How Bastyon Works
We got to interview Bastyon's Lead Dev Daniel Satchkov.
Peace Protocol
Perspective
Tension between the US and Russia has been going on for many decades, but what is new is the ability of people to interact, and hear each others perspectives in an unrestricted way. Bastyon may be the first legitimate chance we have at world peace.
Telegram
As Telegram comes under corrupt oppressive censorship, many Russians will be turning to Bastyon. Nicknamed the “Russian Nostr”, it has a proven history of penetrating Chinese and Russian firewalls and is now trending in popularity. This could potentially be a lucrative cryptocurrency investment and is excellent for adversarial anonymous political speech.
Daniel Satchkov
Simplified Privacy had an oppertunity to sit down with Daniel Satchkov the lead developer and creator of Bastyon. Rather than use a traditional Q&A format, instead we will summarize and simply the technical information we learned from him about the protocol.
Legal disclaimer:
We did not violate any sanctions by talking with Daniel, and the cryptocurrency is sold by western exchanges. We do not sell the cryptocurrency, and therefore no laws were broken.
Off-chain data
Posts are transactions
Every post is a transaction on the blockchain and costs a tiny bit of Pkoin, Bastyon’s native cryptocurrency. Pkoin is Proof of Stake, and the nodes serve the social media content.
Off-Chain Storage
The text and videos of posts is kept OFF-CHAIN, but the blockchain transactions keep track and coordinate which users posted and that they paid the nodes to do so.
Nodes Store ALL data
The biggest difference between Nostr and Bastyon, is that on Bastyon, ALL nodes store ALL post data. This turns which node a Bastyon user connects to into a commodity, since they are all the same. Which is critical for accessing information across a firewall, since if only a single node is on your side of it, then it can serve as a lifeline to the whole network.
Domains optional
Bastyon does NOT require nodes to use government domains or the traditional DNS system.
Future Scaling
In the future to scale, the dev plans to group many social transactions together. For example a bunch of likes from one user into one transaction. The total text of posts is currently around 60G, but in the future the dev plans to have pruned nodes with only the most recent social posts and transactions. This system would radically save overhead on the blockchain. And then there will be larger nodes for search purposes.
BitTorrent Pictures & Video
The videos and pictures are delivered differently using BitTorrent, coordinated and rewarded by the same blockchain. This can be thought of similar to Peertube but rewarded by the blockchain so users don’t have to federate with a whole CDN network like Peertube requires.
Right now, it’s a mix of nodes and torrents. But it is on path to be fully using BitTorrents in the future.
Faucet comes from Devs (Not Protocol)
When new users first create a Bastyon keypair, they are automatically given a small amount of Pkoin to be able to make their initial posts. However, this might mistakenly make a Pkoin investor very concerned about degrading the value of their coins with new unlimited supply. But the Bastyon dev explained to us that these new coins come from a faucet of the developer’s supply and NOT from the protocol itself. In other words, the devs are willing to give away from their wallets, to encourage new users and adoption.
Rewards
Nodes
The protocol rewards the nodes for delivering social content and validating transactions, and these rewards are based on how much they stake.
Content Creators
Additionally content creators are rewarded for having popular posts to encourage quality and participation.
None for Devs
Keep in mind the developers of Bastyon do NOT get a cut from the protocol’s outgoing supply. There’s no “dev tax”
Supply
More than half is already released, with a total supply of 24 million 375 thousand. At the time of this writing, Pkoin has a market cap of over 8 million USD.
No Foundation
Bastyon has no official foundation or development funds. Daniel Satchkov said “everyone chips in”, referring to both devs and support staff.
No Centralized DNS
Bastyon.com
The Bastyon.com website could be a client for some users with a browser extension. However, the protocol is NOT dependent on their centralized domain name. Censorship is a big risk, and so the developers encourage people to use the real desktop client and not the website.
Bootstrap
The desktop and android clients bootstrap similar to Bitcoin, where it has some nodes added to begin with, and then these nodes communicate other nodes for a list. Routing traffic through Tor is another option.
Conclusion
War
In conclusion, perpetual war requires distrust of entire societies. Bastyon breaks down the barriers for Russians and US citizens to speak to each other, which makes foreigners feel more human. This diminishes the ability of politicians to demonize a distant foreigner, when normally restrictions and censorship on the internet prevent it from happening.
It’s more critical now then ever to have free speech “bastyons”. We’d like to thank Daniel Satchkov for answering our questions.
We’re on Bastyon:
Feel free to reach out to us on the protocol itself:
https://Bastyon.com/SimplifiedPrivacy
If you really want to learn and take your privacy to the next level, subscribe to our new content via: Nostr, Bastyon, Session, RSS, Ethereum Push
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