bitcoin carpenter
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Activity: 1582
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January 27, 2017, 08:18:31 PM |
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INCOMING WALL OF TEXT.
“Today we have Sasha. Hey Sasha.”
Sasha: “Hi guys. I’m here.”
Lootz: “What’s up man? I’m cool.”
Sasha: “Everything is fine and we’re working. Holidays are over and we’re back to work. We have so many things to do and I’d like to share our plans for the upcoming weeks. I’m ready to answer all of your questions – whatever the questions are. So, I’m ready for everything.
Lootz: “It looks like a lot of people missed you over the holidays (laughs).”
Sasha: “I didn’t have any holiday time. I was on slack. Some people in the office had to take a rest. Now, we are back to work and we are working very hard.”
Lootz: “Since you’ve been away there’ve been quite a few ups and downs with the price. We saw it go down, so congratulations to everyone who took advantage of that…”
“So lately we’ve been seeing a lot of new people inside the Slack…”
Sasha: “Yea. New people are coming. We have a couple of new coders. We hired new coders. I’m glad that new people are coming to our slack. This is the time now when we are starting to draw more attention to our project. We have many new startups coming to our platform. They are going to crowdfund. We have several crowdfunding campaigns lined up on Waves Platform within a couple of weeks. This is the time where things are really starting to move. This is the way it should be?”
Lootz: “How’s development going? I know it slowed down a bit. Tell us about any new additions. Have you added any new people to your team?”
Sasha: “Yea. We have added a new coder, a backend coder. We are hiring a new frontend guy. I can’t say that development has slowed down. Ok, there were holidays so people had vacation for a week. But, we are moving pretty fast I think. Our goals for January are to test the DEX. We have the backend for the DEX and we have to create the frontend for the distributed exchange. After we have the frontend, we will be launching it. So, the backend is ready. It should be properly tested, and we are working on it. The concept is working and as soon as we have the front end we are going to launch the distributed exchange. Also, we are working on fiat gateways and the Bitcoin gateway. The Bitcoin gateway is going to be first, and after that we will have the Euro gateway. The Bitcoin gateway should be there by, I think in two weeks. At the same time, we will be integrating the Euro gateway. Very soon, we will have proper functionality of what you see in the wallet. Those inactive tabs – they’re going to be active. It’s just a couple of weeks, guys.”
Lootz: “Any new meet-ups or conferences you’ve attended?”
Sasha: “Yes. We are organizing lots of stuff here in Moscow. Also, I’m going to London for Bitcoin Week. I’ll be participating in the panel discussion. Maybe I will have a talk too because there are several meet ups there at the same time. I signed up for one, and I’m looking to have a presentation at another one. I’ll be meeting many people there – many partners and many projects we are working with. I think it should be quite effective. After that I’m going back to Moscow. We will be having some kind of a conference here about the status of Bitcoin here in Russia. We are inviting some people from the central bank, from Duma, from all those organizations who are in control of the situation here. They’ll be sharing their opinion about cryptocurrencies and about legalization here. I think it is very important. In the beginning of February I’ll be going to Hong Kong – at the beginning of the month. We’ll see what I’m going to do next. I’m starting to go to conferences now, so I should be promoting the Waves Platform internationally.”
Lootz: “You’re coming to New York too I think, right?”
Sasha: “Yes, I should. I’m planning to be there in March probably. I should apply for a Visa because it’s taken a couple of months. One of our guys was looking to go to the cryptography conference but he couldn’t because he wasn’t able to get a Visa in two months. After it was over, he received the Visa. So, I’m going to apply now and in a couple of months I’ll be able to go… We are also organizing many developer meet ups here. We’re having one on Friday, next week. I’m going to be talking about proof of stake and recent developments. There are a lot of misconceptions about proof of stake. People think that it’s insecure. It’s pretty secure actually and I want to explain how it works and how it can be made secure. So, we have some stuff here.”
Lootz: “The last ‘big thing’ I believe was the full node release. Has there been anything added to the full node after the release?”
Sasha: “We are tweaking the code constantly because we started with the Scorex platform, but it wasn’t really production ready. We’ve had to tweak and modify (the code). Basically, in some time, we won’t have any Scorex code left. One one hand, it enabled us to move faster. On the other hand, we’ve had to rework the code. So, there is a tradeoff here. We are tweaking the code and we are making it easier to work with. At the same time, we are working on features. Our next big feature is the DEX and fiat gateways. What is the roadmap for later? We’ll have to work on the structure of our blocks. We have to make proper block structure. We have to make a header, like what you have in Bitcoin more or less. So, we’ll be able to enable our research that was done with the Boston professor about these cryptocurrency structures. To do that, we’ll have to tweak the structure of our Waves blocks. After that, we’ll be working on scalability. We have a roadmap for scalability. At the same time, we’ll need to implement features. I can admit that we took too much time to implement what we have now. We will be more focused on business applications now and at the same time trying to implement those nice features with scalability and stuff. But now, we are more focused on business applications and features that can be implemented right here, right now.”
