Cardstack makes Mining more Meaningful

sunnysideupfang (55)in #blockchain • 6 years ago (edited)

I’ve actually never been a miner, but I know a lot of people either mine themselves or participate in a pool. And I understand mining is what makes blockchain so secure since a lot of hash power is needed to get the reward people seek. And in turn the network is secured since it’d be extremely expensive to get a dominant amount of hash power.

I feel end result of the hash power could be put to better use and you’ve probably considered this too. A lot of computing power is being used to solve complex mathematical problems… why not also let all this computing power resolve something a little more meaningful? And that’s what Cardstack is proposing with its Tally consensus.

Miners Calculate Rewards

If you haven’t had a look at my previous post on what Cardstack is, here’s a quick explanation: In Cardstack’s own words, Cardstack wants to be the experience layer of blockchain.
Haha this probably didn’t explain much so I’ll go deeper.

There are too many apps, dapps, and cloud services out there and people/businesses end up using services with repetitive features. Cardstack allows anyone to simply pick the important functions of any service and then to stack them up with important features from other services. This way, you end up with a stack of cards (hence Cardstack) which has only the most important features, in your perspective, from many different technological services.

Now back to mining!

Cardstack is building an experience layer and it is also proposing a new purpose for miners, a new purpose that adds a little more value to the whole network. Cardstack goes beyond just build stacks of important functions from various services; it is building an ecosystem where any open-source developer can provide a new service for others to use. But to make the concept appealing and rewarding to the developers, miners in Cardstack’s ecosystem use a Tally consensus to calculate which developer deserves to be rewarded more. The rewards are handed out on weighed consideration of which developer’s service is used more.

This takes mining beyond just securing the system as it adds a more scalable value to the entire network and it plays into making the system more attractive to other developers. I think using Tally will probably help Cardstack develop into its just its own ecosystem of applications, probably some day as big as Play Store or App Store. Since developers will be rewarded based on how successful their service is, Cardstack is the utopian model of rewards for open source product developers; it is expected that open source developers will now adopt this system.

Mining has been an essential part of blockchain developments but Cardstack is seeing the bigger picture. Mining can be used for a lot more than just securing the system. Cardstack’s approach to new values that mining can do is “tally up” rewards for the developers who add value to Cardstack’s ecosystem by providing successful applications on it.