Month: March 2024

Have you fallen into the ‘rabbit hole’ of covenants?

Interviewer: Hua, freelance writer, independent researcher. X: @AmelieHua

Interviewee: Poly, a Controls Specialist, maintains multiple Distributed Control Systems (DCS’s) and has worked with other five nine systems (99.999% uptime availability). X: @Polyd_

Covenants are an old yet fresh topic. As early as 2013, developers began discussing this topic, and in recent years, multiple BIPs aimed at implementing covenants have been proposed, sparking intense debates and making it one of the hottest topics.

Covenants warrant serious discussion due to their powerful capabilities. They are considered to bring new possibilities to the programmability of Bitcoin and are believed to enable smart contracts. For Bitcoin, this is undoubtedly a double-edged sword. In this article, we will explore what covenants are, how they work, their robust functionality, and their significance for Bitcoin. While discussing details, this article often uses CTV as an example, but CTV is not the only method of implementing covenants.

This article delves into the exploration of covenants but also magnifies a slice of Bitcoin under a microscope for observation. Through this observation, we can understand how Bitcoin operates at a granular level, comprehending both its capabilities and limitations. Understanding what it cannot do is as crucial as understanding what it can do because only then can we choose the right path for building on Bitcoin.

1.

Hua:

Before discussing covenants, clarifying two issues related to Bitcoin may be necessary, which can help us better understand covenants.

We know that Bitcoin uses a scripting language, and it is known that scripting languages support the implementation of smart contracts. However, in reality, smart contracts have not been implemented on the Bitcoin main chain. This inevitably creates a sense that implementing smart contracts on Bitcoin faces some insurmountable obstacles, and it seems impossible on the Bitcoin network.

However, many people may not be aware that although Bitcoin can be programmed using a scripting language, the set of opcodes is extremely limited. This limited set of opcodes restricts the programmability scope of Bitcoin, meaning that, although the scripting language can implement smart contracts, programmers do not have sufficient “tools” to implement smart contracts.

Poly:

Definitely, Bitcoin Script can be considered limiting as it can only perform the basic operations such as making simple payments. Some of the reasons that people may find it “limiting” is that it doesn’t have a global state, it’s not considered turing complete, it uses a UTXO-based system (which has “value blindness”) instead of an account-based system. The last big reason is that very little data from the blockchain itself can be integrated into contracts causing blockchain-blindness.

This has created a lot of challenges over the years as people have worked around these limitations. We’ve also had a semantic shift with the term “smart contract” to mean one specific thing when you should consider the lightning network a production of many smart contracts formed by many individuals. Those multi-sigs with hashlocks and timelocks are not only smart contracts, but also have time-based covenants.

The problem is, just as you mentioned before, because Bitcoin only has simple opcodes to perform just the basics, if you attempt to scale beyond two people in a smart contract, you can get either a lot of bloat for an on-chain footprint or the things you want to do just might not be possible. This strict limitation comes from a few places, I think the biggest being that when the inflation bug occurred back in 2010, Satoshi had disabled a whole list of higher order opcodes including OP_CAT which would’ve allowed us to create more dynamic smart contracts via transaction introspection.

BCH has since overcome this limitation within their own script, showing that Script isn’t as weak as everyone assumes, just that Bitcoin has always been slower due to its decentralization and coordination is near impossible except over long periods of time. We’ve also barely touched on Taproot and Tapscript which will alleviate a lot of the footprint concerns and allows for new behaviors such as BitVM by rolling up the contract into the signature and you only reveal as necessary.

Hua:

Why are there strict limitations on opcodes? Can you use OP_CAT as an example to help us understand this point?

Poly:

So OP_CAT is deceptively simple, it will take two strings and add them together. It was originally disabled because it had resource issues and could be used to cause nodes to crash, but I’m not sure if that’s the full story as Satoshi set the 520 byte stack limit and disabled OP_CAT in the same commit so there could be more to it than just simple resource exhaustion.

But just to give a short list of what OP_CAT can perform: CTV/TXHASH covenants, verify SPV proofs, double-spend protection for 0-conf TXs, 64-bit arithmetic, vaults, quantum-resistant signatures. The list goes on, with OP_CAT alone, it can emulate both CTV[CheckTemplateVerify] and TXHASH style transactions. The only issue is it’s highly inefficient in the manner that it performs these actions that might be possible, but that could just preclude these transactions from being desirable except by users of scale such as custodians.

2.

Hua:

Let’s talk about another “limitation” of Bitcoin. Bitcoin only supports “verification” as a form of computation and can’t do general-purpose computation.

We also know that, for example, smart contracts on Ethereum contain rules for state transitions. It completes the state transition through computation, enabling the functionality of smart contracts. In comparison, Bitcoin can’t do general-purpose computation, meaning it cannot achieve state transitions through computation on its own.

Is my understanding correct?

Poly:

Yeah, I’d agree that’s a simple summary of the current state of things. Bitcoin could be made to support computational transactions and the line can become quite thin when covenants and state transitions are involved, but those proposals aren’t as well researched and might not be something that’s considered desirable.

I’m actually not that much of a fan of the way Ethereum does things. Due to it being computational in nature with the verification built on-top, if I attempt to perform a trade, my window could shift and I could “fail to trade” but the transaction for the attempt to trade was still valid so i still paid for fees which wasted my money on what i’d want to consider a failed transaction and wasted blockspace for someone else. Another weird aspect are the Oracles in Ethereum. Oracles must pay gas to update their oracle prices whereas in Bitcoin DLC’s, the Oracle are blinded and are just providing a signature and can’t be “pinned” due to a change in fees nor can Oracles target specific contracts.

Earlier I discussed all the downsides to the UTXO model compared to the account model and global state model, but what allows the UTXO model to shine is parallelism. The only concern you have is the child transactions to the same UTXO, nothing else matters, this allows the system to scale much better.

3.

Hua:

Let’s start discussing covenants now. What are covenants?

Poly:

Covenants usually refer to restrictions on how coins can be transferred. The word covenant seems to carry some sort of connotation with it so it helps to demystify it and explain it as simple locking mechanisms you can place only on your *own* coin.

We have two covenants already inside Bitcoin and they power the Lightning Network, CSV [CheckSequenceVerify] and CLTV [CheckLockTemplateVerify]. Some just call these opcodes “smart contract primitives” as they’re simple time locks, but they can also be classified as time covenants.

