April 10, 2018
BTRIC Announces Call for Founders of FinTech Self-Regulatory Organization (FTSRO)

Today Blockchain Technology Research Innovations Corporation (BTRIC) announced that it is seeking founders and tax-deductible contributions from across the crypto asset industry for the formation of “Financial Technology Self-Regulatory Organization” (FTSRO).  BTRIC, a 501(c)(3) organization, has established a fund dedicated to the founding of FTSRO and is now seeking additional contributors as well as persons or businesses to be included as founders.

By forming a non-profit Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO), BTRIC believes that the crypto asset industry can better accommodate regulatory requirements in a streamlined and efficient manner, allowing for maximum innovation and participation in this emerging field.  FTSRO will be focused on developing and implementing best-practices standards to cover areas such as crypto asset classification (i.e. determination if a crypto asset is a currency/commodity, a utility token, a securities token, a collectible or other special purpose token, etc.).

In addition, FTSRO will establish model standards for Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) that participants can utilize to ensure consumers and investors are protected against fraud and market manipulation.

Founders of FTSRO will play a role in the organization from the beginning, demonstrating their commitment to “light-touch” self-regulation that ensures that compliance is not expensive or cumbersome and that innovation continues to define and refine one of the most significant developments in the history of commerce.

BTRIC’s Chair of the Board of Trustees, Terri Lei Beideman, stated, “The founding of FinTech SRO is an important step in bringing regulatory clarity to a field that is often confusing and even, in some ways, contradictory.  By sharing information and resources among members and working with regulators, FTSRO will move this industry, which began as a small movement just under ten years ago, forward with constructive and practicable standards and guidance.  FTSRO provides a vehicle to ensure consumers and investors are protected and that crypto asset businesses and other participants are legally compliant while still accommodating the fast pace of innovation in this quickly growing field.”

Persons and businesses interested in participating as a founder of FTSRO, or those interested in contributing to the FTSRO organization fund, should contact BTRIC at ftsro@btric.org.  The concept for FTSRO, which is evolving as more people get involved, is described in this blog article.

About BTRIC: Blockchain Technology Research Innovations Corporation is a U.S. based 501(c)(3) non-profit economic development organization that is focused on the emerging technology field.  Within this field, BTRIC operates a business incubator and startup accelerator, a best-practices standards development, educational, and outreach initiative, and a research and development laboratory.  Due to the global nature of emerging technologies, we also operate a related U.K. based charitable organization (BTRIC UK) to enable contributions from donors located in the United Kingdom, European Union, Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein.

Contributions to BTRIC and BTRIC UK may be tax-deductible or eligible for other tax relief to the extent allowed by law.  Contact your tax advisor for more information.  U.K. based donors can contact donations@btric.orgto donate in a manner that is eligible for the U.K. Gift Aid program.

Visit our website at https://www.btric.org.  You can also connect with us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BTRICorg, keep updated on our Medium blog at https://medium.com/btric, join our Telegram chat at https://t.me/BTRIC_General and reach out via email at hello@btric.org.

Hey, I encourage you to read this thread in the development thread about this issue (and the earlier linked threads contained in there), where I asked the gurus about the technical feasibility of overwriting portions of the blockchain to destroy this information.

If it ever becomes a real problem, there can be changes to selectively prune out the bad parts.  But also note that these images are not just plainly viewable in the blockchain, you'd need to write special code to extract and assemble them into the bad stuff.

Here's the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3168045.0

Best regards,
Ben

Reserved.

bitcointalk.org has been very slow for me today.  I did receive the CloudFlare gateway error one time.  It must be under heavy load/attack or the backend servers need a little TLC.

It seems to be better now compared to earlier today.

Best,
Ben

You can look for the SAFT framework.  My organization is going to assemble best-practices documents for the different type of offerings (Howey, Reg A+, etc.) but that's not been done yet.

