Scalable computing in LNP/BP:

Prometheus protocol

or how to do the most of stuff with Bitcoin better than with Ethereum

Maxim Orlovsky, PhD, MD

Chief engineering officer (CEO) @ Pandora Core AG, Swiss
Bitcoin: digital programmable hard money, build of layers:

• Bitcoin Blockchain: store of value

• Lightning Network: means of payment

This together renders Bitcoin as unit of accounting

Ethereum: collectable mistakes

• No proper separation of concerns, abstractions and layering:

mixing everything together in the same layer, getting the worst
of all worlds. Leads to unscalability

• No programmable money to program with smart contracts

• Turing-complete smart contracts without formal verification

system but with JavaScript-like language to help hackers break
everything

• Non-existing mystical tech which one day will fix everything –

and it’s arbitrary combinations:

Casper(s) PoS, Sharding, Shasper, Plasma, Serenity, Ethereum 2.0
 Ethereum magical creatures

Governance: let’s make government eternal

Layer 3 dApps that DeFi Hackable “Unstoppable” world

(apps) nobody uses speculations DAOs single-threaded computer

Layer 2 Mystical non- Raiden: copy & paste ERC20

(scalability
promises)
existing Plasma Lightning Network Bitcoin

Layer 1 Accounts Turing complete Sharding PoS Whisper Swarm

(blockchain)
Why?

• “we can’t program bitcoin due to it’s limited functionality, so

we have to invent”

Is this true?
LNP/BP allows to do everything that can
(imaginably) be done with Ethereum 2.0
but in a more scalable and secure way
There is more to Bitcoin than just a money

• Bitcoin blockchain: Economically-secured trustless timestamping

• LN onion routing: Economically-incentivised private messaging

This allows to talk about Bitcoin Protocol & Lightning Network

Protocols (LNP/BP, as TCP/IP) as of technological ecosystem
enabling new level of smart contracts
What we can leverage LNP/BP IS "ETHEREUM 2.0 MADE RIGHT"

• UTXO state to prevent double-spending or

double-action
• Single-use seals & client-
side validation: rich state
• Timestamping outside of blockchain, like

"sharding-made-right"
• CTLV/CSV transaction outputs

• HTLCs (hash-timelocked contracts) • Pre-staking, like "PoS made

right" (not for blockchain)
• SIGHASH_NOINPUT
• Onion routing in LN • Escrowed contract chains,
like "smart-contracts made
• TLV extensions in LN gossip protocol and P2P right" (no Turing
messages
completeness)
• Probabilistic checkable proofs
Together these unlocks way to decentralize

• Financial digital assets

• Decentralized exchange (DEX) of assets & tokenized goods

• Storage & messaging with economic guarantees

• Computing, including high-load computing (like machine learning

tasks)
Together these unlocks way to decentralize

• Financial digital assets — RGB

• Decentralized exchange (DEX) of assets & tokenized goods — Spectrum

• Storage & messaging with economic guarantees — Storm

• Computing, including high-load computing (like machine learning

tasks) — Prometheus
 Privacy
Financial
State
sovereignty Tor channels

Bitcoin Client-side Onion

validation routing
Financial
assets Zero-Knowledge

Data
sovereignty

Storm GDPR
Biomedical &

Computational
NCI research
sovereignty

Prometheus Ultimate sovereignty:

DIGITAL IMMORTALITY
How to make Digital Immortality true?
• Spend tens of years building sovereignty layers one by one –
develop L2/L3 technology stack and extend LNP/BP ecosystem

• Make machine learning uncensorable and distributed, scalable and

cheap; use it to innovate up until building generic AI

• Invest into biomedical and NCI research merging neural tissue with
computing

• Do not do an ICO :) – take only those money which are willing to

extreme levels of risk

This is what we call a chain of Pandora Boxes

PROMETHEUS
SCALABLE TRUSTLESS COMPUTING LAYER
Non-magical components
• Game theory settlement model

• Zero-knowledge: probabilistic checkable proofs

• LNP/BP primitives for building:

• complex escrowed contracts (HTLCs)
• multi-party payment channels with PSBT
• reach off-chain state with client-side validation
Non-magical components
• 2.5 years, ~$2m of private and self-funded research; no ICO

• 11 PhDs and 7 Universities worldwide was involved in the

research

• Proven Nash equilibrium

• Well-defined formalism allowed formal verification

•2 historical versions of algorithm

• The recent version described in two scientific papers

1. Base algorithm
The protocol:

• Alice orders computing from Bob. Alice decides that

Carroll will partially-verify (with PCP) results of
computing.

• There is a set of people timelocked their money on-

chain with a special transaction: arbiters

• Alice puts her payment for computing, the other

participants puts their stakes into a specially-
constructed funding transactions
Participants

• Client, ordering computing — Alice

• Worker, doing actual computation — Bob

• Verifier, verifying the computing — Carroll

• Arbiters, whom the Worker can appeal against the

Verifier’s negative decision
2. Zero knowledge proofs
Probabilistic checkable proofs

• Computer science concept known for decades

• One of zero-knowledge technologies

• Can be combined with escrowed contracts for proving the fact of

fulfillment some complex logic much outside of Bitcoin script
compatibilities

• I.e. it is a scalability technology

Probabilistically checkable proofs

Random selection of data pieces for probabilistic proofs

Source data

Merklezation
3. Game theory model
Computation integrity
Game-theory based model for a system
of economic incentives based on
stakes & rewards
4. Putting it all into Tx
The takeaway

• There is nothing that you can do on Ethereum that you can’t

do with LNP/BP in a more secure and scalable way

•A lot of new cool tech is coming: single-use seals, RGB,

Spectrum, Storm, Prometheus...

• Still a lot to do (better sidechains, multiparty payment

channels, bitcoin blockchain enhancements)

•A new cooperation of bitcoin maximalists, cypherpunks &

businesses appears that drives transhumanistic ideas
forward, not just a better money concept
To find out more
• OpenSeals, RGB & Spectrum: https://github.com/rgb-org/spec

• Storm: https://github.com/storm-org/storm-spec

• Prometheus: https://github.com/pandoracore/prometheus-spec

My company, Pandora Core AG, works on implementation of these

technologies, aiming to bring scalability and trustlessness into
distributed storage and computing

Other participants of the protocols development include:


Giacomo Zucco, Peter Todd, Bitfinex, inbitcoin, Garuda AI, Chainside,
Poseidon Group, Fulgur Ventures, Hyperdivision and many others

We are welcoming you to join the work on these projects!

Ways to contact us

• https://twitter.com/pandoracoreag
• https://github.com/pandoracore
• @pandoracore on Telegram

• orlovsky@pandoracore.com

Thank you for the attention!