CTV [CheckTemplateVerify] is a proposed Bitcoin upgrade and is included in BIP 119. It is different from CSV and CLTV, you can think of CTV as a “TXID [Transaction ID] lock” or “UTXO lock”, only these TXID’s can be made from this lock. For CTV, we refer to this TXID lock as “Equality Covenants” as the resulting transactions must equal to the original transactions that were committed. It’s also called a deferred commitment covenant, as you can see that your UTXO has been committed to, but it isn’t yet placed on-chain.

The most known alternative is SH_APO [Any Previous Out or AnyPrevOut] which focuses on the payout commitment being ensured while allowing the pay-in method to be flexible. A few others discussed are OP_CCV [also known as MATT], OP_EXPIRE, TXHASH and TEMPLATE KEY.

Hua:

When you mention “covenants usually refer to restrictions on how coins can be transferred,” can I understand it like this: Covenants are a method of specifying how funds can be used, or in other words, it’s a way of restricting where funds can be spent.

Poly:

Yep, it effectively earmarks the UTXO to be distributed in a specific manner, once you commit to it, you can’t take it back, it’s now consensus bound, and only its new owner can decide how to spend their funds.

When a UTXO is created on-chain, our instinct is to assume that a single private key is holding that UTXO in place. But if it was a CTV bound UTXO, when the UTXO is spent, you’ll see an extra 32 byte hash paired with the new transaction that represents the hidden state that was inside the original UTXO.

Hua:

You’ve mentioned “TXID lock/UTXO lock” multiple times. Can I understand it like this: To understand how CTV achieves their functionality, we need to understand what TXID lock is and how it works. TXID lock is a key mechanism.

Poly:

Yes, It creates a strong foundation to build further schemes. The TXID is determined by the contents of a tx. And if you can add inputs to a tx, you can manipulate the TXID. CTV makes you lock the number of inputs and outputs. This is how we ensure that CTV commitments are trustless, if the TXID could be malleable, you could potentially be able to steal someone’s funds. Once you have a TXID locking mechanism, you combine it with other locking mechanisms such as the time locks to build even greater smart contracts.

4.

Hua:

Why do you think covenants are a rabbit hole?

Poly:

I call covenants a rabbit hole because there’s so much you can do with simple restrictions on transactions such as a time lock or a TXID lock. We’ve managed to build the entire Lightning network with simple time locks and while it isn’t perfect, it is the only truly decentralized L2 in existence. I don’t like how it’s slowly shifting towards being custodial focused, but that’s exactly why I’ve started down this rabbit hole to begin with: To make our smart contracts more powerful. We refer to the TXID lock as a Template. With Taproot, we gained the ability to have signature aggregation. With Templates and CTV, we gain the ability to have transaction aggregation.

CTV serves as a replacement for a pre-signed transaction oracle, which eliminates the trust and interactivity requirements needed to create more sophisticated smart contracts that are needed for things like vaults and payment pools. The vaults and payment pools that you can make with CTV are technically possible today, but currently they’re precluded by the trust or interactivity needed to make it work. Moreover, with CTV, we can build channel factories, additional layer 2 solutions such as Ark, Timeout-Trees, Stakechains or Surfchains, and JIT fidelity bond solutions such as PathCoin.

Probably my favorite feature is Non-Interactive Channels [NIC’s] that we’ve also been referring to as Cold Channels. The basic idea is to take a normal lightning channel and simply place it in a CTV template. What makes this different from a normal lightning channel is that neither party actually needed to be online to create this channel. So if I need a channel with another person, I don’t need them to be online to create it, I don’t even need to tell them I made it until I’m ready to spend from it! This allows for cold storage capability on lightning because I don’t need a watchtower nor a node to safeguard my funds in any channels that aren’t yet active. Third-party coordinators can also establish NIC’s for two individuals so there’s a lot of flexibility in what’s possible.

As it stands, CTV won’t allow you to build a DEX on-chain, but I’m not sure if that is such a bad thing as people are currently trying to build DEX’s off-chain using the Lightning Network as it is today. I think this ties back into the “Verification vs Computation” discussion, how much do you really want on-chain versus how much do you need to verify on-chain. One concern I have about on-chain DEX’s, besides the excessive on-chain updates driving higher fees, is MEV. We’ve already spotted some MEV from BCH’s DEX’s transactions and as the market matures, this is bound to get worse.

Hua:

Can you give an example to help us understand how CTV works?

Poly:

Let’s say I am expecting to receive 5 BTC, as of right now, the only thing I can do is receive the payment and verify it on-chain. With CTV, I can commit to future addresses or to people and reduce it down to a simple pubkey that I give to my payer to pay me. They don’t know the details of it so it remains private to everyone but me. Once I can confirm that they’ve paid me, all of the actions I took using the CTV template have now also taken effect.

So if I had elected to create a channel with Bob, once Alice pays me, the channel with Bob is now committed, even though the channel with Bob is nowhere to be seen on-chain, it is only accessible by my template and the transaction that Alice had created. It’s only known to me until I share the channel details with Bob. Once I do share the details with Bob, we can use the channel as normal. When we cooperatively close the channel, instead of needing to place an open channel details on-chain, we just place the closing channel on-chain. This allows us to perform transaction cut-through, reducing the total number of transactions that need to be on-chain by at least half for layer 2 solutions.

The opening portion only needs a commitment, what we really care about are the closing details. If this was a shared UTXO with multiple people, we could collaborate to close our transactions together as well, reducing the number of on-chain transactions even further.

5.

Hua:

As you mentioned before, we can introduce different opcodes to implement covenants.

Poly:

So if we re-introduced OP_CAT, I think it would allow for nearly every type of covenant possible as you can emulate any form of introspection for TXHASH. The more limited method would be to introduce opcodes representing the explicit behavior desired like with CTV, CSFS or CheckSeperateSignature. CTV is the ability to do deferred outputs. CSFS is the ability to do deferred signatures so you can defer the payment itself. They sound similar and in fact they work well together as building blocks to enable LN-Symmetry, but the commitments are happening at different levels.

TXHASH and TEMPLATE KEY both enable introspection and serve the same purpose, but TEMPLATE KEY uses a single-byte mode while TXHASH uses multi-byte flags. This allows for much more powerful capabilities inside script and smart contracts, but many are concerned about the side effects it could have. TXHASH and TEMPLATE KEY are more of a CTVv2, something that would make CTV more powerful and expressive.

Hua:

I’ve noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a significant disagreement about whether to support the implementation of covenants. However, in comparison, there seems to be more significant divergence among people regarding which method or set of opcodes to add to implement covenants.

