IOTA announces the "Q" project. Learn protocol details for Oracle machines and contracts ...

vander345 (32)in #iota • 6 years ago

This week, the suspense around the "Q" project is over and the IOTA Foundation revealed what really was the project that involved many theories, including quantum computing, ternary processors (which involves another project called JINN), among others. To eliminate all speculation, it is now possible to know that "Q" comes from Qubic, a protocol that specifies the IOTA solution for Oracle machines, smart contracts, outsourced calculations, and more.

Qubic is a protocol that specifies the solution for quorum-based calculations, including constructions such as oracle machines, outsourced calculations, and smart contracts. Qubic provides multiprocessing, cloud-based, or Tangle-based capabilities. In the long run, Qubic will allow people to take advantage of unused computing capacity around the world for a myriad of computing needs, all while helping to protect Iota's Tangle, creating a kind of interconnected global network.

The IOTA Foundation has created a new programming language to implement Qubic around the world, Abra, "Open is a ternary programming language because ternary systems can deliver significant energy savings, essential for IoT devices. A ternary digit, a trit, can represent 1.58 bits. The amount of electrical installation required for a ternary system can then be reduced to 64% of an equivalent binary system, resulting in energy savings, "says the project's official website.

Coupled with the development of the JINN ternary processor, such gains in power consumption will be disruptive in the IoT industry. The official website of the application and a video that accompanies it shows some use cases to better explain the operation of the solution.

Oracle Machine: Machines that serve to gather information from the real world and send to Tangle for use by smart contracts. Such information can be, for example, the temperature of a sensor, the price of an asset in an exchange or personal data such as age and marital status.

As IOTA is focused on IoT, it is expected that billions of devices in the future will be oracle machines acting as lenses between the real world and the digital world. The Qubic protocol provides the necessary solution (quorum-based) for the information to be decentralized and reliable, in other words, several Oracles devices provide the information for the Tangle.

Outsourced Calculations: There will always be tasks that require more computing power than a particular device can resolve or tasks that require data beyond what is available locally. This is especially true for the devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices are typically limited by lack of memory, processing power, power availability, or all of the above. What if these low-power devices could simply outsource intensive calculations to a more capable external machine?

Qubic allows for exactly those outsourced calculations and allows for safe, unlicensed participation for consumers and producers. The protocol allows anyone to create or request the execution of a computational task on one or more external devices, which, in turn, transmit the results back to the requestor. As with Oracle machines, this processing takes place in a decentralized and secure manner, with the Qubic protocol ensuring that the results can be entrusted to a high degree of certainty.

Smart Contract: In general, smart contracts are self-executing contracts that eliminate the need for a third party as guarantor. While smart contracts are expected to be used in the future to replace many types of real-world paper contracts, so far the most common use case for smart contracts is to create virtual tokens. While Qubic is, of course, able to support these types of traditional smart contracts, the combination of duty-free transactions along with general-purpose quorum-based computing opens the door to entirely new possibilities. For example, a smart contract could be used to aggregate temperature data from different oracles to an average temperature, which is periodically published in the Tangle.

As the EcoIOTA portal shows, the incentive for such powerful devices to carry out the task is the monetary reward established by the requesting device. Miners from other crypto-coins may offer their computational power to do these calculations and be rewarded in the same way, with the difference that energy expenditure will be for useful calculations rather than being wasted on cryptographic puzzles.

A Qubic is essentially a computational task package that can be delegated for free to any device through Tangle transactions. Any individual can create qubics, that is, request computational power from the network to perform tasks, depending on the case, it can offer rewards that serve as incentives for IOTA 'miners'. Someone interested can participate in the 'mining' easily by specifying how much computational force they want to make available and the minimum of reward they want to receive, when a qubic with such a condition is found the process will begin.