Lootz: “Right so speaking of business applications, say a company like Incent or Tokes wants to use the (Waves) blockchain. Is there some type of an advantage for them to run their own full node? Why would they choose to run one?”
Sasha: “They can use our nodes or any nodes from other community members, but to be in full control, it is better to have your own node.”
Lootz: “Would it increase speed?”
Sasha: “Yea sure, and you can control it. You can’t (always) trust other people’s nodes and if they go down, you can’t do anything. So, it is better that you be in control of the situation. Of course, when we have the DEX, it could make sense to have your own DEX node so you can have your own matcher. You can offer the service to people and make some additional money from offering this matching service. It’s going to have fees so you’ll be earning fees. It’s nice. Having your own node is nice and it doesn’t take much effort. It’s pretty easy now at this stage. The sooner you enter the Waves ecosystem, the better I think because you’ll understand how it works. In the future, you will probably profit from it because you’ll have more of an understanding of how it works. It is very easy to have your own full node. It is very easy to set up and to maintain.”
Lootz: “Right. And that’s 10,000 Waves tokens, which isn’t much. It’s probably 3 – 4 Bitcoin right? And you can get started now while it’s cheaper, rather than later. I think Incent has about 2 or 3 full nodes they are running. So I believe that would make them a really efficient team, right? It’ll make things run really nicely for them.”
Sasha: “Yea because Incent is going to build on the Waves DEX. They are waiting for our DEX to be launched so they can start trading their loyalty token. They have to use our tech.”
Lootz: “They are the first application on the Waves Platform and they have a customer loyalty token using the blockchain… “
“Tell me about C.A.T.’s. (Custom Application Tokens). What are the advantages? What can be done with C.A.T.’s?”
Sasha: “Many things. At this stage the most important application is of course crowdfunding campaigns, and you can use those tokens in applications like Incent. For example, Incent has C.A.T.’s functionality, and it can reward the customer with those tokens. Actually, Incent is considering different applications. They are thinking about becoming a loyalty program for ICO’s. They launched a platform for ICO’s. They offer their platform that they used for their own ICO to other projects. If you use their platform, you can also use the Incent token as a loyalty token for your ICO, which is also nice. So, there can be many applications here. What else? We have several pretty interesting projects, like, unusual projects, that are going to start crowdfunding soon. For example, we have a project that launches coworking places in several major cities in Europe and the US. So, they’re going to crowdfund for co-workings. You’ll be able to buy a pass to all the coworking places in all the cities they’re working with. It’s pretty interesting; no one did it before. It’s like, you know, crypto is coming to the real world. It’s coming to real estate and to real brick-and-mortar businesses. We also have several groups of people who want to start things like raising funds for production, and stuff like that. So, those tokens can be used for many things. The most obvious application is using them as a voucher or a token for your future product. If you have a prototype and you want to scale, or you want to launch the manufacturing to order like, 1000 gadgets or whatever, in China, at some factory. You just sell those vouchers to people, and they can swap the voucher for the product when it’s ready. So, this application is very obvious and many businesses, not only cryptocurrencies, like, brick and mortar, can go in that direction. We are talking to some, like, VC guys from a very big company … (audio cuts out for a second) … integrate Waves tokens and offer these services to like, big business and industry. For example when you have like, as I just told you, when you have a prototype and you want to scale it. Say you need 1 million dollars, and people are buying some kind of vouchers for your future product. Or, for example, some retail companies can come to Waves platform and buy the product for a huge discount. For that money, you order the production, the manufacturing, and people can buy the product with those vouchers later. There’s huge interest here. We are talking to some pretty big VC people about launching that platform. It’s going to be like Kickstarter for big businesses, or something like that. I’m not sure if we will succeed, but we will are doing our best, and that can be pretty big. “
Lootz: “So, C.A.T.’s … what does that stand for exactly? What functions can it replace in the Ethereum platform? I’ve heard you say in the past that you could do something with C.A.T.’s that Ethereum does in a more complicated way. You can do it simpler with C.A.T.’s?”
