The following is a reprint from a copyrighted text;

Dark Wallet, the anonymous Bitcoin s​torage and transfer platform, was intended to guide Bitcoi​n back to its anti-establishment, decentralized roots. But the platform was released before it was fully developed, making it hard to build an active user base and live up to the radical vision its developers held.

Now, with some brand new features—including an option for customers to anonymously convert and withdraw bitcoin into cold, hard cash—its creators are aiming to attract more people and push Dark Wallet to the comprehensive, anonymous, cypherpunk daydream they hoped it would be.

When Dark Wallet debute​d its alpha version last year, it was still a work-in-progress, according to one of the developers who built the platform. Available as a browser plugin for Google Chrome (and soon, Mozilla Firefox), the team hoped that developers and hackers around the world would tinker with it and offer ideas for ways to improve.

“To be honest, last summer when we released it, it was just to get the basic platform online,” Amir Taaki, the British-Iranian software developer who helped create Dark Wallet, told me. “But that was just more of a taster and now we’re actually getting close to releasing the full platform. This is the point where we want people to download and to test it.”

THE LATEST VERSION OF DARK WALLET. SCREENGRAB: ​DARK WALLET

In the latest version, Dark Wallet now hosts an independent Bitcoin exchange. Users can buy and sell bitcoin within the system, with the Dark Wallet team serving as arbiters. And since Dark Wallet can be used without providing any personal information, the developers claim users will be able to buy, sell, save, and send their money anonymously.

The developers have also paired up with Chip Chap, a currency conversion app, to make converting Bitcoin and withdrawing money seamless and anonymous too. Chip Chap can convert euros to Bitcoin and vice versa, and users can withdraw their converted bitcoin as cash at thousands of ATMs located around Europe without a bank card, just a phone.

“You enter your phone number and the quantity you want to withdraw, then you are given an address and you send the Bitcoin there. After you send it, you will receive a code. You can use this at the ATM to receive cash through a system called Halc​ash which is widely deployed in Spain and throughout Europe,” Taaki explained.

Users can go to any participating ATM, enter the code they’ve been given (no cards required), and have cash in their hands instantly. It’s one of the only systems in place for turning bitcoins into cash without revealing your identity.

But Dark Wallet is still use-at-your-own-risk, even in its updated alpha version. And after more than a year of build up without a final product to show for it, it’s hard not to get a whiff of vaporware around the whole thing. The US government and the European Central Bank are taking Dark ​Wallet seriously as a potential venue for money laundering, especially after ISIS recommended the service. Taaki assured me they are very close to the final iteration of the software. They will release a beta version in a few weeks once they get more users and plan to have a complete, final version within a month or two.

But he also said Dark Wallet is just one project of many his team—which includes Cody Wilson, best known for creating pl​ans for 3D-printed guns—is working on as part of their crusade to change the way people​ think about government and society as they live and work at a small villa in Spain.

Other projects include plans for a site called Dark L​eaks, which would use a mathematical algorithm to break up, encrypt, and distribute classified documents and provide a way for people to pay money to get access to the information. Wilson is also launching ​a campaign to get elected to and then disband the Bitcoin Foundation, which his team feels is unnecessary and counterproductive to Bitcoin’s original goals of decentralization.

Even if Dark Wallet never becomes the go-to for Bitcoin users, Taaki said the attention and funds it has garnered created enough momentum for the team to keep going.

“To be honest, I’m not too worried. A lot of opportunity came with [Dark Wallet] as well,” he said. “Even if it’s not with Dark Wallet itself.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/78x7gb/dark-wallet-now-with-cash

“…when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it.”

24.09.2021 — NFT, art, ethereum, on-chain, off-chain, storage — 6 min read

First is the physical artwork. This can be digitized and hosted somewhere online. That digital version is minted as an NFT. The NFT is really a certificate of authenticity and provenance and a deed to the digital work as well as the physical original.

