This is something I’d love to get into as I want to learn more about crytography in general as well as use more Elixir. I’m taking the Cryptography 1 course on Coursera https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto as a primer.
terakilobyte
montanonic
I too am very much interested in working on things in this area. I have a project I’m primarily committed to for the next couple months, but I have all of the books listed in the reading list above, and am slowly working through them + studying cryptography + learning Rust + reading Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP on the side.
I really hope that within the next month to three months I can start collaborating with others on things in this area. This seems like an amazing opportunity to learn a ton.
I’m especially curious to see what waves something like the EVM could make in this territory. To me it’d seem that it’s particularly well suited to many aspects of this problem domain; but I’m also still very ignorant about how a lot of this stuff actually works, so my instinct may be wrong on that. I’ll find out soon enough 
2
uranther
How exciting! I want to get started this week or next on building out the basic data structure with Merkle trees. I don’t think this will take too long, but I have been distracted with other things 
Yes, the cryptography aspect of blockchain is what makes it so compelling for financial tech (FinTech) and other enterprises wishing to keep their data secure and auditable. Apache Kafka can serve a similar function but its log data are not hardened with Merkle trees, there is no access control, and no encryption in motion.
I noticed there is already a project called ex_chain for Markov chains. To avoid confusion, should we change the name? Any suggestions?
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rps17
uranther
terakilobyte
Why go with the obvious? How about Mixture? No hard rules saying it needs to have a reference to block or chain, right?
3
uranther
I definitely agree! I was trying to think of some pun about Elixir-things and blocks and chains - but nothing yet.
Why Mixture? (It doesn’t seem to be taken by another Elixir project yet.)
One thing about project names is that it’s convenient if it’s a unique word or phrase. For example, searching for “go” is troublesome whereas “golang” will actually return results about the programming language.
2
terakilobyte
Oh no special reason in particular! Mixture is a play on Elixir, seemed like a fitting name especially since the blockchain adds upon itself, each hash a new ingredient. Could definitely be considered a mixture.
1
rps17
Qqwy
TypeCheck Core Team
This is why the name ‘Mixture’ might be a bad idea, as we already have the ‘Mix’ build tool, which might confuse some people.
That being said, I do like original names 
(and bonus points for a play on words).
Another thought: What would be really cool, is if the project is written in a way that is general/modularized enough to let you swap out in what way a consensus is reached.
2