Sasha: “Custom Application Tokens, and yes. You can trade them in a decentralized way. We developed this scheme where you have centralized matching with decentralized settlement. So, in Ethereum, it is really costly to have this structure. You can’t really realize decentralized trading with Ethereum contracts because it uses up too much gas actually, and it is very costly. This approach, where you have centralized matching, and only settlement is on the blockchain is cheap. Ok, it’s more centralized, but it’s cheaper. You don’t have to send your funds to the exchange. You have your funds at all times in your wallet. The exchange is doing just the matching. You are in control of your funds at all times. So, there is a kind of centralization here, but at the same time, you don’t risk any money here. It’s a nice approach and no one did it before. Ethereum is very cool, and I realize that we need to have some kind of smart contract functionality. I am thinking how to implement it in some different way than Ethereum. People will be coming to Ethereum no matter what. No matter what happens to Ethereum; it could fork again, but people will be coming to Ethereum for that functionality – that smart contract functionality. It’s very flexible and it allows you to do things that can’t be done on other platforms. We will have to have it too. We have a couple of ideas, but it’s very far from a complete realization. At the same time, we have to decide how we will proceed with smart contracts. So, maybe at the end of the year we will have something. Obviously, a good blockchain platform has to have some kind of smart contract functionality.”
Lootz: “Nice, and Satoshi Nakamoto, that was one of his latest ideas before he disappeared. He said he wanted smart contracts and those types of features with Bitcoin. Then he disappeared and it never happened, and then Ethereum took over.”
Sasha: “Yea yea. They have scripting in Bitcoin actually. Ethereum didn’t bring any new ideas because they just used the idea of Bitcoin scripting. They just needed to complete (it) and realized this scheme where you can’t run it indefinitely. You have to pay to run the contract. Bitcoin didn’t have this. This is the achievement of Ethereum, this scheme. But, it was all already inside Bitcoin. So, it was realized in Bitcoin, in a way. So, actually, Ethereum is cool, but it doesn’t really bring any new ideas. Everything has already in Bitcoin. The ideas, maybe, they are coming. For example, what ZCash has is a new cryptography that Bitcoin didn’t have. It really brings something innovative. Ethereum is innovative too, but it has all already been in Bitcoin. Probably it makes sense to try to realize some kind of not too incomplete scripting the way it was realized in Bitcoin. There are some ways (to go) about approaching this so we’re thinking about that too. And, there are some different schemes with Turing completeness. I’m looking into various platforms now. For example, Chain platform is a very nice permissioned ledger. I really like the way it’s realized. They did (created) a very nice thing. It’s a permissioned ledger, a closed platform, but it’s really cool. So, take a look at it when you have the time. It’s called ‘Chain.’ There is also Hyper Ledger, which is also nice, and they all have this scripting. Hyper Ledger has Ethereum contracts; Chain has some other approach. We are thinking in which direction we should go in order to have some kind of blockchain scripting and blockchain smart contracts. So, we’ll have to have it too.”
Lootz: “Nice. And that’s an important feature and everything that you said earlier, that it’s in Bitcoin, I read in the ‘Book Of Satoshi.’ I just read all of that, so, it’s kind of fresh in my mind. I like to see that you’re up on your game in regards to other innovations that are coming out. You seem to constantly do your homework…”
“I have somebody in the slack. He asks, ‘Is it reasonable to run a pool of funds, community-governance, DAO-like C.A.T.?’”
Sasha: “It’s going to be feasible, yeah. We are also working on leasing now, the leasing functionality, where you can lease your funds. The forger or the miner can just use your funds to mine. So, it’s some kind of mining pool in a way. It’s just some approach to mining pools. You have to have leasing functionality in order to make proof of stake secure. People don’t really realize this usually. You can’t have very small stakes mining because, in this way, an attacker will be able to create thousands of accounts and send 10 Waves, or 10 NXT to an account and, in a way, be able to control the network. You can actually try to attack the network by doing some kind of grinding attack, and keep all the proof of stake rewards for himself. So you have to limit the minimum amount with which you can forge, or mine. You don’t allow small miners to have profits. So, in order to enable them to make some money off of the fees, you need to have this leasing functionality. So, a small account holder can lease his or her funds to a miner and have some profit from the activity of the miner. So it’s very important in this approach, for security. So, we’re going to have this type of pool – some kind of mining pool through the leasing functionality very soon. We are working on this; we have a coder who is working on this now. So, we’ll have leasing too very soon. I think it is almost ready. I want to enable people to lease not only Waves tokens, but also assets / custom tokens. That can have many nice implications actually. NXT didn’t have that for example. You could only lease NXT. I want people to be able to lease also like, custom tokens. It’s kind of interesting what can be done with this. I see lots of implications and directions where it can be used. So, we will have this functionality too. Waves leasing is kind of ready. We have to test it and we will have next token leasing.”
Lootz: “What’s the difference between the leasing functionality and regular POS (proof of stake)?”