Poly:

I think a large part is there’s different camps of thought. There’s a lot of the lack of understanding the intent behind each proposal as they have different goals in mind and are designed in completely different ways.

A lot of developers have only had their eye on Lightning and how it’s to evolve, they tend to favor opcodes like SH_APO since it enables LN-Symmetry. For a lot of developers that don’t particularly like Lightning due to its limitations such as Inbound Liquidity constraints or the requirement to be online, they tend to favor opcodes like OP_CAT, TXHASH as more expressive scaling solutions. The developers that prefer CTV are more neutral and are looking at it from a systems point of view, it doesn’t necessarily do any one thing perfectly but it greatly enhances everyone’s ability to do their preferred thing, whatever it may be without introducing risks that can’t be measured since it doesn’t introduce introspection.

6.

Hua:

Before discussing covenants, we talked about issues related to opcodes in scripting language and the problem of limited computation leading to state transition. We already know the relationship between covenants and opcodes. Now, let’s delve into the issue of state transition. I’m not sure if looking at covenants from the perspective of “state transition” is correct, but this perspective truly fascinates me.

Without covenants, the scripting language’s main function is to retrieve transactions’ signatures and verify them. The transaction can only be completed when the private key is correct, and there is no intermediate state. With covenants, a transaction can be completed when certain conditions are met. Moreover, a transaction can only be completed when specific conditions are satisfied (not just the correctness of the private key). Can we understand it this way: Covenants indirectly provide conditions for state transition.

Poly:

The covenant is the template shell or the “state”. Inside of it, you’re going to need to make time locks and other functions to enable the desired functionality that you’re wanting, be that a vault, lightning channel or some other layer 2 solution.

So CTV allows for the state creation to occur, but you have to dynamically rebuild the state at each transition to keep it in homeostasis, we call this meta-recursive. Whereas something like SH_APO allows you to create a state and then periodically update that state, making it recursive. CTV can also create a chain of transactions that would allow you to “step-through” that state.

A good example to think about is Ark, it’s a giant smart contract, almost like a giant coinjoin and the one running the protocol creates a new state [or rounds as it’s called] every few seconds to facilitate participants to pay others as needed. Once the Ark operator is ready, they will send a transaction to the mempool to commit the current state to on-chain. These on-chain placeholders can be thought of as the “transition states.” The operator has to constantly recompute new states to present to the Ark participants and what’s sent to on-chain is the verification of that state.

Hua:

Can we understand it this way: Covenants implement a form of smart contract based on verification rather than computation?

Poly:

Yes. Definitely. This smart contract is just comparing a transaction to an associated sha256 hash. Block speed verification would actually increase since there’s no signature operations.

Hua:

One direction of development for blockchains is modularity, including off-chain computation. However, Bitcoin seems naturally designed for off-chain computation, appearing behind but actually leading the way. What do you think?

Poly:

Time is a flat circle. It’s crazy how it seems like we’ve come full circle to what’s wanted in a blockchain. Bitcoin still seems to have some modularity issues and footprint issues. I wish we had better side-chains that weren’t simply multi-sig solutions and used actual cryptographic means to secure one’s funds and allowed for Unilateral Exits. I think that would help push the boundaries on Bitcoin’s modularity. Taproot has allowed for even more off-chain computation with things such as BitVM, which would allow us to compute almost anything off-chain. But unfortunately, it can’t emulate things inside Bitcoin such as CTV so it seems we still have progress to make.

7.

Hua:

What possibilities can be achieved by combining covenants with other opcodes like DLC?

Poly:

So DLC’s have a few problems that would be fixed with covenants such as increasing the flexibility of the parameters of the DLC by making many price points [if we’re wagering on the price of something such as Bitcoin]. Another one is that hardware wallets [HWW] can’t interact with a lot of DLC’s, the signing rounds for DLCs and attempting to do it with HWWs causes DLCs to take several minutes to open. With CTV, this delay to enter a DLC can be reduced down to seconds.

8.

Hua:

Are there any other points you’d like to introduce to the readers?

Poly:

We went over a lot of concepts. We touched on how it can be used to mitigate excessive blockspace demand and potential ddos attacks. We discussed how people could save space by making Non-Interactive Channels. I think another good one to discuss is the “L2 exit problem”. If we managed to get everyone off of the L1 layer and get them onto a large L2, there’s currently no good way to get people off that L2 in an expedited manner. We could think of that L2 as Lightning [we call the potential mass exodus on Lightning, the “Thundering Herd problem”], or we could think of Coinbase, Binance or Liquid as the L2. There are people who hold claims to Bitcoin, but their only way to actually acquire that claim is by submitting a transaction to get it placed on-chain. There’s millions of people on Coinbase, I have no idea how to get them off of there and onto Bitcoin in any orderly fashion in today’s environment. There would be a mempool backlog of 6 months attempting to get people off the exchange. CTV can fix this.

Make an Ark or a Timeout-Tree with CTV. The exchange could even offer the service directly. Everyone could be offloaded from the original “shared UTXO” that was under Coinbase’s consensus and pushed into a “shared UTXO” with a consensus of their choice, be it a simple pool or a large Timeout-Tree. This is where it really wrinkles the brain, this was a pure L2 L2 conversion. There was no intermediary step requiring me to go down to L1 first. And I can continue repeating this process indefinitely, using any layer of my choice. There isn’t a need to return to the base layer unless I was forced there such as from an uncooperative closeout from my channel or perhaps an unvaulting from my vault. The Ark and Timeout-Tree pitfall is that they have rollover requirements, you have to move your funds every few weeks or months or you forfeit your funds. This isn’t an ideal solution for long-term funds but works great for any short term holdings and larger markets.

I’d like to provide a full list of every concept that’s been developed using CTV and its ability to simply aggregate pre-signed transactions: Non-Interactive Channels, Timeout-Trees, Ark, Darkpools, Payment Pools, Payment Channels, Ball Lightning, Congestion Control, Dpool’s, Compaction, Tree Swaps, PathCoin, Stakechains, Surfchains. But don’t think of these as all independent Templates, if there’s a feature of one that you wish to include in another, you can create your own custom Template to try and find your desired behavior.