Without looking into it, I thought that entire files -anything from 4×4 pixel blocks, 16G videos, 9mb gifs- would be encrypted and stored in a standardized format on the blockchain, with parts of files seeded between Ethereum maintainers much like bittorrent files; In the same way Instagram allows people to upload masses of images, and how Netfix never goes down and seems to host hours of video… “What a large set of virtualized storage containers they’d need to keep this ever-updating, ever-increasing series of artwork, tokens and transactions in the blockchain”, I thought. And, what a large electrical bill it would cause open-source users to maintain such an infrastructure!

I was partially correct in assuming the storage of NFTs was on a network such as BitTorrent. That’s one of the ways digital artifacts can be stored. But, I was totally wrong about how NFTs reference an artwork that it claims to represent.

On existing NFT marketplace platforms, such as Bitbrowze.com, there are what’s known as “on-chain” and “off-chain” ways that NFTs reference their relationship to a work of art. These different mechanisms dictate the persistence, permanence, and longevity of an artwork associated with an NFT version of it.

How can an artist guarantee that an artwork will be accessible 5, 10, or 100 years into the future? What are the risks of holding an artwork for a lifetime? Can one reassure art collectors that they’ll be able to pass NFTs on to their loved ones who will inherit the artwork rather than some worthless token pointing to a broken URL?

Rohan Pinto

jboogle, “The broken promises of NFT Art”, 2020. Ibid.

On-chain NFTs

In the on-chain method, information about an artwork (metadata) is embedded in the smart contract. The actual artwork is stored on IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), which works like a peer-to-peer network.² Platforms like Rarible use conversion services like Pinata or NFT.Storage to create an IPFS object.⁴ This object contains the information that points to the link of an image, video, or the digital thing of which you wanted to create a NFT. The original file doesn’t exist on the blockchain! ^2 3

“…when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it.”

Anil Dash, “NFTs were not supposed to end like this”, The Atlantic. April 2 2021. ²

IPFS is fine to use if you decide to run your personal IPFS node to maintain your artwork. . Naturall, you’ll foot the cost of the hardware (much like running your own server) and need a constant connection to the internet to maintain availability of your digital file. Alternatively, you must keep pinning the content or pay for the service that keeps pinning it––Services like FileCoin and infinFT bring both decentralized protocols and storage of digital artifacts for persistence and longevity. By this I mean, making the content available to other nodes for them to copy and distribute it in event that your original personal node goes down or that the software on the node tries to clean up any unused data in order to make space for other users ⁴⁹. Just because you make the artwork readily available doesn’t mean its data is stored and persisted longterm.

Therefore, you have three things to pay for in the process of rolling out your own on-chain NFT:

1. the creation of IPFS object with metadata about the artwork – This approach offers the metadata of the NFT token that will POINT to your artwork ⁴
2. the IPFS pinning services (FileCoin and infinFT )– This ensures that the presence of the object pointing to the artwork is available on a regular basis
3. the decentralized storage solution – where your artwork actually resides (hopefully forever).
4. IPFS is my preferred choice for peer-to-peer, decentralized storage due to ⁵:

• the ability to identify a file by its contents, (content-addressing)
• the capacity to verify that the artwork data that someone requested is the exact data sought by the user
• the immutability of the artwork’s content

What about the Off-Chain Method?

In the off-chain method, the artwork is likely stored on a centralized server like AWS. In fact, with this method, all the popular options that come to mind might be more stable and performant. (Good luck! JK)

Disadvantage?

Does it matter? Yes it does, says collector diehards.^6 7 If the artist is able to swap out the file, it undermines the certainty of what the buyer had paid for! In a bid to show how competitors in the NFT-creation market are selling brittle services, Showcase called out OpenSea, Matic and Editorial for using centralized storage instead of their own means of storage.

