Bitcoin Drone Show Flies Over Lugano – Trustnodes

A bitcoin drone show lit up the city of Lugano in Switzerland’s border with Italy, commemorating the closing of the bitcoin conference Plan ₿.

The show was put on by Cyberdrone, which describes itself as “a drone light show company specializing in high-performance drone development and the creation of autonomous swarm solutions.”

It is the first drone show of its kind, highlighting the gathering of many prominent bitcoiners, including Adam Back, the President of Blockstream.

Max Keiser, a long time bitcoiner, held a key  note on “Conquering Time and Space,” so keeping the overhype in the depth of bear.

Other talks were by Jimmy Song who preached to the audience on “How Fiat Ruins Everything.” Everything!

We had Peter McCormack to speak about how “An Attack on Assange is an Attack on Freedom of Speech,” even though for some reason Wikileaks never used its free speech to reveal anything about Russia or China even as both were moving towards dictatorship.

For a further taste of what sort of conference this was, we have a “Masterclass on How to Invest in Bitcoin.” That PhD probably took about one minute, with the speaker not saying you just open an account on one of the exchanges, 100x long and then get rekt, and then next time hodl for life.

But there were more interesting talks, including on defi, and although bitcoin parties are nothing compared to eth-heads, they’re not bad.

There were also NFTs. Well, RGB assets, and RGB here stands for Really Good for Bitcoin because some kids never grew up.

To show its copying nature in addition, they look more like a meme than NFTs, but still somewhat cool.

That’s Peter Todd, whose gotten old-er and now has a beard, holding a cat because the dog has been taken by dogecoin.

The cat is an RGB, which presumably also stands for color. Like the arrival of color TV about half a century ago, or pictures on the internet, blockchains now get their jpegs.

In this case the jpegs are off-chain and linked to bitcoin in a sort of roundabout way with the project stating:

“Each RGB smart contract is represented by some genesis state, created by smart contract issuer (or, put simply, issuer) and a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of state transitions kept in form of client-validated data (i.e. this data is not stored on blockchain or within LN transactions/channel state).

The state is assigned to unspent bitcoin transaction outputs (UTXO), which defines them as single-use seals.

The party that is able to spend corresponding transaction output is named a party owning state: it is a party that has the right to change the corresponding part of the smart contract state by creating a new state transition and committing to it in a transaction spending the output containing previous state.

This procedure represents closing of a seal over state transition, and a pair of spending transaction and corresponding extra-transaction data on the state transition are named witness.”

The address above might look like a bitcoin one, but it’s not, it starts with rgb. In general terms this is effectively an ‘offline’ or off-chain system that kind of ‘pauses’ a transaction to put stuff – link code – to it, like a cat.

This overall performs the basic function of allowing you to own a picture, with the Iris Wallet allowing you to see it.

So bitcoin has kind of made it to around 2017 when the first CryptoKitties clogged ethereum.

That’s progress as it wasn’t clear it would move at all, but it isn’t quite leadership, it is more following and catching up in a somewhat convoluted way where the smart contract code is not on-chain, making its immutability more open to question than otherwise.

That naturally has to apply to all of bitcoin attempted defi. They’re trying to work on DEX-es, that’s decentralized exchanges, which in ethereum are pretty old fashioned things with modern kids nowadays playing on order-less, as in order books, exchanges like Uniswap.

Collateralizing bitcoin in its natural environment would be cool however, but the only way this can be done is by locking your coins to some other network, and in the process many attack vectors would have to be strengthened, including bridges or watchtowers or whatever they’ll use, which haven’t really been tested because no one is quite using them.

That all said, bitcoin excels in stunts, like this pretty cool drone show even though the bitcoin symbol used could be nicer, and one gets the feeling that bitcoin coding may be at least attempting to revitalize after about five years of complete standstill.

They’ve lost a lot of talent to ethereum, and for half a decade now bitcoin was for punk attitude, while eth was for code.

That may change in as far as bitcoin tries to become for code too, but developers have to work with very limited capabilities and self executing open source code will probably never quite be a thing in bitcoin in a way where you have the opportunity to publish unchangable code.

Still, there’s a lot of copycat fruits and they’ll probably blossom eventually once all the low fruits are picked in eth, although bitcoin is bigger and there is opportunity to grab attention especially in native collateralization, but whether that can be done in a way you’re sure your private key is ownership, is not too clear.