Applying blockchain innovations to Highly transnational Network dependent services
Applying blockchain innovations to Highly transnational Network dependent services
This is a discussion of recent innovative developments in the block-chain related technologies which needs to be understood. This not on crypto-currency or economics but mostly on the blockchain, transactions & storage as well as various opportunities and applications.
Transactions
(a typical database transaction from : http://www.writeopinions.com/database-transaction)
One the issues around blockchain is the slow transaction times. Blockchains used by bitcoin suffers very slow speeds and this is impacting the entire ecosystem surrounding it. The newer blockchain, Etherium is also facing similar trait and this is much more evident with the recent curiosity around crypto-kitties. [1]
STEEM & bitshares blockchains as well as the new EOS blockchains addresses this problem with Graphene.
Graphene
This technology could be a solution for various distributed - highly transnational applications & can act as the engine of public-ledger implementations.
Graphene is an open-source blockchain implementation which theoretically supports 100K transactions per second. This is been proved with STEEM blockchain where the steemit.com social media platform is already performing very large number of transactions similar to the like, post, comment operations on social media applications like facebook.com. The behind Graphene is well established and the CTO for all the 3 block chains which uses Graphene is Dan Larimer & @dan who is blockchain expert.
Exploring graphene to replace traditional databases at the transaction layers could be a possibility that can be explored.
Storage
Another major aspect of distributed applications is storage. This not just a capacity planning and CAPEX problem, but as the technology needs to address the highly mobile user base. Further complications are added by the low internet speeds of developing countries where mobile based payments (eg: mPesa in Keniya, IMPS based systems in India) & related applications are becoming mainstream. These markets are important not only because of the large volumes but also the speed at which innovative trends are adopted but the governments are pushing digital payments, e-governance etc.
The storage layer has two issues at a very high level
- storage
- retrieval
We will skip the storage for the time being and directly jump to retrial as I believe tats where the new blockchain based technologies has an advantage above other systems.
Traditionally the retrieval can be slow due to multiple reasons like disk failures, slow network speed, congestion in the network, denial of service attacks etc. The block chain evolution has contributed in the development of new file systems which can address many of the issues associated with accessing content over a network.
Inter Planetary File System (IPFS)
This is another innovative development which has its roots in the blockchain — especially the bitcoin blockchain technology. The file system provides uniquely addressable HTTP / Web URL like unique identifiers for files. This means, we get a truly distributed, de-duplicated file system which is accessible like a traditional URL. This also means, web servers for content delivery & CDNs can be atleast in theory replaced as well !
Possible applications of these new concepts
Graphene — can be seen as a high speed, fault tolerant, in-memory transactional data store. Though more study is required, this sounds like meeting the ACID requirements for databases & offers faster trasaction times.
This faster transaction times can be used in Telecom HLRs, Financial processors & even facebook like systems where Likes/comments etc happens at a very fast pace. As a proof of concept the social media portal Steemit.com uses Graphene as the underlying datastore.
IPFS — IPFS can be used as the data store where all the metadata and the content itself gets stored. This can be considered as disc storage and object/data store in the database. Thogh it doubles as a disk and database the access speeds are very high and the distributed nature makes denial services difficult. So is censorship. Surprisinly this was recently used during the Catalan independence referendum, 2017 to provide free access to content.
In a nutshell, these technolgies can be applied to solve many of the issues around transacton speeds, storage etc in addition to crypto-currency. Finding innovative use cases with maximum impact can provide opportunities for both service providers as well as for enterprises.
Existing use cases and deployments:
There are multiple existing non-crypto-currency deployments out there which can be considered to be out of beta.
- Steemit.com — a unique blend of crypto-currency and social media platform
- Te Catalan Independence Referendum, 2017 use case
- Everipedia.org is planning to migrate their platform to IPFS and Graphene
- Fllowmyvote — uses Graphene for storing the transactions
A much larger set of existing use cases including the crypto-currency scene is pictured below.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, these technologies can be applied to solve many of the issues around transacton speeds, storage etc in addition to crypto-currency. Finding innovative use cases with maximum impact can provide opportunities for both service providers as well as for enterprises.
