CHIP 2022-10 BCMR: Bitcoin Cash Metadata Registries

CHIPs Informational
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#1

Hi all, I just published a draft proposal for a new application-layer standard:

Bitcoin Cash Metadata Registries (BCMRs) share metadata between Bitcoin Cash wallets, allowing user-recognizable names, descriptions, icons, ticker symbols, etc. to be associated with on-chain artifacts like identities, tokens, and contract systems.

Registries can be found via DNS and updated using on-chain transactions, offering strong censorship resistance and the same security available to funds and tokens: multisignature wallets, offline signers, time-delayed vaults, bounties/honeypots, and more.

On-chain identities are represented by chains of transactions, so their history and broadcasts can be verified by light clients with tiny proofs (a few KBs). Think software update hashes, warrant canaries, tamper-evident logs, reusable payment addresses, .onion addresses, etc.

The full specification is available on GitHub:

A livestreamed tech talk + Q&A on Bitcoin Cash Metadata Registries will take place on November 1, 2022 at 13 UTC:

Feedback and reviews are appreciated, either in the GitHub issue tracker or below. Thanks!

7 Likes
Higher-level token standards using CashTokens
#2

Great discussion today. Appreciate you organizing that. Very ambitious goals. The one open question I still have is about making sure to identify any tradeoffs you had to take, or potential weaknesses you can imagine, for example off in the future when it is highly adopted.

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#3

Also mentioning it here, that a version 2 of the BCMR standard is in the works. Copying from the open PR, the v2 will be the standard on mainchain, v1 was only for experimentation on chipnet.

Ah, I didn’t respond to the question on supporting the v1 schema – yeah, I think v1 should definitely be dropped completely. In a sense, it only ever supported chipnet since the format can’t even indicate what chain it’s talking about.

We can worry a bit more about backwards compatibility after this major version. I’m hopeful we’ve found a lot of the issues for now though, and future changes will generally just add new, optional fields. (And/or use extensions rather than changing the standard!)

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#4

The bcmr v2 open PR has now been merged and the v2 version now marked as draft with a recent change: “Simplified publication output encoding” which incorporated feedback on the IPFS encoding.

The version 2 BCMR standard is already implemented in Cashonize, the webwallet and partly implemented in the Electron Cash pc wallet. Both wallets allow for linking a bcmr in the genesis transaction when creating new CashTokens.

Multiple token projects have already launched on mainnet using the bcmr v2 standard. Currently there is not yet an easy applications which can manage authhead utxos to update tokenmetadata.

There is also now a serious, high-quality metadata registry for CashTokens metadata with the launch of OpenTokenRegistry by @bitjson.

3 Likes
#5

And another important piece of infra supporting the BCMR standard is the blockexplorer by salemkode (explorer.salemkode.com) which has full BCMR support and now also resolves autchains for on-chainmetadata update!

For example this is the tokenId of bitcats nft collection on the blockexplorer.

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