thanks. As you know, some cryptocurrencies use the proof of work consensus (Bitcoin), other, the proof of stake (Ethereum in the future). In this context it would be possible to design a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Ethereum using the Raft consensus. Sorry, if this question does not make sense or sound absurd. I am learning about these issues yet.
rps17
rps17
montanonic
Out of curiosity (I don’t really know how these things are supposed to work), did y’all start out with the goal of Open-Sourcing? Where did that fit in to the overall business strategy (if you are able to elaborate). Thanks! 
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uranther
@rps17 Good find! I wasn’t aware that plain ol’ Raft was not enough for a blockchain consensus. Yes, there is the Tangaroa flavor of it which juno implements.
Hyperledger Fabric implements Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and Sieve which is an augmentation of PBFT, supporting output consensus. Sieve has been created by IBM Research and we are currently waiting on a research paper from them. That FAQ also mentions Eve whose supposed successor I’ve found, Adam.
Bitcoin uses their proof-of-work for consensus (PoW) which is definitely not performant at scale. This paper from IBM Research compares PoW and BFT replication with respect to their scalability. It looks like a great place to start to get our bearings.
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mark-lester
Hola, I have arrived on a learning mission on functional programming, but I am, as the tech half of our project, now needing to reach out some more.
I have built a smart contract system.
There are some nuances, but none of them are of the form of a universal timestamp arbitrated by a proof of work mechanism funded by a cryptocurrency which is validated by a universal timestamp …
Basically, with SSL, digital sigs & Merkle trees, you can easily build a system that as long as everyone corroborates everything with everyone else, and at least one of them hasnt been hacked, is provably immutable.
So it wont scale wrt number of parties on a contract, but how many parties to a contract, who all need undeniable proof, do you want ?.
I have a crude rules engine which is barely more than a proof of concept place holder right now. I was/am considering allowing javascript run in a VM to add functionality, but I should perhaps do some learning about functional programming before doing anything yet.
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rps17
Thanks for sharing! Yes, I’ll read the mentioned papers and give feedback. It also seems that an alternative to proof of work is the proof of stake. In reality, there are lot of alternatives and sincerely it’s interesting to see which one is more useful to create a cryptocurrency.
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rps17
uranther
riverrun
A couple of questions:
- Do you have any repository set up yet?
- Do you think it can all be done in Elixir / Erlang - any need for performant C code?
I would be glad to help where I can.
2
uranther
Do you have any repository set up yet?
exchain/exchain on GitHub
I just created a new supervised mix project and put a tentative roadmap for the project.
Do you think it can all be done in Elixir / Erlang - any need for performant C code?
I think we can start implementing it in Elixir as non-fancy data structures until we need to start scaling it and optimizing bottlenecks. The “chaincode” or smart contracts portion should be done in Rust (or Futhark?) because that component must crunch numbers. It would be convenient to use the smart contracts virtual machine of Ethcore Parity, the latest Rust implementation of Ethereum, and likewise pluggable for that of Hyperledger Fabric or Sawtooth.
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