, Mastercoin was ready to launch & well-funded after pioneering the first Initial Coin Offering. It would enable new assets, currencies, and smart contracts to be created on-top of the #Bitcoin blockchain, without requiring any network changes.
Suddenly, there was a wealth of opportunities to expand the utility of Bitcoin. Enter @Tether_to, the world’s first stablecoin in Oct 2014 and a cornerstone of the crypto markets since.
Omni/Mastercoin had the innovative idea to layer its transactions onto Bitcoin, not using slivers of btc like colored coins, but by encoding them as legitimate transactions whose free fields carry the Omni Layer information.
Omni even built a primitive DEX on top, though no one really used it save for some really low ball offers to match against offers people send by mistake. Still, it was one of the first DEXes out there.
Of course, even if the Omni DEX worked, BTC has such high confirmation latency that front-running would have been really easy.

These are problems we see today in ETH's DEX's as well:
medium.com/hackernoon/fro…
Ultimately, Omni became hard to use because it's encoding scheme took a lot of space and cost a lot in fees.
While the limitations of Bitcoin’s speed and fees held Mastercoin/Omni back from massive success, that team deserves an immense amount of credit for the foresight and vision in creating the first digital assets free from a central authority.
One of the main things we at @avalancheavax learned from Omni is the killer application for blockchains. Namely, digital assets are the killer app. Money is just one of these assets, but there are many others.
Without the Omni team's innovations, crypto would not be where it is today.

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More from @el33th4xor

Emin Gün Sirer Profile picture
22 Jan
Back with another #FreeLoveFriday. Last time, we covered how Mastercoin/@Omni_Layer pioneered digital asset issuance on blockchains. Today, let’s discuss @chainlink and the vital role it plays in connecting blockchains to the real world.
I have said repeatedly that digital asset issuance is the killer application for blockchains. The next frontier is bringing real world assets to networks like @avalancheavax, but we often face a significant problem:
Namely, how do you get data from the real world onto blockchains and into applications running on them? More critically, how do you achieve that securely and transparently in real-time? Smart contracts are tamper-proof, but they're only as reliable as their input data.
Read 10 tweets
Emin Gün Sirer Profile picture
22 Jan
In Bitcoin, a transaction isn't final until it's in a block that is k deep. k depends on exchanges and is 3 or more, with 6 being a typical choice. Since the initial block wasn't that deep, a "spend" didn't happen, and therefore there could not have been a double spend.
Now, the choice of k depends on a few factors. 6 isn't a magical number that's correct for all time. It depends on the amounts of hash power available to the attacker. If the attacker has access to 49% of hash power, k should tend towards infinity.
The tail of any PoW blockchain is kind of like a scratch/working area. Changes there are to be expected and perfectly normal.
Read 8 tweets
Emin Gün Sirer Profile picture
20 Jan
Sad to see another PoW coin come under 51% attack. The long term solution to attacks like this is to migrate to Avalanche.
Remember that PoW's safety depends solely on the amount of hardware that is available to launch a 51% attack. If an attacker has 51% hashpower, the number of confirmations required for safety is infinity -- the coin is not safe to use.
Changing the hash function is something that people try, but it typically doesn't work: once the coin is turned into a GPU-mined coin, the attacker has as much hardware to attack with as there are GPUs to rent.
Read 15 tweets
Emin Gün Sirer Profile picture
8 Jan
There’s not enough positivity spread between projects that are more commonly considered rivals, rather than peers. I’m starting a new series called “Free Love Fridays” to dive into what I like about the best projects in crypto. Naturally, #Bitcoin is up first.
Bitcoin has had an outstanding few months as it surged through all-time highs, but these new benchmarks are the culmination of years of hard work by its community constructing the narrative of BTC as a hedge against the traditional financial system.
Bitcoin has solidified its migration from peer-to-peer cash to store-of-value / digital gold, and extended this narrative well beyond crypto twitter to famed investors and institutions who are now diving in.
Read 14 tweets
Emin Gün Sirer Profile picture
4 Jan
Avalanche is coming to @ReefDeFi soon, enabling its users to access DeFi applications in the @avalancheavax ecosystem directly through its platform.

Reef is part of a massive trend of what’s to come in 2021: cross-chain DeFi medium.com/avalabs/reef-l…
As anyone who’s tried to use a DeFi app on Ethereum over the last few days can tell you, we’re once again seeing the limits of the underlying network buckling under immense activity.
I love the #Ethereum community, but it’s impossible to ignore that DeFi has outgrown Ethereum 1.0 in its current state. Solutions like Layer 2s have been promised, but these efforts merely shift risk into unproven, centralized tech.
Read 7 tweets
Emin Gün Sirer Profile picture
27 Dec 20
DSD, an algorithmic stablecoin, up trading around $0.39.

Here are my thoughts on why and what to expect, in the hope they may be of interest or inspiration to DeFiers.
DSD, derived from ESD, follows a fairly standard design, where the amount-in-circulation of the coin is adjusted algorithmically to maintain the peg at $1. The (simplified) idea is to mint S when price is above $1 and to withdraw S below $1, to keep the value of S pegged to $1.
There are some design choices in these coins: the period at which adjustments are done, the oracles used for the price information, their granularity, the amplitude of the adjustments, and so forth. What you want is a dampening control loop.
Read 23 tweets

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