Seed - Development - Base Project & Cryptographic Portion

Seed is a research project with the end goal of supporting a high-throughput, low-latency blockchain. There are a few modifications to blockchain technology that Seed would like to explore in it's attempt to support this end goal.

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Seed Literature

Seed - Introduction Post

Seed - Background Knowledge on the Bitcoin Scaling Debate

Seed - Literature Review

Seed - Problems & Hypothesized Solutions

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Seed Summarized

The first major philosophy change is switching away from competitive mining, and moving towards cooperative validation. We believe that the traditional competitive approach to proof-of-work causes a misalignment of users, as well as acts as a major bottleneck in the system. Seed aims at having transactions validate each other, offering work up-front as their 'fee' for being used in the network. Our blockchain will organize its transactions in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), rather than in internal lists. This is done in order to give us the short-term benefits of DAG while still storing the DAG into blocks for long-term storage.

The next thing we aim to do with modules, the decentralized apps of the Seed system, to be able to interact directly with other modules. Every client should be able to validate and run any transaction for any module, asynchronously of course. This allows for interprocess communications to be created between modules and them to build on each other.

We also aim to allow modules to describe the networking requirements of each function. In Ethereum, the amount of wei per gas offered by the user dictates that transactions requirements on the network. We envision that this should be taken away from the users control, and instead modules themselves should describe the requirements of its functions.

Last but not least, we also aim to achieve real-time speeds by allowing modules to host their own relay nodes which have direct control over the routing of transactions. For example, should a dApp be created which requires very low latency between users with similar x/y coordinates to one-other, that dApp developer should be able to host a relay node which routes users who need instant validation from each other to one-other, in order to minimize propagation time for time critical software.

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What is completed so far?

Seed is still very early into development. The client is a shell Electron client currently which is connected to the Seed API. Within the Seed API, the portion that is complete is the cryptographic section, such as generating private keys, signing transactions, generating public addresses and SHA256 hashing.

In development on the virtualMachine branch is some early prototyping of hashing/transacting hashable functions for modules. This branch is still in very early development.

What is mostly completed is the background research, two literature reviews, two blockchain research proposals and the project proposal for Seed. It is currently transitioning from design into code.

Running The Client:

When you first pull the project from git, change the directory to the /clientSrc folder. From there, you can launch the client with the following command

npm start

The unit tests are currently being run right away and printing to the developers console. Through the electron wallet, you can view the developers console by opening up Developers Mode, which is accessible as a menu item in the top menu, or via Control-D (CMD-D on Mac).

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What is the technology stack?

The first implementation of Seed is being created in JavaScript using Node.js. Outside that, we aim to have as few dependencies as possible for the Seed API. The Seed API should be able to run on anything which supports Node.js.

The client is being created using Electron. This client is allowed to have more dependencies, however all networking requirements and protocol requirements still must be done in vanilla JS or Node.js

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What is the road map?

The schedule for this project is currently as follows:

This schedule is under the assumption that the two contributors are myself and @jaegar. There is a separate project that the two of us will also be developing alongside Seed, which will be the first released module for Seed to prove its use case.

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How to contribute?

If you would like to work with us and help contribute, you can get in contact with me through the comment section here or via my direct contact information that can be found on my Github.

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Thanks for your time. I'm developing Seed following Agile Scrum with my partner @jaegar. We plan on posting a pull request to #utioian-io once every two-week sprint. Between posts, however, I will be blogging the experience on Steemit. So the literature reviews, development discussions, research and design discussions are all on Steemit, with the code updates being posted to #utopian-io, both under @carsonroscoe for now.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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