Advantage

Anyhow, some of the advantages of “off-chain” measures include using software oracles to allow for the introduction of outside factors (such as news headlines, weather information, performance of the stock market) to the if/else mechanisms of smart contracts. The way smart contracts are talked about at the time of introduction implies that transactions only occur in the vacuum of a decentralized application’s logic. The off-chain method offers an advantage of preventing external factors like stock market crashes and natural disasters (barring the coincidental destruction of storage, internet service, the dapp servers, the murder of the development leadership…) from compromising the security and operation of the blockchain. However, it also makes projects harder to connect with those outside factors. An Oracle software tool is a device that can be associated with determinant events such as the example of a soccer player who scores a hattric. A dynamic NFT would connect to an on-chain process and accommodate this event.

Chainlink’s example of how to integrate oracles creating dynamic blockchain NFTs using Chainlink oracles.

For another example, if you wanted a NFT to become resaleable only if a certain stock performs well, you could use an oracle to connect the blockchain with stockmarket information every few days. This invariably introduces security issues but allows developers to create smart contracts that connect to real world events.

Addressing the generative art perspective, an artistically sympathetic developer, Ricardo Stuven argued that, “When it comes to on-chain artwork NFTs, the token doesn’t just refer to a piece. The token itself is the piece.”⁸ It does not matter that the work is pointed at or is stored elsewhere, moreso that the generative and procedural potential of an artist can be formally leveraged by the functions within the smart contract to create entirely mutative, unique digital works that are according to him, making him more worthy of being collected. Other engineers beg to differ, identifying logic gaps in the way the Hashmasks project actually performed, not due to their full diligence in binding individual tokens to crytographic hashes but in generating a single combined record of provenance. Adam Eisenmann then called on the community to arrive at consensus over the best way to connect an artwork with its NFT.⁹

This all sounds like nerd in-fighting but the claims of Dash, Khanan, Showcase and other technologists’ are technically true in regards to off-chain mints.

Summary:

The artwork is not stored on the blockchain, and blockchain is not an optimal choice of tech for storage. ⁶

The current art market is hedging on NFTs to revolutionize the sales of art. And right now, it’s working because a sizeable population have agreed to participate given the way this system works. It’s extremely unregulated yet. I don’t intend to discourage anyone from using these platforms; just sharing what I’ve discovered so that you can make an informed decision 🙂

Footnotes

¹ Rohan Pinto. “On-chain versus Off-chain: The Perpetual Blockhain Governance Debate”, Sept 6, 2019.

² In his now archived Atlantic article, Dash took issue with the way NFTs today establish its relationship with digital artwork. He was an early proponent of such a transparent system for establishing provenance of digital art. In 2014, he and artist Kevin McCoy created a proof-of-concept that was similar to the on-chain method today, but cautioned that technology had not advanced enough yet to store works larger than 4mb on the blockchain. They called it a Monegraph. See: “Seven on Seven 2014: Kevin McCoy & Anil Dash”.

³ “Recently, an NFT-skeptical programmer named Jonty Wareing wrote an in-depth thread on Twitter delving into where the media referenced by NFTs actually lives. He discovered that typically, the token will point off-chain to either an HTTP URL metadata file or an IPFS hash.”

Dan Kahan. “Do You Really* Own Your NFT? Chances Are, You Don’t” The Defiant, Mar 31, 2021

⁴ IPFS. “What is IPFS?” Jun 22, 2021. IPFS. “Persistence, Permanence, and Pinning”, Jul. 28, 2021.

⁵ IPFS. “How IPFS Deals With Files – IPFS Camp Workshop”, Sep 17, 2019

⁶ “On-chain metadata makes an NFT more valuable, in part because the metadata is incorporated into the token, allowing the NFT to last forever (or as long as Ethereum exists), and in part because on-chain tokens have to meet certain Ethereum standards, giving them a liquidity premium and making trading easier. When determining whether the NFT is on-chain or off-chain, the key question is where the NFT is hosted.”

Haug and Partners. “Valuation of NFTs: Factors to Consider and an Alternative to Destroying the Original Work” July 28, 2021.