References:

Owen’s Covenants 101 https://x.com/OwenKemeys/status/1741575353716326835

Owen’s Covenants 102 https://x.com/OwenKemeys/status/1744181234417140076

Owen’s CTV Demo https://x.com/OwenKemeys/status/1752138051105493274

Dallas’s Primer https://x.com/dallasirushing/status/1740443095689318566

Batching Lightning Channels Required Covenants https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-October/022006.html

Timeout-Trees https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-September/021941.html

Ark https://www.arkpill.me/

Darkpools https://gist.github.com/moonsettler/6a214f5d01148ea204e9131b86a35382

PathCoin https://github.com/AdamISZ/pathcoin-poc

This is a guest post by Aemlie Hua. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

REDMOND, WASHINGTON 4 March 2024 – $KARMA has released the largest fungible token airdrop in Bitcoin history to over 60,000 wallets. In true Web3 tradition, the collection was launched by a seven-member $KARMA Council, bringing together 10 leading Ordinals communities behind $KARMA’s mission.

The $KARMA Council’s airdrop aims to foster a sense of community amongst early Ordinals participants and bolster the burgeoning ecosystem.

Strength in Numbers: Growing the Ordinals Ecosystem

$KARMA is a token launched by a seven-member council, including four representatives from the OnChainMonkey (OCM) community: Soldman Gachs (@DrSoldmanGachs), Fitzy (@fitzyOG), Rabbi (@RabbiGains), and Drheref (@DrHeref). They are joined by BennyTheDev (@rarity_garden) and Alex Philippine (@Skrylabs) from Tap Protocol, bringing their technical expertise. Jason Fang (@JasonSoraVC) from Sora Ventures, a lead investor in Metagood, creators of OnChainMonkey, and the Tap Protocol is the final member of the Council.

Fostering strong relationships with other communities is something that the $KARMA Council believes will be an essential step in achieving the $KARMA community’s goals. Accordingly, a significant number of tokens have been earmarked for future ‘Karmunity’ Incentives.

The $KARMA community incentive pot will continue to activate future partnerships or activations that will help to further expand the $KARMA and Ordinals community. This could include rewarding valuable community members, partnering with additional projects, or general growth initiatives.

The Ordinals Community Airdrop

With this in mind, the $KARMA Council decided to airdrop 49,968,900 $KARMA tokens to communities within the Ordinals ecosystem. This was designed to push towards $Karma Council’s goal of expanding both the OCM & Ordinals ecosystems.

The Council sought to take an objective selection process. For this initial airdrop, they selected the top 9 collections by market capitalization at the time of the snapshot at Block Height 828,888 (4 February 2024).

The 9 communities eligible to receive $KARMA tokens in the Community Airdrop are:

Bitmap (https://ordinalswallet.com/collection/bitmap)Bitcoin Punks (https://bitcoinpunks.com/)Bitcoin Puppets (https://magiceden.io/ordinals/marketplace/bitcoin-puppets)Bitcoin Frogs (https://bitcoinfrogs.com/)Nodemonkes (https://nodemonkes.com/)OMB (https://magiceden.io/ordinals/marketplace/omb)RSIC (https://magiceden.io/ordinals/marketplace/rsic)PIPE (https://trac.network/Pipe/)TRAC (https://trac.network/)

Rewarding the OCM Community

A total of 560 million $KARMA tokens are being allocated to holders of OnChainMonkey NFTs. Eligibility for the OnChainMonkey community was based on assets being migrated from Ethereum to Bitcoin. Except for the OCM Karma collection (https://opensea.io/collection/karma-monkey), which has had their allocation of $KARMA reserved until that collection is upgraded to Bitcoin. Since the snapshot has not been completed for OCM Karma, people can still purchase the assets on ETH and when they migrate to Bitcoin, they will be eligible for the $KARMA airdrop.

“Trac is the governance token for Tap Protocol, the first decentralized indexer economy on the Ordinals protocol enabling similar features of ERC20 but on Bitcoin L1. The TAP standard that created $KARMA was conducted by members of the OCM community but has now expanded towards 9 other Ordinals communities,” Jason Fang, founder of Sora Ventures said. “Tap protocol contains many more features compared to BRC20 that enables developers and projects to stake, send cost effective airdrops, and enable token distributions that make building on Bitcoin most cost effective, safer, and scalable.”

“$Karma embodies the spirit of innovation and community, serving as a beacon for the next generation of decentralized ecosystems. We’re thrilled to champion this groundbreaking initiative led by our OnChainMonkey community members and investors,” remarked Amanda Terry, co-founder and COO of Metagood. “At OnChainMonkey, we’re a community of builders and innovation and impact are woven into our DNA. Just as Bitcoin revolutionized finance, $Karma is poised to redefine collaboration, economic empowerment, and impact, with strong communities early to Ordinals at its core.”

Technical Milestones for Airdrops

The airdrop of the $KARMA tokens was performed in an efficient manner utilizing “Tapping,” a core feature of the TAP Protocol. “Tapping” is a process of transacting that makes it considerably cheaper and faster to distribute tokens to a large amount of addresses. Using the existing BRC-20 standard, conducting an airdrop for 61,000 wallets would have required over 122,000 transactions. The KarmaCouncil was able to complete the entire airdrop using under 55 transactions, therefore setting a precedent for the future of community inclusions for future airdrops on Bitcoin.

BRC20 requires 2 transactions for a single transfer of tokens between 2 parties. The TAP Protocol allows for many transfers within 2 transactions. 1 transaction with many receivers at once and a 2nd transaction to approve the transfers (called “tapping”). This reduces the costs for airdrops significantly in comparison to BRC20 as there is almost half of the transactions needed. It also helps to put the Bitcoin network under less stress due to lesser amounts of transactions required.

TAP Protocol’s token authority feature allows it even to reduce it further using only 1 transaction, which makes it also attractive for simple individual transfers. Token authorities require additional setup configurations however, while airdrops work out of the box.

A Note on Tap Protocol and the Technology

Trac Core is an indexing solution (created by Trac Systems) designed to enable decentralized tracking of Ordinals metaprotocols on Bitcoin. Trac Systems is also the creator of the Tap Protocol. Creating the $KARMA tokens on the Tap Protocol was conducted by the community. Tap Protocol is a similar to BRC-20 and allows for features and hooks into DeFi that otherwise wouldn’t be possible natively. In layman-terms, Tap Protocol can be seen as BRC-20 “on steroids”.

Taps airdrop feature is cheap because it combines receivers of different token types and amounts into 1 inscription.