In any event make sure you consult legal counsel.  The repository we build is not intended to replace legal advice; rather, to provide a starting point to bring more lawyers into the know in the crypto realm.

Good luck with your ICO, and strongly consider seeking the advice of an attorney with experience in this specialized area of law.

Best regards,
Ben

Thank you very much for your response.  I know there are people mining private keys with the LBC, etc.  I wanted to see if the difficulty was on scale with that or less because the data that would replace the "bad data" could be random.  Now that I'm thinking about it, it may actually be more difficult than that.  Often my pre-coffee questions are answerable by me post-coffee, but I am not an expert and wanted to hear from a better source of information.

Yes, I also am not sure that I'd agree with changing the blockchain in any way, even if it were possible.  Just exploring what is or isn't possible.

Best regards,
Ben

For those of us that would like to see crypto as a payment method in every retail location, at every online store, as a method of paying employees and vendors, and for P2P payments, we must have government acceptance.  We will have it, government knows it cannot truly control cryptocurrency, so it will try to regulate aspects of it.

I believe some aspects could benefit from common-sense regulation.  I strongly support voluntary standards that could be implemented quickly as a tactic to improve some of the clear cases of fraud and/or stupid crap such as client-side JavaScript (lol).  Efforts such as this will help improve public, regulators, and lawmakers perceptions, increase adoption, as well as solving problems inside of the ecosystem instead of being mandated this or that.

Best regards,
Ben

Excerpt:


German Researchers: Child Abuse Content Found On Bitcoin Blockchain, Users Must Be Protected
https://cointelegraph.com/news/german-researchers-child-abuse-content-found-on-bitcoin-blockchain-users-must-be-protected

Hi All,

I have a question.  If someone wanted to overwrite a portion of the Bitcoin blockchain with random data and have it still validate in place of a correct block, would this be computationally difficult/impossible?

The reason I am asking this question is the following:

German Researchers: Child Abuse Content Found On Bitcoin Blockchain, Users Must Be Protected
https://cointelegraph.com/news/german-researchers-child-abuse-content-found-on-bitcoin-blockchain-users-must-be-protected

So the question is, "is it practically possible to overwrite those portions of a bitcoin block that currently contain URLs to apparent CP repositories and still have the block validate properly?"

I know to do this to substitute useful data would be practically impossible.  But if one is looking to destroy existing data by overwriting it with any other random string that would compute the same hash (could be completely random in place of these URLs), does that then make the exercise within reach from a computational perspective?

I am in no way suggesting that this should or should not be done, I just want to get an experts view of the feasibility of doing so.

Best regards,
Ben

Here's another website that has your private key: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/dio/1

However, it may take you a little while to find it on there, since it says at the top of the page:

Page 1 out of 904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102837043110636675

This website doesn't actually have 904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102837043110636675 pages stored to disk, as that would take up quite a bit of space.  Instead, it produces the pages on demand as you flip through them.  You can also change the "/1" in the URL above to "/[any number between 1 and 904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102837043110636675]" to go directly to that page.  Though I must admit, I haven't tried them all.

As you can see, the chances are so small that someone else would have your private key.  In fact, it's extremely likely to take billions of years to find it.

But, of course, the first guess could be right!  Just extremely improbable.  So improbable that it's hard to imagine just how unlikely that would be.

A Bitcoin private key is safer than the safest lock in the world.  It is so safe that people have trusted hundreds of billions of dollars in Bitcoin to the security of the public address/private key combination.  Many altcoins use the same method for their addressing, though the namespace may differ, so people storing other coins, such as Litecoin, have also trusted this system for addresses and private keys.

Fun fact I discovered while searching around looking for analogies for this reply.  Did you know that a piece of paper folded 103 times is as thick as the Universe?  I didn't!

Happy hunting!

Best regards,
Ben

Yes, it can happen in theory.
However, the chances of it happening are much lower than "really low probability", more like "virtually impossible low probability".

