Civ Kit aims to become a full-fledged marketplace while maintaining the censorship-resistant and permissionless nature of open-source technology.
Bitcoin enthusiasts have presented 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. THE paper was authored 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 transactions, decentralized identity, moderation, P2P messaging protocol and ‘know your peer (KYP) oracles for arbitrage,’ a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine said. The system aims to support all types of commerce, including goods and services.
“Researchers will gradually release code and modules, relying heavily on the Lightning Dev Kit and Nostr libraries,” the press release explains. “The development of Civ Kit will be tied to the same open source and transparency standards as Bitcoin Core and libsecp256k1.”
The design of the Civ kit will emphasize trust and reputation in the marketplace, and the press release outlines how borrowing and lending can be added using a universal credit score for all merchants calculated by a combination of successful transactions (Web-of-Stakes) and Web-of-Trust Techniques which act as a “trustless source of truth”. The Civ kit has been “reviewed by some of the best minds in the Lightning and Discreet Log Contract engineering communities,” the press release states.
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 this initiative serves as a single piece of the puzzle to boost Bitcoin’s circular economy, which, if we’re 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 provide the world with the ability to build unstoppable free markets. .
“The title of the Bitcoin white paper spoke of a ‘peer-to-peer electronic payment system’ – yet the P2P industry is under attack from international powers that feed on centralized fiat currencies and the control they wield” , said Youssef. “At the same time, billions of people have been relegated to non-existence by this broken system. Bitcoin is the solution and we are not backing down.
The team behind the white paper is working to integrate the research into Noones, a new company dedicated to financial freedom in the Global South. The Civ Kit is open for collaboration and publicly available on GitHub.