About $KARMA (https://karmacoin.xyz/)

$KARMA is more than a token; it’s a commitment to growth, community, and innovation. Designed as a catalyst to expand the OCM and Ordinals ecosystems, $KARMA is set to redefine engagement and opportunity for the entire Ordinals community and beyond. $KARMA is a network of founders, builders, industry leaders and seasoned collectors in the Ordinals ecosystem.

About OnChainMonkey (www.onchainmonkey.com)

OnChainMonkey is the first non-fungible token (NFT) 10,000 profile picture collection created on-chain in a single transaction on Ethereum. OnChainMonkey marked history again, becoming the first 10k PFP NFT collection inscribed on Bitcoin in a single inscription. The collection of 10,000 randomly generated NFTs is led by an experienced team, including Danny Yang, who founded Taiwan’s largest cryptocurrency exchange; Amanda Terry, who served as a digital media business development executive at Twitter and NBC; and Bill Tai, a legendary venture capitalist who was the first investor in Zoom and early investor in Canva, Dapper Labs as well as over 20 companies that have become publicly listed. The OnChainMonkey community aims to create value for their token holders and promote positive real world impact through Web 3. 

The bedrock of Bitcoin self-sovereignty is having control over your private keys. Without this, in one way or another, you are relinquishing control of your money to someone else. “Not your keys, not your coins” as the saying goes. A counter-intuitive aspect of Bitcoin for people who aren’t familiar with the technical underpinnings of it is “where” your Bitcoin actually is. When people think of a wallet, they think “the place where I keep my money.” Your bitcoin wallet doesn’t actually “hold” your Bitcoin, it just stores your private keys. Your Bitcoin is just entries of data on the blockchain hosted by everyone participating in the network. When you go to spend your bitcoin, what you are actually doing is proposing an update to the data stored on the blockchain. A private key is how the protocol ensures that you, and you alone, can authorize an update to the blockchain that spends your Bitcoin.

So what are your private keys? Just very large numbers. Extremely large. This is a private key in binary:

1110001011011001011110111100000101000100000010001001111010111011010101110111001111111111101010111010010111010011101001110010100110111101000110000111110101111001101001011110011011101000001101101101110001101000110001111010001001001111011010101011001101101010

256 random 1s and 0s. This random number is what ultimately secures your Bitcoin. It might not look like much, but its randomness is what ensures your wallet’s security. There are almost as many possible Bitcoin private keys as there are atoms in the visible universe. That is how many numbers a computer would have to count through to generate and catalog all the private keys potentially possible. As long as the process used to generate the keys is truly random, your keys are safe.

This is what a private key looks like in hexadecimal (binary uses two digits to encode a number, 1 and 0, hexadecimal uses 16 digits, 0-9 and A-F):

E2D97BC144089EBB5773FFABA5D3A729BD187D79A5E6E836DC68C7A24F6AB36A

This is what a private key looks like in uncompressed Wallet Import Format (WIF):

5KYC9aMMSDWGJciYRtwY3mNpeTn91BLagdjzJ4k4RQmdhQvE98G

WIF format is how everyone used to interact with their private keys in the early days of Bitcoin. In this era, you could generate one private key at a time, and then you’d generate the public key from that. The process of generating a public key is essentially just the multiplication of very large numbers but there is a bit more to it than that.. All public keys are an x and y point on a graph showing a very, very large curve that loops back on itself.

On the graph curve, in Bitcoin’s case Secp256k1, there is a point called the “generator point.” This generator point can be thought of as the “base point” on the Secp256k1 curve. It is integral to the process of generating keys and signing with them. This is what the generator point is for Bitcoin’s curve:

G = 02 79BE667E F9DCBBAC 55A06295 CE870B07 029BFCDB 2DCE28D9 59F2815B 16F81798

To generate the public key from your private key, you take the private key you generated and multiply it by the generator point. That’s it. This now establishes a point on the graph with a mathematical relationship to the private key you generated that only you know.

This is an uncompressed public key showing both x and y points:

04C0E410A572C880D1A2106AFE1C6EA2F67830ABCC8BBDF24729F7BF3AFEA06158F0C04D7335D051A92442330A50B8C37CE0EC5AFC4FFEAB41732DA5108261FFED

It is very common to “compress” public keys in the rare chance you interact with them to just store the x coordinate with a byte to tell you whether the y coordinate is negative or positive. That shortens it considerably:

04C0E410A572C880D1A2106AFE1C6EA2F67830ABCC8BBDF24729F7BF3AFEA06158F0C04D7335D051A92442330A50B8C37CE0EC5AFC4FFEAB41732DA5108261FFED

When you go to sign a transaction with your private key, it once again boils down to essentially just multiplication. By generating a random number (the nonce), and using that and your private key to essentially multiply the hash of the transaction you are signing, you produce the signature (which is made up of two values, r, and S). This allows someone to run an algorithm to verify the message was signed by the appropriate private key without revealing that key. The thing guaranteeing only you can authorize spending your Bitcoin is essentially just the multiplication of very, very large numbers.

If you aren’t all that familiar with these concepts before reading this, all of this probably seems somewhat intimidating. Binary? Hexadecimal? Graph points? How do you back up a WIF?

Since the development of more intuitive ways of handling this data, most users are unfamiliar with these complicated formats. Most likely, you have more experience with word seeds, also known as seed phrases.

BIP 39 Mnemonic Seeds

Mnemonic seeds, or seed phrases, were created to address the problem of the experience of interacting with your private keys.

As we discussed earlier, private keys are ultimately just a long series of 1s and 0s that are randomly generated. Imagine trying to create copies of this and ensure you didn’t make an error transcribing it:

1110001011011001011110111100000101000100000010001001111010111011010101110111001111111111101010111010010111010011101001110010100110111101000110000111110101111001101001011110011011101000001101101101110001101000110001111010001001001111011010101011001101101010

All it would take is a single error copying one digit to render a backup of your keys useless. This is where mnemonic seeds come in handy. 256 consecutive 1s and 0s in a row is not a human-friendly way to interact with sensitive information. Recording this number incorrectly means losing access to your account.

truck renew fury donkey remind laptop reform detail split grief because fat

That is much easier to deal with, isn’t it? Just 12 words. So how does that work, going from a bunch of random 1s and 0s to a string of words that actually make sense to you? An encoding scheme, just like binary or hexadecimal!

