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Atomic Swaps Are Coming to BTCPay This Year, Says Nicolas Dorier [Interview]

Atomic swaps are coming to btcpay this year, says nicolas dorier [interview]

Atomic Swaps Are Coming to BTCPay This Year, Says Nicolas Dorier [Interview]

Atomic swaps are coming to btcpay this year, says nicolas dorier [interview]

Bitcoinist caught up with Nicolas Dorier, a developer of open-source and self-hosted bitcoin $BTC payment processor alternative, BTCPay, who spoke about upcoming features such as atomic swaps, and making BitPay obsolete for businesses that don’t care about handling bitcoin. 

‘Nothing is Unsolvable in the Long Run’

Bitcoinist: In August 2017, you posted one of the most epic tweets aimed at BitPay calling out their lies and vowing to make the company obsolete. Can you reflect on this? How far have you come in realizing this promise with BTCPay?

Atomic swaps are coming to btcpay this year, says nicolas dorier [interview]

Nicolas Dorier: Their obsolescence comes from lots of factors. I made them obsolete for businesses, which do not care about handling bitcoin $BTC or some small set of altcoins. Creating your own BTCPay server is easier than passing BitPay’s KYC.

If you need fiat, lots of new payment processors entered the market, which made Bitpay way less relevant than in the past (coingate, globee, opennode, coinify, coinpayments, blockonomics, strike, opennode etc.).

One of the devs of BTCPay, RockstarDev, is working on a solution to handle fiat in BTCPay though, but it is far from being ready. This competition got facilitated by a bunch of bad business practices and decisions they took in the past.

In general, should the bitcoin $BTC community strive to replace centralized companies and services with open-source code like this if possible?

“bitcoin community” is a tricky term, there is some loose set of shared values like financial sovereignty, but aside of that, individuals are building the tools they need to fix their own problems.

If centralized companies abuse an individual, then bitcoin $BTC gives such individual a way to fix the problem by building the tools by himself or contributing to other projects which help him to fix it.

Fixing problems caused by censorship with bitcoin is more of a technical than a political, social or regulatory issue, this makes problems easily solvable.

How many merchants/businesses etc. are using BTCPay Server today? Can you share some names and figures?

I can’t. BTCPay Server is by definition not centralized so I have no way to know. Some merchants add themselves to this page.

The only number I can share: Our slack has 1100 members, twitter account almost 10K followers, github 700 stars. Some third-party BTCPay servers are hosting multiple merchants. BTCPay jungle, for example, is hosting around 300 merchants.

The biggest users I know are Coincards (selling gift card), Cheapair (selling plane tickets), Gab (selling membership for a free speech Twitter-like platform), Casa Hodl (selling bitcoin nodes in a pluggable box), TorGuard (VPN provider) and Halong mining (was a ASIC manufacturer in 2018). There might be bigger merchants.

I think there are between 2000 and 20.000 merchants using BTCPay. I know… it is a very rough estimation.

What kind of businesses can benefit from using BTCPay, in particular? Why?

Kind of everything. Stickers sellers, t-shirt sellers, gift card sellers, plane tickets, ASIC seller, sex workers, privacy service providers.

BTCPay is not only for the merchant, but it is also a very useful tool for the individual as you can have your own donation page, with a crowdfunding feature and it can be used as a multi-coin wallet.

How does fiat conversion work if one uses a self-hosted solution like BTCPayserver? Has there been any progress on this end since we last spoke?

Soon (TM). A developer, RockstarDev, is working on something, but myself I don’t really know what. It has been hard for me to work on it, as I have no interest in converting my coins to fiat.

You also integrated Lightning Network payments. How feasible is it to use LN right now for the average user? Is LN living up to its promise?

Yes, it works very well. There are some rough edges still, I think it is usable for the average user but not instinctive yet. It is also risky, there is no perfect backup solution yet.

In BTCPay, you can have your lightning node in 1 click, but if your server is gone, your money on the lightning node is also gone with it. So put what you can afford to lose.

What issues still need to be addressed for LN payments to really take off?

1. Proper backup solution.
2. More reliable payments
3. More liquidity to route higher value payment

Nothing is unsolvable in the long run.

Has the drop in BTC price affected your work or has it actually made it easier to ‘buidl’?

Yes, it burned the weed and cleared out the noise. I enjoy coding these days and I am way less nervous than at the beginning of 2018.

In September, BTCPay Server stated that it’ll stop supporting Shapeshift after they introduced KYC requirements promising to open-source the service. Has there been any progress on this front?

Yes, one contributor, MrKukks added support for Changelly and Coinswitch. I don’t like it because both are centralized solutions.

