ARCBLOCK REVIEW - WHAT EXACTLY IS BLOCKCHAIN 3.0 & WHAT ROLE DOES ARCBLOCK PLAY IN IT?

ARCBLOCK PROJECT (Part I)

BLOCKCHAIN 3.0? Huh?
First things first, before we go deeper into the ARCBLOCK project, let us first delve a little into the term Blockchain 3.0, which has been slowly gaining popularity these days. What exactly does it refer to?

Well, simply put, Blockchain 1.0 refers to Currency. The original development of distributed ledger technology, a.k.a. DLT resulted in the first cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, where decentralised records of financial transactions and arguably, store of values on the blockchain enabled peer-to-peer transfer of payments (or more broadly, assets). These developments sometimes brought with them tagline benefits such as fast,trustless and anonimity, which were viewed as a means of getting around centralised financial institutions like banks (yups, those blood-sucking buggers).

The main feature of Blockchain 2.0 which followed was Smart Contracts. Personally, I think these are the start of the true blockchain revolution. If you can code a gazillion if/else statements into the blockchain, and enable trustless execution of certain actions given certain conditions, you can basically automate or dis-intermediate away A LOT of the inefficiencies buried in our current financial, corporate, social and government administrative systems. Notably, the marriage of blockchain tech and Smart Contracts meant that it is almost technically impossible to hack the latter.

More importantly, next came along the concept of Blockchain 3.0, or Decentralised Apps (Dapps for short). The commonly touted benefits of Dapps include their avoidance of centralised infrastructure and hence any central point of failure. The code and its executive basically live on huge peer-to-peer blockchain networks (my mobile, Peter's home desktop, that Russian guy's mini-server etc.). Note that all these are behind the scenes, the frontend user platform can take any form and be designed for any purpose. For instance, the recent cryptokitty craze (hey, i'm a owner of digital cats too!) was one of the more (initially) popular Dapps that came along, despite it seemingly clogging up the ethereum network at some point.

"grrrr..."

Now, back to ARCBLOCK
ARCBLOCK's main site says that they are "a platform and an ecosystem for building and deploying decentralized blockchain applications." The big deal about all this is that with the rapid mainstream (consumers/corporates/govts) recognition of the value of blockchain tech, a lot of traditional processes or platforms..everything from your grocery shopping to banking/insurance transactions, to the way companies secure their supply chains and conduct their corporate communications and storage of databases, to the way ppl use social platforms...EVERYTHING that involves entity-to-entity interactions and requires secure/trustless info storage or execution, will slowly have armies of blockchain developers fighting to gain market shares in that myriad band of functional segments.

And developers and investors will come to realise that heck, while decentralised in tech, there needs to be some consensus among the community on the types of protocol/platform to build these Dapps on, so that inter-operability between smart contracts in different Dapps can be maximised and systems can actually communicate (e.g., ur insurer Dapp talking to ur Bank Dapp to process payment). This communication and inherent synergy, to me, is actually the biggest part of the unlocked potential of blockchain tech, in terms of the positive spillovers it can bring to the populace.

And here, ARCBLOCK, with its focus on scalability, extensibility, easy-of-usage (in building Dapps), and cooperation, rather than competition with existing front runners such as Ethereum and Hyperledger, has a real chance to go BIG.

• With ArcBlock’s Open Chain Access Protocol, developers can now carefully weigh the pros/cons of blockchain protocols and evaluate suitabilty relative to their projects, since open connectivity over multiple blockchain protocols is now enabled by ArcBlock.
• In terms of optimisation, ArcBlock also aims to achieve >100,000 Tx/s, which would enable broad range of Dapps to run on the platform simultaneously, accommodating operations for a wide range of applications.
• Personally, the feature/design focus that impressed me most was the fact that ArcBlock is designed to run natively in the cloud. A node no longer needs to be ur desktop sitting in ur studyroom. In ArcBlock, it can be a “logical computer” comprised of one or more virtual machines, or a group of cooperating cloud services. While initially built on top of AWS and Windows Azure, it will be also be expanded to support Google Compute Engine, major Chinese cloud computing players, and other platforms. On a forward looking note, I feel that one potential synergistic partnership could even be between ArcBlock and decentralised cloud computing blockchain aggregator projects such as SOMN and GOLEM. Blockchain FTW!

Interested readers can take a closer look at the following links:
Site: https://www.arcblock.io/
Bitcointalk ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2699379

In Parts II and III of the review (over the next week), I'll also delve deeper into the token mechanics, team profile, other notable whitepaper strengths and interesting/useful info tidbits. Look forward to it!

[By: Wind_Crypto, bitcointalk profile at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1478675; ]