References:
- Crypto-kitties & Etheritum blockchain congestion
- Graphene documentation : http://docs.bitshares.eu//index.html
- https://followmyvote.com/understanding-the-graphene-blockchain-ecosystem/
- Start your own block chain ! : https://objectcomputing.com/resources/publications/sett/march-2017-graphene-an-open-source-blockchain/
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Great article. Have you checked out https://h.cash and the recent disappointment IOTA? Those 2 will be great topics for articles. resteemed.
On IOTA, I am seeing positive views from many resources... am I missing something?
Somebody spammed the network with Tx. Since it's fee-less and doesn't use a bandwidth model like DPoS coins, The network transformed into another Bitcoin. The attacker had practically zero cost for attacking.
Unlike NEM or WTC they are mostly on the concept/prototype stage. From what I see IOTA can end up anywhere between Tesla and Oracle. Right now I'm thinking of somewhere in the middle. IOTA needs it's node count increased along with Tx or it's just going to be BTC for IOT. I haven't done much research but I don't see any incentive for a person to run a full node.
https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iota.md
I was not aware of this incident. So it seems the MIT news given below was more of a PR stunt or so! I was actually surprised to read the article and then find that its about IOTA (ie I stumbled upon the article after your comment).
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609771/a-cryptocurrency-without-a-blockchain-has-been-built-to-outperform-bitcoin/
The above is the weirdest statement I found.
On a similar note, I saw (bash author's blockchain!) : https://orchidprotocol.com/
This project seems to be the most high profile, well funded project after BAT. ie the founders are real heavy weights.
I am not sure whether you use bash or not, but without
bashI will practically starve to death and I think many of the people I know... so I was surprised to see this one.I had seen that article. IOTA is at the moment just overhyped like VR. I'm sure it has a great future. But that'll be far down the road.
Orchidprotocol is such an amazing project. I really loved the way they expressed their vision, especially regarding China.
Have you checked https://maidsafe.net/ which far more ambitious and even older than Bitcoin. They are trying to build the next internet instead of just VPN like https://orchidprotocol.com/ or Substratum. They might end up becoming even bigger than IOTA if they didn't mess anything up.
I don't have a programming background. So I don't really use bash.
ok. Do you think its PR ?
You saw the list of investors also right ? The bash authoer and anderson-horowitz : I didn't feel like the need to read the whitepaper. Also afraid out of due respect for Richard M Stallman and Brian J Fox (author of bash) ...
madesafe looks a lot like i2p and https://syncthing.net/
Simply put, this is how we interact with a computer. Shell sits between the human and computer - like the GUI. I must have spend may be 1/5th of my last 17 years using bash and I am not a regular user. So imagine and important it for regular users. Also when I say I am not regular, I use it say 50 times a day or more :-)
Orchidprotocol looks really legit. I saw Substratum a month ago and it gave me similar vibes. Substratum grew almost 5 times in a month. Orchidprotocol should eventually have similar or even better results.
There are subtle differences between PR garbage like Electronium and solid projects like https://www.mona.co/
I think Orchidprotocol will do well.
Thanks for teaching me about bash.
I read about IoT(a) / IOTA .. looks to be in a real mess. Their github page has support requests than issue reports. I smell scam!
see this : https://codesuppository.blogspot.in/2017/12/iota-tangled-mess.html?m=1
thanks @vimukthi ... just saw h.cash .. not sure about IOTA as well. Now you have told me about
PIVX, h.cash and now IOTA ... adding them to the reading list.
I must say that I am impressed by Graphene. It looks to be promising enough to replace TimesTen (now bought by Orcale)
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STOPwell done bobinson, once again!
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