As many here have mentioned, right now there is no way to do this permisionlessly or without going through KYC. That is going to change in about ten days when Sovryn launches:
https://sovryn.app/

Sovryn is non-custodial. Sovryn is built on Bitcoin Layer2 and provides for Bitcoin lending to earn yield, borrowing and also trading and margin trading.
You can sign up on the website to be informed for early access. And of course, you don't even need to provide your name BTC

The easiest way to think of the function of SOV is with an analogy to stocks. A company's shares provide for governance rights and also a claim on the company revenue, usually through dividends. SOV provides is similar in that it provides a way to participate in Sovryn governance and the system revenues are channeled to those who participate in that governance.

I think this is an important step in building a permissionless economy around Bitcoin. Sovryn, instead of being managed by a company, which is created by the legal system of a specific jurisdiction is like a decentralised company that is created by the smart contracts themselves. This makes Sovryn governance permissionless, global and uncensorable.

This is not an ICO. We are not creating yet another pointless shitcoin. The system will never require you to have any coin other than BTC. There is a token, called SOV, which any user or contributor will be able to earn by participating or advancing the Sovryn protocol. This is not a new coin. It is a decentralised stonk, which can provide governance rights and a share of the revenue stream.

In that respect it is, in some ways, similar to what Bisq have done for their DAO. However, SOV is not planned to provide discounts in the system. All fees will be paid with BTC.

Thanks very much to both of you. Your encouragement makes this much easier. It would be great to see you guys using Sovryn.

I also agree with everything you said. With Sovryn we have a few guiding principles. Here are a few relevant ones:

"You shouldn't have to be technical to be free". We are working hard to make our system so easy to use that anyone can use it. It should be as easy as a centralised exchange. Maybe even easier, since you can use coins directly from your wallet.

"Don't fight greed, harness it". Sovryn is designed to make it easier than ever to make money with your Bitcoin. We want to help harness greed as tool to encourage freedom. We think that is what Satoshi was doing. So we have features we call HyperHODLing (going leverage long BTC) and SuperStacking (earning interest on your stack of Sats).

"Don't sacrifice the good for the perfect". Sovryn won't be perfect. It won't be as decentralised as mainchain Bitcoin. It won't have governance that is as neutral as PoW. But it will be one hell of an improvement over centralised exchanges. We know a lot of Maxies will probably reject Sovryn for these reasons. We think this is a mistake. The road to hyper-bitcoinisation is long and requires many steps. Not one giant leap to the end.

BTC

Bitcoin BTC is digital gold.

In 1933, the American authorities decided to confiscate all their citizens gold. This happened in the land of freedom. It can happen again. It can happen anywhere, anytime.

People talk about the 51% attack. But that is not the only way to attack Bitcoin. All those Bitcoin sitting in centralised exchanges? They can be seized. All that KYC data that Bitcoiners have handed over to exchanges, the IRS wants it.

Defence-in-Depth (DID) is a concept invented for medieval citadels and adapted to modern IT security. In a citadel, you don't just have one layer of defence, you have many. A moat, a wall, a keep...

In modern IT security, you have technical controls (cryptography), physical controls (hardware wallets) and also administrative controls (self-custody). Bitcoin as a system is secure because of PoW and cryptography. But Bitcoin, as a social and economic structure, needs additional layers of defence.

We need to make sure we don't have to use centralised services and pool our Bitcoin in places that make it easy to seize funds or taint coins. We need to make sure that there are not obvious points of centralised control where politicians can exert pressure. Coinbase and Binance, if they became dominant enough, could have the same centralising effect over Bitcoin as Facebook and Google have over the web. Binance already suggested they would try to re-org Bitcoin Blockchain.

Centralised services are walled gardens of convenience that you are not in control. They are honeypots. They rob us of our sovereignty.

DID is about expanding the envelope of decentralisation and uncensorability. DID is about expanding what we understand Bitcoin to be. It is more than just a blockchain or a coin. It is a social, political and economic structure.

Defence-in-Depth is about expanding the protections we provide Bitcoin and, as a result, expanding the protection Bitcoin provides us.

It wouldn't surprise me if, in the not too distant future, Bitcoin defi (or sovrynomics), will exceed that of Ethereum. Bitcoin "marketcap" is an order of magnitude greater than that of Ethereum. There is simply a much larger pool of funds that could flow into the decentralised Bitcoin economy once it get's going. The technology to allow this to happen is here. This is a big reason I am so excited to be working on Sovryn.

It's not only Sovryn. Bisq and Hodl Hodl are seeing big increases in volume and are perfect decentralised P2P gateways into crypto. Money On Chain have created the first Bitcoin-backed stablecoin, and I am sure there will be many others.

Decentralised services for Bitcoin are at the beginning of a renaissance and I think the whole space could change over the next year or two.

Carrying around Sats is way less heavy than carrying around atoms. 

Satoshi created Bitcoin to rid us of masters who have authority over us. This includes Satoshi himself. It was an invention to allow us to be Sovereign, and it works. His success is that he has no power... but we do.

Love this question!

There are two approaches to security:
1. Security by obscurity (keep things private, so that attackers don't know about vulnerabilities)
2. Security by sunlight (make everything open, so that any security flaws can be found and fixed)

In opensource approach 1 doesn't work and cryptographers discovered that with good cryptography, it is not even needed, because approach 2 is better.

Bitcoin is a great example. It is totally public, and has become the single most secure software system ever devised. On the other hand, Bitcoin exchanges which are private, and have well paid security teams get hacked all. the. f'king. time.