Each of those 12 words in that mnemonic seed above is a binary number in an encoding scheme mapping specific strings of 1s and 0s to words. If we look back at the WIF private key example earlier, that was simply a number encoded in a specific encoding scheme, in that case, base 58, which uses every number and letter of the alphabet except 0 and 1, and O and l (case sensitive). The exclusion of those characters was done specifically to make transcription errors unlikely by confusing a 1 for an l, or a 0 for an O. bech32 and bech32m used by Segwit and Taproot take this to the next level by using only this set of characters (qpzry9x8gf2tvdw0s3jn54khce6mua7l).

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39 (BIP 39), introduced a standardized encoding scheme where each word in a specially crafted dictionary is alphabetically mapped to a binary number from 00000000001 to 11111111111. The demonstration seed above maps to this:

truck: 11101001001

renew: 10110110001

fury: 01011110011

donkey: 01000001001

remind: 10110101110

laptop: 01111101000

reform: 10110100010

detail: 00111100010

split: 11010010001

grief: 01100110100

because: 00010011110

fat: 01010011011

In just binary it looks like this:

11101001001 10110110001 01011110011 01000001001 10110101110 01111101000 10110100010 00111100010 11010010001 01100110100 00010011110 0101001 1011

There are 2048 words, each mapped to a specific 11 digit string of 1s and 0s, specifically to make it easier for people to interact with their private keys. When you generate a random number for your private key, your wallet cuts that number up into chunks of 11 digit binary numbers and maps them to the BIP 39 Mnemonic dictionary. It’s still the same large number, but now you can read it as English words. Since your brain is much more accustomed to this format than long strings of 1s and 0s, this drastically reduces the odds of you writing down something wrong and losing your Bitcoin in the process.

You may have noticed that in the raw binary encoding of the word seed above, there are four digits (1011) sitting off on their own, and the last “word” is only actually 8 digits. That is a checksum to ensure that a seed phrase is valid. When you generate your random number, there aren’t enough digits to map it exactly to 12 (or 24) words. The wallet hashes those existing digits you generated and takes the first few digits of the hash to add on to the end of your random number. This gives you enough digits to map to the last word.

This last word allows you to perform a safety check on copies of your seed. If you enter your mnemonic seed into a wallet incorrectly, the checksum will not match. Each 12 or 24 word seed has multiple potential valid checksum words, but if the last word doesn’t match the checksum of a correct seed your wallet will warn you it is invalid. This gives people an intuitive yet still mathematical way to guarantee their backups are correct, unlike the messy process of transcribing and backing up the raw binary numbers.

The selection of the specific words on the list even went so far as to guarantee that none of the 2048 words have the same first four letters. This was done to reduce the likelihood of people making transcription errors by confusing similar words and winding up with an incorrect backup of their private keys.

Translating these words into a set of multiple private/public keys is quite simple. Your mnemonic seed is taken and hashed using SHA512, which outputs a hash of 512 individual 1s and 0s. Half of that output is used as an actual private key, and the other half is used as input to SHA512 with an index number and the existing private or public key to generate a new key pair. You can do this as many times as you want to generate new private/public keys that can all be recovered from your single mnemonic phrase.

This ensures that you can manage your private keys as easily, and safely, as possible with the lowest odds of making a mistake that loses your money. And all of it was done using math! Hopefully, now you have a good understanding of why people say that Bitcoin is money ‘secured by math.’

Pioneering bitcoin wallet company Oyl has secured a $3 million pre-seed investment from a variety of investors, including UTXO Management and Domo, the creator of the BRC-20 token standard.

The investment marks a noteworthy shift in cryptocurrency investment trends, with several Ethereum NFT funds making their first foray into a bitcoin-centric business. Arca, which led the round, is a venture firm with a history of investments in Ethereum NFTs and alternative blockchains. Now, the company is extending its portfolio into the bitcoin sphere through Ordinals. Other investors include Foresight Ventures, Taproot Wizards CEO Udi Wertheimer, and distinguished NFT funds Kanosei and FlamingoDAO.

“The speed of development on Bitcoin is primarily constrained by lack of infrastructure — we’re in a race to see who can create the most usable backend tooling for developers to build on,” said BRC-20 creator Domo.

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Oyl is set to launch in coming weeks, aiming to become the first bitcoin wallet to incorporate “in-wallet” trading of bitcoin and Ordinals. The app is designed to support market aggregation for BRC-20s and facilitate swap integrations with the “bitcoin DeFi” protocol Omnisat.io.

“We want to support the new surge of development on Bitcoin — starting with builder tools like RPCs, all the way to consumer platforms like the Wallet,” Alec Taggart, Oyl CEO, said in a statement.

Arthur Hayes, whose family office Maelstrom also participated in the funding, noted the growing recognition of the untapped potential within the bitcoin DeFi sector.

“Funds that have historically been focused on other chains are now seeing what’s possible on Bitcoin with Ordinals,” said Arthur Hayes. “The infra winners in ‘Bitcoin Defi’ are yet to be determined — it’s a huge opportunity.”

In addition to being on the verge of launching its wallet, Oyl has introduced Sandshrew, a product that offers developer tools such as Bitcoin Core, Esplora, and Ordinals endpoints.

Disclaimer: UTXO Management’s parent company, BTC Inc., is also the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine. UTXO Management operates separately and independently from Bitcoin Magazine.

“It is in the nature of a system of government control of business to aim at the utmost centralization…In voting for government control of business the voters implicitly, although unwittingly, are voting for more centralization.”

– Ludwig Von Mises

One of the most underestimated threats that modern society faces is the ever tightening grip of centralized control. History has shown us time and again that centralized control inevitably devolves into tyranny, eroding the foundations of liberty upon which free societies are built. The 10 planks of communism, as outlined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, that serves as the blueprint for transitioning society to a collectivist system cannot be implemented without centralization first occurring; due to the fact that communism at its core seeks to abolish every form of private ownership while enthroning the state as master of all. The sad reality is that these planks have been gradually implemented over the years by most countries in the world, thus progressively eroding free markets and the overall liberty of their citizens.

The centralization of speech online is the most recent threat that has emerged as a potent tool for state control. Ironically, this phenomenon resembles the realization of plank 6 of the communist manifesto, which advocates for the “centralization of the Means of Communication and Transport in the Hands of the State.” As commerce and communications via online platforms grows, these two very important aspects of human existence become centralized in the hands of the big tech companies that own these platforms. In our cancel culture driven world, the increasing overlap between centralized social media platforms and financial services has significantly increased the risk of absolute censorship; where violating the constantly changing “community guidelines” can lead to one becoming persona non grata and being immediately deplatformed.

