It came to my attention thanks to Greg Meredith and to Vitalik that some people may have gotten the wrong message, from my recent posts against economic abstraction. I’m hoping this post is enough to set the record straight about a couple of things.

I’m still a fan of RChain!

Greg and I have been working closely together on Casper for over a year and a half. RChain is Greg’s interpretation of Casper with Sharding (with a distributed virtual machine based on Greg’s reflexive higher-order pi calculus, Rho-calculus, and a higher level programming language Rholang).

I am still very interested in seeing the RChain vision born out, and am still hoping to help in this effort. RChain represents a result of years of my life’s work, so I am very invested in its success.

I will still be a fan of RChain, even if Greg decides to go with economic abstraction of bonding tokens. However, it will be disappointing to know that Greg would complicate the protocol and undermine the security of RChain to meet the demands of potential investors by selling RCoinAs for AMPs, RCoinBs for BTC and RCoinEs for ETH.

I will also be personally financially affected if AMPs are not required for the conversion to (or purchase of) RCoins. I’ve been buying AMPs during the course and fallout of the Synereo governance crisis ever since I made a call for a coin split in an effort to acquire still non-existent RCoins. I expect to lose a substantial amount of money if Greg goes through with economic abstraction, and this was (and is) part of my motivation for making these blog posts. [edit: note that this isn’t why I’m against economic abstraction, but just one reason why I made these blog posts at this time.] But such is the risky nature of speculation.

I’m still a fan of non-economic abstraction!

I also want to make it clear that I am a fan of non-economic protocol abstraction.

I think the abstraction of signature verification is a great idea. It lets users to select whatever kind of cryptography they are most comfortable with. It lets users have second and third factor authentication for transactions. It will let us have multisig transactions (rather than only multisig contracts, as things are today). It will let us build delegation and stake pooling for Casper without affecting the specification of the Casper protocol. And it does not at all impact the security of the blockchain.

I think the abstraction of replay protection is a great idea. It lets us stop insisting on the use of sequence numbers (incrementing nonces) to prevent the replay of transactions. It will be possible to create accounts for which we can make a set of transactions that can be published to the blockchain in any order. It can make it possible to create off-chain transactions that can be executed on-chain regardless of which other transactions are created by the originating account. It will allow for more flexibility in state channels. And all of this without impacting the security of the blockchain.

The main hazard with these non-economic abstractions (which are currently in the Ethereum roadmap) is the possibility of poorly implemented or otherwise unsafe verification or replay protection. My love for powerful technology overpowers my safety concerns, at least in this instance!

I hope this helps clear some things up!