So we are taking approach no.2. Build well-thought out tech, using well understood cryptography. Make it ALL public and ENCOURAGE people to find flaws in it.

Are there risks? Absolutely. Always DYOR! But this is the only approach that has proven itself in the long run.

High praise and an appropriate warning from a legend. Thanks!


Absolutely. This has to be top priority. And nobody should trust us. The whole point is trustlessness. Please audit the code, anyone who can. It will always be opensource. We will make sure it is independently audited and that there is a bug bounty. But our hope is that this will be a community effort. One of the best ways you can help, is by showing us we F'ed up.

That said, we are mostly forking code that has already been audited and used to transact with substantial funds on Ethereum. This is not green code. It has already been seasoned.

Rootstock (RSK) is a pegged Bitcoin sidechain. That means it is uses bitcoin as it's native currency, is merged-mined with Bitcoin and can have different features from Bitcoin mainchain. On of the cool features of RSK (there are many), is that it allows us to build smart contracts (secured by the Bitcoin hashpower).

Work started on RSK, I think 5 years ago, and at the time there was a lot of excitement about sidechains. I remember them being considered the future of Bitcoin, the next evolutionary step. I still think that's true.
However, building *secure* and *decentralised* sidechains for Bitcoin is REALLY hard. Most people have heard of Liquid which is a trusted federation and not censorship resistant and that has come to be viewed as what Bitcoin sidechains are, and so the excitement waned.

In the meantime, RSK has continued to slowly evolve and it is now, in my opinion, finally evolving to a state where Bitcoiners can start building decentralised alternatives to exchanges, lending platforms and derivatives markets for Bitcoin.

This is our goal with Sovryn. To build a decentralised, open economy around decentralised, open money: Bitcoin. Call it Sovrynomics  

You can check out our (obviously) opensource code here: https://github.com/DistributedCollective/

If things keep going reasonably well, Sovryn will be ready to start facilitating margin trading, spot trading and lending for Bitcoin in about 6 weeks.  

To me it seems that there is a segment of the Bitcoin community that are actually fearful of Ethereum. They try to protect against this by making it their mission to FUD everything that has the mere whiff of Ethereum. An unfortunate side effect of this is an inability to acknowledge any benefits that might come from smart contracts - which is ironic, since one of the true Bitcoin OGs , Nick Szabo basically invented the smart contract concept.

To my mind, Bitcoin has nothing to fear from Ethereum... any more than Bitcoin has anything to fear from any of its other testnets. The only thing we have to fear is the mental stagnation that comes with throwing the baby out with the bath water. I am not willing to concede smart contracts to Ethereum. We invented them, they are ours.

More than mildly, it annoys us that we have the tools to be truly sovereign and yet we continue to submit our ourselves, and our bitcoin, to centralised authorities. "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age"; yet KYC is demanded before we can trade."Not your keys, not your coins"; yet millions of bitcoin sit in the vaults of custodial exchanges and wallets.

For monetary liberty to be widespread it must be part of the social contract. We must come together to deploy decentralised systems that maintain Bitcoin's promise of sovereignty. These tools already exist and they are improving.

Awakening Our Inner Apex Predator
"When Satoshi genetically engineered bitcoin, he spliced DNA from organisms that never survived (B-money, Hashcash, Bit gold). This gives bitcoin an incredible amount of survivability and fierceness. It makes it the apex predator of money."

Billions of dollars in cryptocurrency is traded, lent and borrowed on platforms that have self-custody and no KYC. Billions of dollars in cryptocurrency but not bitcoin. This decentralized financial system is called DeFi. Many Bitcoiners deny, ignore and attack DeFi because it is an invention, a mutation, that occurred on Ethereum. This reflexive defensiveness ignores a fundamental truth about Bitcoin: If any technology can provide value for Bitcoin, Bitcoin will simply adopt it. A nuanced view of DeFi recognizes that it is composed both of valuable decentralisation but also of cancerous ponzis and evolutionary dead-ends. We will adopt DeFi where it improves Bitcoin DID (Defense-in-Depth) and cauterise the rest.  

Defense-in-Depth
Bitcoin maintains it's sovereignty through technological, cryptographic means. First and foremost, private keys provide the only means of control and ownership. Second, and most famously, Proof of Work defends the network against attack.

Attackers, however, are not limited to attacking the cryptography or the hashpower in order to limit our sovereignty. They route around and seek any weak links. "Trusted third parties are security holes". We increase the perimeter of defence by eliminating these trusted third parties.

Ethereum is Bitcoin’s Testnet
We will splice the DNA of DeFi into Bitcoin. We will increase Bitcoin's defense perimeter. The tools already exist. Ethereum is our testnet. Let it provide the radioactive pool where mutations are many. Let us observe it as it moves fast and breaks things. We will adopt it's best tools and learn to defend against its worst.

Rootstock, a Bitcoin sidechain, can be our CRISPR in this genetic adoption. We will splice the code from Ethereum dapps and improve upon them.

CypherpunkRouges
Cypherpunks write code, share code, review code and copy code. Sovereign individuals use this code. Like the X-men's Rouge, Bitcoiners will absorb the superpowers of others. I have been working on a DeFi dapp for decentralised bitcoin trading and lending. Hopefully you will join me, or better yet, compete with me.

"Those who would give up Liberty, to purchase a little temporary convenience, will have neither Liberty nor convenience." That will be our code. Onwards. BTC