03 Feb 2021

Don’t Trust Me. Verify.

Plus a walkback in Sovryn history to the Author’s first article - and what has happened since!

Special Note: Sovryn core contributor, Ororo, authored the following post in August of 2020. This is their second article and so much has happened since the first (A Sovereign Bitcoiner’s Manifesto), we thought it important to share with the community just how much the Sovryn OGs and early contributors have accomplished. It’s a phenomenal amount of work which was largely driven by a collective inspiration derived from the Sovryn mission - to expand on Satoshi’s vision of monetary sovereignty to create a financial operating system that offers full financial sovereignty to all. Enjoy the article Ororo has so eloquently written, and at the end we’ll wow you with a simple list of achievements made in just a few short months, during a pandemic and worldwide economic crisis.

Don’t Trust Me. Verify.

When I used to be more active in the forums, I received some comments that the way I communicate is a little too risqué for someone who is building a financial product. How can people trust their money to a system that is developed by (among other people) a chick with _gasp_ unpopular opinions? This problem solved itself when I became too busy with Sovryn development to voice any further opinions.

However, a recent incident made me want to say one thing about trusting me: Don’t.

Don’t trust me. Don’t trust helpful community members. Don’t trust the Sovryn protocol. The wonderful thing about Sovryn is that you don’t need to trust anyone else. The terrible thing is that you can’t trust anyone else.

Listen, if you are deciding on which platform to entrust your funds to based on the quality of their corp-speak, their marketing, their regulatory licensing, or the quality of their investors, then - to quote Satoshi - “You don’t get it and I don’t have time to try and convince you, sorry.”

Literally the whole point of all of this - Bitcoin, Sovryn, smart contracts, everything - is that you shouldn’t have to trust anyone. If you put your funds in a centralised service, then yeah, you have no choice but to trust them. With Sovryn, your coins are always controlled by your keys. I could be the most irresponsible or deplorable person in the world and it wouldn’t matter one bit.

What does matter? The code matters. If we, the Sovryn devs, have made a mistake, then all the funds can be lost. They can be hacked. There could be a bug. And you could lose everything.

The community working on Sovryn is very open and transparent. You can go to our Discord and see that most of the conversations there are happening around development - because they are public. However, not everything is public. You don’t know what isn’t public. You can’t be sure that you are being told everything. You can’t blindly trust what I or someone else tells you about the way the system works, the token allocations, the governance system. You don’t even know my real name. How can you trust me? You can’t. You shouldn’t. Please don’t.

As a community of developers we are keenly aware of this problem of trust. We feel a great sense of responsibility (or at least we say we do) towards earning your confidence.

The good news is you don’t even have to trust - you can verify. All the code is open source. You and everyone else in the world can check for yourselves. We encourage you to, in fact we beg you to. We, the Sovryn community, will happily pay you to!

Sovryn is built on code that has been tested with millions of dollars in assets on the Ethereum Network. It has gone through multiple code audits, and there is an ongoing bug bounty that rewards clever hackers for finding ways that it might break.

Sovryn’s priorities are always user privacy, security and control. The community of Sovryn devs are extremely dedicated to upholding those priorities. However, they are only human. Mistakes can be made. There is always risk. As a Sovryn user, it is your responsibility to understand those risks. It is your responsibility to DYOR. You are Sovryn at your own risk. No regulations, no safety nets, no authorities protecting you. Isn’t that awesome?

Note: In the time between when this article was written and when the author’s first article was published in August of 2020, so much has happened, thanks to dedicated developers like Ororo and a rapidly expanding community of contributors from all over the planet.

What has been achieved since that last time I wrote in August of 2020? Here’s the short list:

Sovryn contributor achievements between August 2020 to February 2021:

We’ll all look forward to another amazing recap in the coming months. A huge Thank You goes out to all the OGs, developers, contributors and community members making Sovryn a vibrant and fast-evolving DeFi system for Bitcoin.

Stay Sovryn!

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