Quote:The Orbital Blockchain Network (OBN) is a public ledger where transactions between parties can be recorded on a peer-to-peer basis, i.e. without any third-party control or interference - an antidote to authoritarian, state overreach.
This means no frozen bank or Paypal accounts, no social media censorship, no invasion of privacy, and no petty bureaucrats meddling in your business.
OBN is also intensely focussed on preserving user anonymity and privacy.
Let's imagine that the OBN is like a bustling city marketplace that operates around the clock, and is accessible from anywhere in the world through a special online portal.
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In this marketplace, anyone can offer their own goods or services, represented by tokens. These tokens can be anything, from a bag of apples to a painting, or even abstract things like an hour of guitar lessons. You don't need permission to set up your stall and start trading.
The transactions in this marketplace are not managed by any authorities or middlemen. It's like each stallholder directly dealing with their customers, exchanging goods and services for other tokens. Due to the efficiency of the network and absence of middlemen, more of the value created is shared between the producer and the consumer.
In our marketplace, there are special staff called 'validators', who ensure that all exchanges are fair and legitimate. They're like market inspectors who double-check every trade. For their services, you pay them a small fee in a specific currency called 'EPIC tokens'. Not one validator has any more authority than another and anyone can become one as long as they stake sufficient EPIC of their own as an incentive not to act maliciously because they would risk losing their stake if they tried.
To visit this marketplace, all you need is to log in through a simple web app, much like opening a door into this bustling city from your living room. Registration is free, very simple, guaranteed, and you don’t need to share any personal information, not even an email address or phone number.
There's even a sandbox, a kind of a playground inside the marketplace where you can practice trading with play tokens.
The marketplace offers an array of services that you typically use every day, like ride-sharing, online shopping, payments, or even forming your own organisations called DAOs.
The city is continuously growing, with new buildings and features being planned and added. One such feature is 'vaults'. Think of them as secure lockers where you can privately exchange goods without anyone else knowing about the transaction, not even the market inspectors. It's the ultimate way to ensure privacy in your dealings within the OBN and, indeed, in the real world.
If your seller wants to trade in public, perhaps because they want to improve their reputation by showing they have done lots of trades with others, then you can simply create a new account for the public transaction and then privately trade with that account and your own.
This principle is also adopted for completely private and secure communication. Let's say you're passing secret notes in class. Each note you send is placed in a different envelope. Every time you pass a note, you also provide a new return address. The teacher sees lots of envelopes being passed, but they have no idea if these envelopes are all part of the same conversation or different ones, and who’s communicating with who!
Plus, the envelopes are sealed so well that only the person you're passing them to can open them. From the outside, it's impossible to know that a continuous conversation is even happening or who's involved in it. It's the perfect secret message system. And, that’s essentially how it happens in the OBN, using sophisticated but robust cryptography.

(06-27-2023, 10:38 AM)F2d5thCav Wrote: My question would be, who admins the network ?  And what is to stop banks, the State, or other operators from taking over the network and subverting it to their purposes ?

Hard to believe TPTB will just stand by as a huge chunk of banking is ripped from their control.

Cheers

(06-27-2023, 04:16 PM)GeauxHomeLittleD Wrote: In theory it sounds like a good idea, but dang near every person I know who messed with digital coin has gotten robbed- and I'm talking about people using the most popular and trusted services available. I have never trusted the idea of strictly digital currency, anyone who knows the right sequence of keys to push could wipe it all out in an instant and there are those who devote themselves to doing just that. Heck, aren't most of us worried about our own governments wiping out all of our bank accounts the same way?

Also the whole completely private transaction rooms that even the mods can't access seem really sketchy. What will go on in those? Trading a bag of apples for some coffee beans or human trafficking and dirty bombs? My guess would be the latter. Another "Silk Road" with a different name.

(06-27-2023, 07:33 PM)Ninurta Wrote: I understand cryptography, and use it daily to keep Grandma's Secret Cookie Recipe secure.. but this "blockchain" business is mystifying. It does not seem possible for it to be both "freely accessible" AND "secure" both at the same time, and no one has so far been able to explain to me how that could possibly be.

Furthermore, it's known that governments can utterly and completely control CBDC's, and issue them or disappear them at will. I don't see what could possibly prevent them from dabbling in any digital currency created. I mean, if it's "freely accessible", that means governments can access it too, right?

On top of that, "currency" made up entirely of bits and bytes, just electrons in the machine, seem utterly insecure to me - what happens if the lights go out? You can't just open your safe when the number dial suddenly disappears!

So I don't, EVER, deal in digital currencies. It seems to be a good way to watch all of your hard-earned money just go POOF! and disappear. If I don't deal in digital currencies, then I have no need of services that claim to securely shuffle them about between traders. If I have a bag of apples you want, and you have a set of horse shoes I want, we'll just deal face to face and in person, apples and horse shoes in hand - not need for any ethereal intermediary of exchange like "digital currency" in my mind.

If I want to buy something solid, I want it in-hand where  can check the weight of it.

.

(06-27-2023, 11:18 PM)BodhisattvaStyle Wrote: "These tokens can be anything, from a bag of apples to a painting, or even abstract things like an hour of guitar lessons"

Looks like they were explaining how simple barter and trade work. I have a news flash for them...

We already know how to barter and trade.

This is an attempt to control that (in the future) as well. One would need to dig deep into the "fine print" of this.

My view of it is, don't trust it.