Civ Kit aims to become a fully-fledged marketplace while retaining the censorship-resistant and permissionless nature of open source technology.
Bitcoin enthusiasts have unveiled a new academic white paper detailing the Civ Kit, which aims to establish a censorship-resistant and permissionless peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic marketplace system. He paper was written by Antoine Riard, Nicholas Gregory, and Ray Youssef, who shared the document with the Bitcoin developer community for feedback. The Civ Kit combines the Nostr architecture with the Lightning Network, prioritizing “privacy and security through escrow exchanges, decentralized identity, moderation, a P2P messaging protocol, and knowledge peer (KYP) oracles for adjudication,” a Press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine stated. The system aims to support all types of commerce, including goods and services.
“Researchers will gradually release code and modules, drawing heavily on the Lightning Dev Kit and Nostr libraries,” the press release explains. “Civ Kit development will adhere to the same open source and transparency standards as Bitcoin Core and libsecp256k1.”
The Civ Kit’s design will emphasize trust and reputation within the marketplace, and the press release outlined how lending and lending can be added by using a universal credit score for all traders calculated by a mix of successful exchanges ( Web-of-Stakes) and Web-of-Trust Techniques that act as an “untrusted source of truth”. The Civ Kit has been “peer reviewed by some of the best minds in the Lightning and Discreet Log Contract engineering communities,” the press release says.
Nicholas Gregory, one of the authors of The Civ Kit, has been involved in Bitcoin infrastructure development since 2016 and hopes the initiative will boost Bitcoin’s circular economy. He said: “I really hope that this initiative will serve as a unique piece of the puzzle in boosting the circular economy of Bitcoin, which, if we’re being honest, hasn’t reached its full potential in 2023.”
Ray Youssef, founder of Paxful and the Built With Bitcoin Foundation, another of the paper’s authors, said he is committed to continuing the work of Satoshi Nakamoto to give the world the ability to build unstoppable free markets.
“The title of the Bitcoin white paper spoke of ‘a peer-to-peer electronic cash system’, yet the P2P industry is under attack by international powers that feed off centralized fiat currencies and the control they exercise,” Youssef said. “At the same time, billions of people have been consigned to non-existence by this failed system. Bitcoin is the solution and we are not going back.”
The team behind the white paper is working to integrate the research into Noones, a start-up dedicated to financial freedom in the Global South. The Civ Kit is open to collaboration and to the public. available on GitHub.