Of course, as others have pointed out on this thread, if you are not using a good source of entropy or an otherwise flawed random number generator, the chances of it occurring rise.  The reason is because the limited entropy and/or RNG flaws effectively lower the number of possibilities that it will ever generate.

To visualize this, for example, if a normal key to a house has 10,000 combinations that the "lock making machine" randomly assigns to doorknobs, you can look at a flawed RNG as if part of the lock making machine is stuck, so in reality it will only ever generate 1,000 different combinations.

Randomness is valuable.  If using virtual machines to store wallets/run nodes/etc., ensure that they have access to a good source of entropy.  VMs often have poor entropy without specific steps being taken to increase the levels (platform specific).

Best regards,
Ben

I agree, but decentralized.  Get fiat/crypto conversion exchanges (that you already give your KYC anyway) to work together on a common KYC standard that they all benefit from and contribute to.

This is how I think it should be done.

Hi Kenny,

I think a natural case for "useful work" is in distributed computing projects.  There are numerous tasks that can be effectively divided into work units and a ready market for entities that want to buy computing power to have those tasks completed.  For purposes of this post, I'll talk about a very simple distributed computing use case, OCR text recognition from scanned images of pages.  There are businesses that pay to have their files scanned and OCR recognized.

The minimum viable product would be building an OCR engine that works in a pool-mining fashion.  However, the work is centralized.  So that's not ideal.

Next iteration, allow it so that anyone can submit work projects from any node, they can also set pricing in terms of what they want to pay for each completed work unit.  Further iterations could allow them to deploy their own sandboxed OCR engine (and, of course, any number of other distributed computing engines, image recognition, structural analyses, statistical calculations, training ML/DL algos, complex systems modeling, etc.).

I think that would be a useful type of decentralized computing system, there's some work being done in this area and I want to see what can be done to advance this.  I've reached out to GPU vendors regarding this for my organization because I believe they'd have an interest in finding "useful work" applications for a mining-type client base.  They are making a decent percentage of their income now from cryptocurrency miners, so finding a way to sustain that income through types of mining that is more about useful work as opposed to algos (which can be more easily ASICed) is in their best interest.

I think on Reddit there's a post about using excess mining heat for a greenhouse, I thought that was a pretty cool idea.  I don't see "useful work" mining replacing cryptocurrencies, but I do see it as a novel application of distributed computing that can work in a mining-like manner if properly implemented.  I am focused on finding models of replacing content monetization that isn't so dependent on advertising.  We need new "YouTubes", but we need to be able to pay those that put their lives into earning money off of that platform.  Mining a traditional cryptocurrency is only one way that users of a hypothetical decentralized platform can contribute to monetization without actually paying directly.  Advertising will probably always be a part of the equation but I believe that multiple revenue models should be explored.

Best regards,
Ben

Rest in peace, Stephen.  Despite his disability, which would lead many to despair, he did not fall prey to that and instead provided some very profound insights as to the nature of reality.

I read a story once about his amazing survival with ALS.  I believe he lived with (diagnosed) ALS longer than any other known person, being diagnosed at the age of 22.

Best regards,
Ben

I would support Mr. Cassio's suggestion, but it may be complicated to track if someone transfers their accounts to others.  I do, however, agree with the concept that any paid upgrades should be sufficiently high in cost as to deter their use as a vehicle for spam.  A fair price for a fair service.  Perhaps removed from an account upon any spam violation, no tolerance policy?

I think the merit system is a great approach to cutting down on spam, over time that should have an increased effect.  It will be great when the Bitcoin Discussion forum isn't filled with the same 20 items just tumbled around in a new combination of lexicon.  If you dare, as I have, to actually respond to some of these threads, you're confronted with masses of people that frankly, I don't know how they get on the Internet, much less posses any Bitcoin.  But hey, I never cease to be amazed at all of the variety that is "out there".

Best regards,
Ben