Proof of Burn Challenge

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado so today is august 20th 2021 we keep marching towards alonzo's lunch and we're all sayings are pointing towards the 12th things are looking good things are looking solid and i have a request for everybody for would-be dap developers a challenge problem if you will so every now and then a brain-dead moronic idiot will tweet at me or say something in a live stream and say when burn we should burn tokens the supply of cardano is too high let's burn something the idiocy is so astounding that i think it's about time we actually demonstrate smart contracting capabilities at the same time have something we can share for all people who say that in perpetual so i could do this myself or with the team but we just don't have the time and i think it'd be a fun community exercise but there is a lovely paper that we wrote years ago let me share my screen real quick it's by dionysus zindros agolos chiassus and costas and what costus egalos and dio did is they created an actual formalization of the proof of burn protocol so let's read the abstract together proof of burden has been used as a mechanism to destroy cryptocurrency in a verifiable manner despite its well-known use the mechanism has not been previously formally studied as a primitive in this paper we put forth the first cryptographic definition of what a proof-of-burn protocol is consists of two functions first a function which generates a cryptocurrency address when a user sends money to this address the money is irrevocably destroyed second a verification function which checks that the address is really unspendable we propose the following properties for burn protocols unspendability binding and uncensorability and so forth okay so if you actually look at the paper it was published in 2009 it kind of defines the protocols it's got some algorithms some ideas shows you the construction and so forth so if you're a developer this should not look too alien to you it's not too complex of a protocol and there's some nice theorems to show that these properties hold so you don't really need to care too much about the proofs you can just look at the pseudo code and kind of the idea and the author dionysus is teaching i think over at stanford these days and he may have written a solidity version of this it's probably floating around somewhere in either one of our repos or one of his repos but i would love to see somebody implement this as an application on cardno after the 12th using the police application back-end and stock pluto's code potentially one of you pluto's pioneers can do this nice proof of burn and then for the rest of time when anybody requests the burn ada we can just simply send them this application and say okay you first make a contribution please do burn your own ada so these are cool challenge problems that we as a community can do and i think that they're fun to do they're fun to learn about the protocol if you're interested in becoming a cardinal developer next month that's going to be a big deal for everybody these are the kinds of things that you can do that are both productive high optics and very pedagogical in nature teach you a lot about how our system works so if anybody wants to take up this task i shall be eternally grateful and i'll even throw in something to sweeten the pot at some point this unnamed lobster shall become named and this lobster will eventually develop a personality and will even probably write a graphic novel or something and then of course what do you do with a named crypto lobster that lives on a microphone you create an nft and i will be well more than willing to give the lobster nft should such a thing be created and exist by us to whomever creates the finest and bestest firstest proof of burn application on cardano so we have the lobster challenge i might issue more than one of these nfts or something related but you'll get a lobster-related nft yeah i don't know if i want to give away the the proper lobster nft but you'll get something connected to it we all know the lobster nft is gonna be worth a lot of money one day it's gonna be that's lobster money man so anyway proof of burn protocol write it on plutus get yourself a lobster nft if you can get it done and then we as a community have a nice shareable application that we can send to all people who request that we burn coins you dummies have a wonderful day everybody see you next week