Today I am releasing a new Decred-based communications tool, Bison Relay, that enables free speech, free association, and can act as a fully independent alternative stack to the web, whose substantial problems were outlined in my prior article. Bison Relay is an asynchronous client-server protocol that makes heavy use of the Decred Lightning Network (“LN”), where every message sent is encrypted, metadata-minimized, and paid for via LN micropayment. The Bison Relay server is accountless and every message is handled individually, where it is both paid for prior to being sent and then received.
The web is the world’s largest software platform and is, correspondingly, a central pillar of modern society. Large public corporations have built their fortunes by creating web-based businesses, investors in those corporations have reaped huge profits, and the web has become a ubiquitous concept in day-to-day life. However, over the past 33 years since the web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, its initial role as a means to educate and liberate has evolved into a means to oppress, manipulate and indoctrinate.
Decred has been in production for nearly 7 years, generates a reliable stream of useful, new, non-trivial technology, and has a dedicated core set of developers and users, but it has struggled to gain wider recognition and corresponding adoption. Many people in the cryptocurrency space have heard of or held Decred and have a positive opinion of it. Despite this nominal awareness and Decred’s solid technological underpinnings, it would seem that recognition and adoption are hard to come by.
Payments from the new decentralized treasury infrastructure are currently blocked and will be delayed until a new consensus vote takes place to implement a change to the consensus rules. Contractor payouts will continue via the legacy treasury until the changes are deployed and activated.
No funds from either the decentralized treasury or from the legacy treasury are at risk of being lost.
The only practical consequences of this issue are some inconvenience for operators of the Contractors Management System (CMS), the need for a new consensus vote to happen, and some delay for the new treasury to effectively start working.
Many of us in the cryptocurrency space have been waiting for the next major market contraction for several years, and it has finally arrived, in spectacular fashion. COVID-19 and government response to it are disrupting markets in a way that few could have expected, putting a massive strain on markets already leveraged to the point of malfunction. The US central bank, the Federal Reserve System (“FRS”), is running the same plays it did during the 2008 crisis to address the market contraction: a combination of reducing its target interest rate and using effectively-unlimited credit to backstop various markets directly. Since Bitcoin was released shortly after the 2008 crisis, many people have come to understand the substantial …