Token Created On The Steem Blockchain

On the day that @ned is suppose to have another livestream (I am not sure if it was cancelled again or not), I am here to write about a token being created on the Steem blockchain.

Many were upset about the delay in SMTs which, it appears, evolved into a scaling down of the project, at least initially. I am sure we will find out more but my understanding is Steemit Inc will be working on bringing out SMT-lite to start. From there, they will keep adding until the full functionality of SMTs is there.

Ever since Ned made the announcement a few weeks back, the Steem community kicked it into high gear. It is actually very inspiring to see. Between @fulltimegeek working on his token creation project or @blocktrades stepping up to provide the expertise to code the blockchain, we see things moving away from Steemit. This is really helping to reduce our dependence upon that organization,

Now, I was alerted to the fact that another developer created a token on the Steem blockchain. That is the claim at least.

@shredz7 put up a couple posts detailing a project called Steem-State. This is something that allows other developers to build DApps on the Steem blockchain.

steem-state is a framework that allows developers to define events that occur on a certain transaction type, e.g. displaying data to the user or updating the internal state (such as the balance of the user). Using steem-state, one can create any possible DApp on the Steem blockchain, from tokens to games!

According to the write up, Steem-State uses soft consensus instead of smart contracts. This provides a bit more flexibility than what takes place on Ethereum. It is also able to scale easier since all transactions do not have to be verified by everyone on the blockchain. Instead, only the parties involved do the verification with the entire blockchain updating as people log on.

This diagram does look confusing at first, so here is an explanation. It is a chart of multiple users running something similar to our code and their state over time (as the lines go down, time increases). Each bright orange/red/yellow box shows when a user logs on (either Alice, Bob, or Carl). As you look down the lines, you can see that both Bob and Alice created a transaction in the green boxes. To the left of the long lines are each users' states over time. If you look at Bob and Alice's states, they are always the same (in consensus) throught the entire duration of the graph. But then if you look at Carl's states, they are not the same as Alice and Bob's.

Since Carl logged on later, he missed the first transaction Alice created, which sent 50 tokens to Bob. Because of that, both Bob and Alice agree on the state, but Carl didn't, since his balances show that the transaction between Alice and Bob never happened.

To solve this, we have to make sure that Carl knows about the transaction Alice and Bob created. Similar to how blockchains work, Carl will have to read through all previous transactions before being up to real time so that he knows that he didn't miss a single transaction.

It is interesting that scaling is handled since it is not something that Steem is reputed to have issues with. One of the main advantages of the blockchain is that we do not have the same issues as Bitcoin or Ethereum in that regard. Nevertheless, some of the attacks against blockchain is the ability to handled tens of thousands of transactions per second. We believe Steem can do it yet it was never tested with real world transactions.

The main point is that developers now can easily follow the code provided to set up DApps and create a token along with it. There also is a link showing how the code was used to set up a token already.

Here are the two posts.

https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@shredz7/announcing-steem-state-build-any-dapp-on-steem

https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@shredz7/the-first-token-on-the-steem-blockchain

As I wrote after the bombshell Ned dropped, there are plenty of very smart people on this blockchain who know what needs to be done. We are seeing that. The community, especially from the development side, is really stepping up. Any nervousness about the Steemit Inc situation should quickly be disappearing. Whatever happens with that organization, the blockchain will thrive.

There simply are too many highly intelligent people determine to make that so.

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