Using RIP 11 to Free the World

Somewhere around 2017, in the mist of the gold rush of new block chain ventures, a financial visionary named Bruce Fenton came up with the idea of a BTC type crypto currency that could be bound to assets outside the block chain. There were and are layered solutions developed on top of BTC and other block chains, but Bruce knew this function needed to be put into the base program, not layered on top of existing code. He also knew that it needed other aspects of BTC to truly be a force for freedom. No ownership, no pre-mine and no centralized organization calling the shots. Just like BTC it has to be the community of miners, buyers and sellers that controlled the block chain direction and value. Except with this project there would be a 4th factor. The crypto currency used as the fuel for the block chain would not be the only factor determining the value of the block chain, the digital or hard assets tied to the block chain would also add to the total value. Well the world is full of visionaries with great ideas that never make it out of their minds or off the paper it is noted on. Let’s face it; coding a block chain is a lot of work. Satoshi had a team of fantastic programmers, who were passionately working for free, to develop BTC. Where was Bruce going to find an enthusiasitc supporter, with a pocket full of coders, that would just work for free, spending millions of $$ worth of man hours and resources, for an open source project that was going to be given away for free? Well if you were going to write a novel, and have the life experiences of the protagonist mold that character to be the exact person, whom Bruce was looking for, your fiction would not be as fantastical as the life of the friend whom Bruce sought out. To say Patrick Byrne has had no ordinary life would be like saying BTC has gained a bit of value since its inception. His life and thoughts are well documented and I encourage everyone to spend a few months reading about him and more importantly his writings. I will not go into PB’s background but only say through one of his companies, Medici Ventures; he had that pocket full of fantastic, visionary programmers who voluntarily and enthusiastically jumped on the project. (I believe there were 5 programmers who initially started and I would give them recognition if I could remember all of their handles, but to name a few, leaving out others would be a grave injustice) All of this history is out there and I am going to jump over it all and just say the end result of all this was the release of the Ravencoin block chain, RVN BC. Just like BTC, no owner, no pre-mine and free for the world to use. Now this was not the end and there was and is a lot of development still going on with RVN, but this article will focus on just one little piece of code that we in the community affectionately call RIP11, (Ravencoin Improvement Proposal 11). Now RVN was developed as a tool for business, something anyone can use to manage many different aspects of business. New and innovative use cases are being developed every day. RIP11 is one of those use cases that facilitates thousand of other use cases. RIP11, along with 12, 13 and 14, gives anyone the ability to uniquely identify any addresses on the RVN BC and prove ownership. Now all you block chain heads out there can ponder a bit on the implications but for 99.999% of us who need a bit on context to this, I will try and give an analogy of how everyone could benefit from using this technology. For those of you who are technically inclined I suggest you read what Doug Pepe, known as Mangofarmassets in the community, has given to all of us, it is brilliant in its simplicity: Title: Asset Metadata Encryption Protocol https://github.com/MangoFarmAssets/rips/blob/master/rip-0011.mediawiki If you don’t know by now, one of the features of RVN is that anyone is able to create a unique token or assets, where only one can exist on the BC. RIP11 proposes that a wallet address be used in the naming of a unique token when it is created. If that token is ever moved out of the address that is its name sake, both the token and the address lose their verified idenity. Just like how a driver’s license has a picture and other unique identify information so that if someone other than the owner tries to prove their identity with that license, it will not be valid. With RIP11, if you hold that wallet address and that identifying token is in your wallet address, then any person or system can know it is the real entity that they are transacting with. I say entity because I believe RIP11 widest use cases will be by the Internet of Things, IoT. For those that don’t know enough about block chains, just because the owner of the token and wallet address tells you they are the owner, which is not secure by its self, all of this information is stored on the block chain, with the information secured by 10’s if not 100’s of thousands of other computers. So when someone or some device tries to access a web site and says “Hey I own this token so there for I own membership to this website”, the gatekeeper for the website can independently check the block chain and see that yes, that address is correct and that token is held by that address. In fact, the gatekeeper can see the entire history of that unique token and see that no funny business has happened. Another great aspect is that a ‘gatekeeper’ of anything does not necessarily need to know the real name or other identifying personal information of who is transacting, the gatekeeper only needs to know that the correct address holds the correct token. Any transactions with that wallet address are then verifiable that the owner is the one making the transactions. While nothing is 100% hack proof, this is vastly more secure than current systems and greatly reduces the places where transactions are vulnerable. Someone can always put a gun to your head, but they can’t just pretend to be you on the internet. They also can’t pretend to be your car key fob, your garage door opener, your security camera, your phone or host of other devices that are either on the internet or communicate wirelessly. So now anyone can make transactions privately but not secretively. Any transaction that happens on the RVN BC is forever recorded on the ledger but the identity of the people or the IoT transacting with those addresses may or may not be private. The choice is up to the parties involved in the transactions and no one else. And with these simple features we can create a Distributed Trustless Marketplace, DTM. The second part of this article will briefly go over how the idea for a DTM, or the DTM called DirectToMarket, as coined by community member Liquidmetal, came to be. Why a DTM or multiple DTMs are needed as opposed to creators and consumers transacting directly with no 3rd parties involved. The underling functioning of the DTM and how it promotes the creation of small businesses. Finally, how the DTM could change the basic fabric of our current economic systems and destroy the centralized authority created by it.