I will release an atomic swap solution inside BTCPay this year, then I will try to evolve it closer to what Shapeshift was after.

What’s next in store for BTCPay and Nicolas Dorier? What technologies are you most excited about related to bitcoin $BTC in 2019?

The crowdfunding feature (MrKukks), there will have atomic swap (me), some fiat solutions (by RockstarDev). There is not really any midterm/long term roadmap, developers working on what they think is cool, shipping one working pull request at a time. 🙂

I am excited about Lightning becoming more and more reliable. I hope 2019 will see a proposal for Layer 1 enhancement, which will allow scaling better.

I am excited about schnorr sig, SIGHASH_NOINPUT, taproot, and grapfroot for the crazy amount of possibilities it offers, while being very easy to code. I am excited of seeing more and more people running bitcoin $BTC and/or BTCPay Server on small devices (raspberry pi) like what nodl.it, lightninginabox or Casa Hodl is doing.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Yes, come on our slack and look bitcoin $BTCshirt’s videos, you will have fun. 🙂

What are your thoughts on what BTCPay has been doing and future plans? Share below!

Images courtesy of Shutterstock

The post Atomic Swaps Are Coming to BTCPay This Year, Says Nicolas Dorier [Interview] appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

source: https://bitcoinist.com/btcpay-atomic-swaps-nicolas-dorier/

Published at Fri, 11 Jan 2019 07:00:40 +0000

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FidentiaX Develops World’s First Tradeable Insurance Marketplace

People will soon be able to buy and sell insurance policies using the blockchain-based platform, fidentiaX, which is creating the world’s first tradeable insurance marketplace.

[Note: This is a press release.]

Most people do not know that insurance policies with cash value are tradeable on the market for higher returns. In 2014 alone, $57 billion (250,000 policies) of the estimated $112 billion USD of policies lapsed and surrendered could have been resold on the market. The minority of policyholders who know about this find it difficult locating interested buyers due to the absence of a recognizable marketplace for safe and secured transactions. Buyers looking to add policies to their investment portfolio are confronted with similar hurdles.

Limited options, lack of awareness, and accessibility have created an inequitable situation for policyholders. Insurance companies prefer that policyholders surrender their policies (thus releasing them from their sum-assured obligation) rather than encourage trading of these policies. fidentiaX aims to disrupt this status quo and break the tethers of the insurance companies by empowering policyholders to monetize their policies.

Leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts, fidentiaX will help policyholders and investors build a portfolio of tradable policies with stable returns, while developing a trustless platform for trading of these policies.

There are many advantages of buying an insurance policy on the open market, for instance: stable returns (superior to a similar asset class with the same risk ratings), fixed tenure, liquidity, and low correlation with other asset classes.

fidentiaX will be the world’s first marketplace for tradeable insurance policies, creating a marketplace and repository of insurance policies for the masses. fidentiaX’s Policy Ledger breaks from the traditional reliance on intermediaries by creating a digital ledger for policyholders enabling them to:

  • Consolidate and manage insurance policies on a distributed ledger.
  • Creating an immutable record of available policies on the blockchain.
  • Premium payment alert
  • Coverage summary
  • Multi-signatory access for beneficiaries and trustees on mortality event

fidentiaX strongly believes that tradable policies should form part of any investment portfolio. To this end, the company will conduct periodic (minimum once a year) private sales for members only. Policies from the model portfolio will be auctioned for a minimum number of fidentiaX (fdX) tokens, and the auction will be open for members to bid on the policy (a real-world asset). The successful bidder will take ownership of the policy and could either cash out the policy or add that policy to their investment portfolio.

In the coming years, Asia will be the fastest-growing market for life insurance, with an estimated real annual compounded growth rate of 10.2 percent. fidentiaX will be focusing on building its brand within Asia before executing its global expansion strategy. Key focus countries within Asia are Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore.

The establishment of the fidentiaX Open Source Foundation (FOSF) will build a framework for the community, by the community to serve the community. The FOSF aims to create an equal opportunity community of contributors from both developers and industry contributors. Using funds from the foundation, collaborators will develop freely available enterprise-grade insurance blockchain solutions to benefit millions of users and insurers worldwide. The core focus of the foundation is to develop, proliferate, and promote an open-source blockchain architecture that is not owned by any traditional large insurance institution or blockchain development firms.

fidentiaX is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to consumer protections. This press release is for informational purposes only. The information does not constitute investment advice or an offer to invest.

Images courtesy of fidentiaX.

The post FidentiaX Develops World’s First Tradeable Insurance Marketplace appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.

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