Without decentralized alternatives, censoring any speech or transaction that is deemed “undesirable” becomes a trivial matter. Big tech social media giants acting as the de facto thought police and enforcers for the state, wield immense influence over the flow of information, and suppress every form of dissent through the threat of financial strangulation when one doesn’t toe the line. There are two major factors that undergird this power to silence dissent online:

Centralized nature of the social media platforms Centralized payment processors like PayPal that dominate these platforms

For individuals who rely on social media for their livelihood, deplatforming represents a significant threat, not only to their ability to express themselves freely but also to their income. Self-censorship naturally becomes the norm and this is even more dangerous as it creates the illusion of alignment with the current thing of the day. Thankfully, Bitcoin has made these payment processors irrelevant and due to it being fully decentralized, neutral, apolitical and censorship resistant; it’s a viable alternative.

Code is Speech

In 2013 Cody Wilson, the pioneer of the world’s first 3-D printable gun, received a letter from the State Department demanding removal of blueprints for his plastic firearm, the Liberator, or risk facing jail time and millions in fines. In 2015 Wilson’s organization, Defense Distributed, filed a lawsuit against the State Department, alleging that prohibiting the publication of his plans, which are essentially computer code, constitutes a prior restraint of free speech rights, as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US constitution. The dispute revolved around the State Department’s claim that posting 3-D printable gun files online constitutes a potential breach of arms export controls, a controversial set of regulations known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

The history of ITAR has been marred by controversy and contention. In the 90s, it was used to target cryptographers (aka cypherpunks), classifying strong encryption tools as military munitions. After the source code for PGP was released and printed out as a book, it immediately fell under First Amendment protection. Despite this seemingly obvious fact, its inventor Phil Zimmermann, was subjected to a grueling three-year Department Of Justice (DOJ) investigation during these Crypto Wars, which was subsequently put to bed without any indictments. In 1995 cryptographer Dan Bernstein also sued the DOJ, arguing ITAR violated his First Amendment rights, and won the case. This was the landmark case that designated code as speech.

Despite the State Department’s two-year enforcement of ITAR against Defense Distributed, it failed to stop the proliferation of its 3-D printable gun files online. Instead, concerns over censorship spurred over 100,000 downloads of the Liberator blueprint in just two days! Despite removal from Defense Distributed’s websites, the file quickly spread to platforms like the Pirate Bay, making erasure nearly impossible. Attempts to ban speech in the digital age are not only absurd but futile because of its ability to manifest in infinite forms.The historical example of RSA’s classification as munition highlights the futility of restricting information as epitomized by printing forbidden information on t-shirts. Information must be free.

Export-controlled RSA encryption source code on a T-shirt turned the shirt into a restricted munition.

In an interview I had with Jessica Solce, the film maker and executive producer of Death Athletic: A Dissident Architecture a documentary that profiled Cody Wilson and the 3D-printed guns movement; when commenting on the significance of Cody’s battle with the government she said,

“Cody entangled the First and Second Amendment by pushing guns into the digital era. He utilized the burgeoning technology of 3D printing to reduce a gun to code. This WikiWeapon, the Liberator, was directly inspired by Wikileaks, and immediately threatened the Government’s axis of power and control. It was a masterful play that antagonized the military complex and forced the conversation of gun control into the age of the Internet.”

In other words, Wilson didn’t just challenge the military industrial complex’s monopolization (i.e., centralization) of firearms manufacturing. His stance extended to firmly resisting instances of government overreach that sought to regulate and control information pertaining to emerging technologies, which in and of itself is another form of centralized control. A condition which George Orwell described in his book 1984 as, “an endless present in which the party is always right”.

Interestingly Jessica also encountered firm resistance from centralized content distributors and media outlets when the film was released, as it definitely didn’t fit the “approved narrative” because on the surface it looks like a film about guns but it’s really a story about the power of free speech and free access to information in the internet age. Clearly the time is ripe for more decentralized content distribution and streaming services that are integrated with Bitcoin payments, think Angel Studios on a Bitcoin standard. This will empower content creators to not only profit from captivating content while simultaneously challenging centralized control over information, ensuring artistic creative control, prioritizing truth, and preservation of free speech., but I digress.

In July 2018, three years after Defense Distributed challenged the State Department’s actions in court, they accepted a settlement offer from the State Department, including a license to publish its files and a payment of nearly $40,000. When questioned about the settlement, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert justified the decision, stating that the Department of Justice advised settling the case to avoid likely loss on First Amendment grounds in court. Information must be free.

This and many other ongoing legal battles faced by Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed underscore important aspects of individual rights and freedom of speech that must be defended. These battles serve as a reminder that:

The state seeks to control and capture new technologies by “any means necessary” Lawfare and bureaucracy are the weapons of choice in achieving this aim More decentralized technological tools and protocols that incorporate Bitcoin as the monetary layer need to be built to ensure the preservation of liberty and individual sovereignty.

Jessica echoed similar sentiments when stating one of the biggest takeaways that she hopes people will get from Cody’s story; “The takeaway is to build however you can – community, resources, decentralized systems, archive history and information. The battle for information, the era of the Internet and the battle for its control must be understood as a type of new frontier. Many are against second amendment rights so I’d ask them are they truly against the free and open dissemination of information as well? Do they like someone telling them what they are able and not able to understand and read?”

I couldn’t agree more.

Decoding Free Speech in the Digital Age

Just like PGP or Cody’s 3D-printable gun designs, Bitcoin at its core is fundamentally open source code, thus Bitcoin is speech. In the words of Beautyon,“There is no point in any Bitcoin transaction that Bitcoin ceases to be text. It is all text, all the time.” The ruling in the Bernstein v. The DOJ case set a precedent that recognized code as protected speech under the First Amendment, and therefore this protection also directly applies to Bitcoin. Fundamentally, Bitcoin is a messaging system and functions much like email and text messaging, all of which transmit messages. Its primary aim is to definitively confirm an owner’s control over a cryptographic key, represented as a block of text, enabling access to a corresponding entry in the global Bitcoin network ledger. The point here is that restriction of communication using programming languages is an example of a prior restraint of speech.