⁷ An assortment of technical discussions on StackExchange about off-chain NFTs: StackExchange. “On-chain vs. Off-chain NFT Art Platforms” Ethereum.

StackExchange. “If crypto art is stored off-chain, how does the collector have any control over their NFT’s contents if the server where it is saved shuts down?” Ethereum.

StackExchange. “Can we mint 5 gigabyte video NFTs?” Ethereum.

⁸ Ricardo Stuven. “On-Chain Artwork NFTs” Treum, Medium. Jan 29 2021

⁹ Adam Eisenman. “Ethereum NFT token-to-asset mappings are off-chain and nobody cares” CoinMonks. Medium. Feb 21, 2021

xDALE is a Smart Contract Real Estate Marketing Organization. It can be seen as the “Un-Broker”.

The Real Estate Services industry is rife with red tape and other inefficiencies. It is an environment based on paranoia. The proprietors are paranoid about wire transfer fraud, excessive fees. The lawyers are resentful of the high compensation paid to brokers and the brokers resent the fastidious lawyers who kill more deals than bad credit. Furthermore, the listing agents resent having to co-broke a listing and often withhold access to potential customers. This does a disservice to the Landlord. There is a lot of leg work involved which requires pre-qualification of the customer. Finally, the customer often hides the truth of his personal background for fear of application denial. In many cases he must pay creative deposit fees, move-in fees, and application fees.

All these elements come after the rigorous search for available listing and many proprietors want to do it themselves and do not subscribe to a MLS. Therefore, a confusing multitude of alternative websites now pop-up to host listings. The solution to these inefficiencies are self-managing smart contracts. The following are some XDALE-Benefits to the players in a real estate transaction.

SALESPERSONS

• A decentralized peer to peer network
• Less paperwork
• Faster closings
• Conflicts are eliminated between staff and proprietors
• Expanded territory beyond local market
• No need to sell, simply supervise property tours
• Option to be paid a flat salary a draw against future earnings
• Listing exclusives are guaranteed via publicized NFT images
• Agent has personal ecommerce web page
• Compensation is transparently delivered via deFi wallet

BROKERS

• Eliminated expense of Errors and Omissions Insurance
• Low commission payout; higher profit margin per transaction
• Lowered transaction expenses due to deFi
• ERC20 token allows for rewards program to customers

LANDLORDS

• Flat-fee option
• Crowd-funding in some jurisdictions
• Property tokenized to Title Search Database
• International investment potential
• Wire fraud vulnerability eliminated

CUSTOMERS

• Smart contract arbitrator supervises your rights versus the Proprietor
• Bureaucracy elimination lends speed and savings
• Your sensitive data is kept offline in cold storage then erased as scheduled

If you wanted to rent your apartment to someone, you’d need to pay a middleman such as Craigslist or a newspaper to advertise, and then again you’d need to pay someone to confirm that the person paid rent and followed through.

A decentralized solution can help cut your costs. All you do is pay via cryptocurrency and encode your contract on a smart contract. Everyone sees, and you accomplish automatic fulfillment. Brokers, real estate agents, hard money lenders, and anyone associated with the property game can profit.

Smart contracts are revolutionary in terms of transforming the current real estate practices.

Smart contracts are replacing traditional contracts as the sole agreement between the seller and buyer. It automatically executes the requirements as soon as specific conditions of the contract are met.

Smart contracts guarantee trust through a single version of the truth by establishing trust. All the parties including the bank, the agent, and the mortgage lender can sign an agreement via smart contracts. Because transactions are kept on a blockchain, this shared ledger enables the parties involved to look over the process at any moment and from anywhere.

A smart contract is a self-executing digital agreement that enables two or more parties to exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the need for a third party.

Smart Contracts are Awesome! |

Autonomy |

Trust |

Backup |

Safety |

Speed |

Savings |

Accuracy |

But, Smart Contracts Are Not Perfect