Attempts to ban Bitcoin are just as ludicrous as banning memorizing 12 words in your head or outlawing certain musical scores .Does this mean that the powers that be will not try to outlaw Bitcoin and increase their grip on the narrative through censorship? You bet they will! Just like they have declared war on free speech online by rebranding it as a war on “misinformation and disinformation”, propaganda is also being disseminated by the corporate media that paints Bitcoin mining in particular, as being harmful to the environment, a claim that has been repeatedly debunked along with the usual “Bitcoin is for money launderers and criminals”

Time fails me to discuss the latest proposed FinCen regulations and the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) law which are all very subtle but sinister attempts to gradually cripple Bitcoin in the name of combating money laundering and enforcing know your customer policies.. In the same vein, digital ID’s and central bank digital currencies (CBDC’s), are more than just surveillance tech; but are also weapons for destroying free speech and independent thought. The ultimate road to serfdom. While legal challenges against all these forms of government overreach noted above will be launched and likely won, they take a long time to settle and are usually very costly. The best solution is to develop more open-source, decentralized technological tools that will thwart and defang any attempts by the state to censor speech.

As big tech companies pay lip service to freedom of speech while simultaneously implementing “freedom of speech not reach policies, online discourse increasingly mirrors the authoritarian control described by Ludwig von Mises when he said: “At every instant of his life the “comrade” is bound to obey implicitly the orders issued by the supreme authority. The State is both his guardian and his employer. The State determines his work, his diet, and his pleasures. The State tells him what to think and what to believe in”. This is even more true today, than it was in 1944 when it was written.

Without the freedom of speech we lose a critical part of what it means to be free human beings. Today we may witness the battles between Defense Distributed and the State Department, Wikileaks and the DOJ, Bernstein and the DOJ, and so on. However, one thing remains clear: the players may change, and the time frames may differ, but the underlying struggle has always been centralization versus decentralization, a battle between those who seek to control speech and those who seek to liberate it. Satoshi Nakamoto, Julian Assange, Aaron Schwartz and many others are some of the martyrs of freedom that contributed immensely to the preservation of free speech in our society today. Bitcoin is the best shot that we have at safeguarding the future from being suffocated by the censorship industrial complex leviathan. 

This is a guest post by Kudzai Kutukwa. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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“The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering’. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. A coping mechanism, an inspiration, or a manipulative rhetorical tool. For quite some time, the inhabitants of the West have found themselves conscripted onto a battlefield of the mind. Society has been reshaping itself or being reshaped at a frenetic pace for decades now. Nostalgia has proven itself to be a potent weapon in the arsenals of every faction on that battlefield.

The power of contrast should never be underestimated. Humans are living, breathing, pattern-recognition machines. We cannot help but compare proposed plans and present circumstances to historical outcomes. This is normal, this is healthy: It lets the human mind achieve some measure of confidence in predicting what happens next. The human mind loathes unpredictability more than anything else. The unknown noise in the dark is far more terrifying than the wild animal on the ridgeline that you can observe and predict.

The regime knows that contrast holds such power, because it allows for critique. Such was the power of Florida during COVID, for instance. Without a state that was free of lockdowns and mandates, foisting the same circumstances on an entire population across the board would have caused less negative sentiment of those measures. This was the real reason for the mass psychosis and peer pressure of that era. It’s much more difficult to make someone take a bite of a turd sandwich insistently offered to them when there are other options.

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“The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.”

― Amy Bloom, Away

“Hireath” is an old Welsh word that describes a feeling of homesickness for something that no longer exists or perhaps never did. Millennials stand astride the old world before 9/11 and the new one, with memories of a higher-trust society with much more prosperity and unity than what we have now. These feelings are amplified by the fact that due to their age, the entirety of the era before the shift was viewed through the rose-colored glasses of childhood. Essentially, millennials are too young to remember the 1992 L.A. riots or the Oklahoma City bombing with any sense of clarity or context, but old enough to remember when innocence was valued and optimism about the future was commonplace.

This contrast between a less anxious past and a present that consists of never-ending psychological warfare can be many things. The past can be pointed to as a critique of how far we have fallen and thrown in the faces of the ruling order as dissent. It can also be a coping mechanism, both healthy and unhealthy. From vaporwave to homesteading, from filtered edits of 1980s Miami to thinking about the Roman empire, the aesthetics and contrast of the past are coming back with a vengeance as the present is too Lovecraftian to personify.

My personal favorite example of this has been the meteoric resurgence of the band Creed. While the band broke up in 2004, they have miraculously been memed back to life. A video of the 2001 Thanksgiving halftime show they performed in Dallas went viral. Taking place just two months after 9/11, that snapshot in time captured and distilled both the optimism of the time and the resilience of its people. The video entered the narrative bloodstream, provoking remarks about how “we used to be a real country” and with it, the demand that we deserve something better than this because we once had something better than this.

Shortly afterwards the Texas Rangers began to streak toward the World Series after a rough start. The team gave the credit for their comeback to Creed, which they began to play constantly in the locker room for motivation. Home games in Dallas blared “Higher” and “My Sacrifice” prompting the fans to sing along in a massive chorus. The Rangers would go on to win the World Series, with a reunited Creed attending the game with Jerseys and a newly announced tour across the United States. The winner of this season of The Voice was a burly white guy belting out Creed’s “Higher” during his finale. In a dark time of “Its So Over” lies the burning embers of a “We Are So Back”.

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”

― Albert Camus, The Rebel

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But the regime understands the power of contrast, too. The solution to this problem has been to tear down or change the past. Beloved franchises that influence culture are butchered ignobly by the likes of Kathleen Kennedy. Films and shows of historical fiction are made to impose contemporary norms of sex, diversity, and sarcastic cynicism upon our past. Suddenly there have always been black Scandinavians, African Roman legionnaires in Britain, and the great men of history have their conquests and achievements “reimagined” to give someone else the credit. Wikipedia is edited, and classical literature and its heroes are “reimagined” and judged through a contemporary lens.

Visual media is obviously the most powerful avenue with which to do this. A series like Stranger Things seeks to recreate the most familiar possible representation of the 1980s, only to subtly slip in the values the regime wishes to promote as if this state of affairs has always been the norm. Yellowstone receives critical acclaim only for tough cowboys and patriarchal dynasties to spend spare moments reinforcing that a good feller ought to be a feminist. Like an angler fish with a pretty lure and a poisonous bite, designed to entertain you just enough to where the subversion can slip through.

This adds a certain sense of urgency to stopping the rot. It is why we must promote and share the best parts of our past, even if it’s something like a halftime show played by Creed. Those of us who remember the time before the world moved on must pass down what was normal and what was good to the generations born inside the throes of hell world who don’t know any better. It is our duty to shout from the rooftops that this isn’t the best we can do, and it’s not the best we’ve ever done. Even if the past must stay in the past, it provides a blueprint for the right kind of future.

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