Sasha: “It’s just a part of POS. You mine with your stake in POS systems. If you’re a small holder, if you don’t have more than 10,000 Waves at this moment, you can’t mine, forge, or make money off of the transaction fees of the network. So, you need to provide the leasing functionality for small account holders to be able to profit from the fees. So, they just lease their funds, for example 1000 Waves, to a big account and this big account shares the profits with them. They’re always in control of the funds. They can just cancel the lease and they can take the money back. The mining node can’t use the funds. They can only use them for forging. They can’t spend them. So, you are always in control of your funds, and at the same time you can make money off of transaction fees without actual mining. It’s a nice thing that is important for security of proof of stake systems. You can’t have very small accounts mining in proof of stake - you have to have some limit. This is like some kind of restriction that you have in proof of stake systems. You have to have this leasing functionality for the network security.“
Lootz: “So what you’re saying is fundraising a large pool of funds could threaten the network because the money they use can be used to stake and control the network? Doesn’t that apply to anyone doing crowdfunding on the platform?”
Sasha: “I mean, if people raise too much money, and too much Waves, yea you could have this attack, a 51% attack, in proof of stake - at this stage. So, if someone is able to have 51% of all proof of stake coins, including Waves, he could control the system. That is for sure. There are some ideas to, for example … Vitalik is writing a lot about that, about some kind of economic incentives. So, theoretically in proof of stake systems, you can even thwart 51% attacks. You could have some kind of economic finality which – this term was invented by Vitalik, I think – when even if the attacker has 90% of all stake in the network, you are still fine. You need to have some kind of big economic incentive. For example, when people are trying to mine on two forks. So, they are like supporting the attacker and they are mining on the wrong fork, they are like, banned from the network, and their stake is taken from them. So, when you see that someone is mining on two forks, or two branches of the blockchain, you just take his or her stake from him; you just fine him. So, this approach can work but we don’t have it yet. Probably we will have something like that on the way. It’s actually what the Ethereum people are trying to realize with Casper, this approach. It’s nice, because, it’s really quite sophisticated. It enables one to thwart 51% attacks even if the attacker has more than half of the total stake – the network is still fine. But, at this moment, we don’t have this approach. So, if someone is able to like, have half of all the total Waves, he can control the network. That’s true.”
Lootz: “That was actually Rick from slack. He actually is saying that his question is not about POS or leasing funds. His question was about doing a crowdfunding, and letting the C.A.T. holders decide what to do with it (raised funds). For example, could there be a charity C.A.T. that allows people who donate to decide what to do with the money?”
Sasha: “Yes, we will have voting functionality. That is why we are launching Waves Community Token / WCT. It’s going to be quite important for the ecosystem because people will be able to vote with it. If you have this token, you can vote, for example, for endorsing some projects. You can vote for many things; we will see what people are going to be voting for. But, the basic idea is to vote for the endorsement of new projects that are coming to Waves Platform. If you launch this crowdfunding token, with which you are trying to ‘make the crowdfunding’, you can also vote with it. If you saw in NXT, they have this nice voting functionality. It wasn’t really used, but it was pretty nice actually. I don’t know why people didn’t use it. [Lootz interjects saying it may have been too complicated.] Maybe, yeah, but it was nice. If you support some ICO, they’ll send you the tokens. You can, in principle, you can vote. You can have this voting for the direction where you are taking the project. So, it’s possible. It depends on your agreement between your community and the project maintainers. So, it is doable. If you say to people that ‘I’m going to crowdfund; I’m going to issue this token and you’ll be able to vote for the direction where we are taking the project’. So, I think people will be glad and they will be participating. Of course, they have to be active. Why it usually doesn’t work is because people are passive. They don’t want to be so involved in your project. They just want to, you know, flip your coin and sell, and make some like, 300% profit. They don’t want to, you know, participate. This is the tragedy of the commons. This is like, some kind of game theoretical thing. When you want people to vote for something and only people who have some agenda vote. All the other people are just passive and won’t vote. People who want to attain some specific goal? They do vote. All the other guys are just passive and don’t vote. We need to find a way I think with Waves Community Token to engage people in the community, to make them be more engaged, and to monitor the new projects which are coming to Waves Platform, to endorse them, and to actually profit from new ICO’s even if they don’t send them any money. Because, if they endorse it, the idea is new projects will be happy to send some tokens over to the Waves community and they will be distributed among the Waves Community Token holders. So you just have to hold the token; you don’t have to invest in any ICO’s, but you will still be getting some profits from the new ICO’s on the Waves Platform.”
Lootz: “This is kind of like NXT Venture. Back in the day, there was an NXT asset called NXT Venture that did kind of the same thing. Over time, people stopped using it … but you’re saying there is going to be some kind of voting function that uses it (WCT) so that might increase it’s warranty and it’s utility.”
“So the voting feature could be used independently by tokens. You also mentioned crowdfunding. Will there be a website that people could start their crowdfunding on?”
Sasha: “Yea. We are talking to several like, working crowdfunding platforms and we are talking to several groups of people who want to make their own platform. Something is going to materialize very soon. We need to have this Kickstarter-like website that has tokens. We have this product thing that I told you about - this thing where factories can crowdfund for new products. We have to have, like, a normal Kickstarter approach where startups can announce their project, and can issue some kind of token that are used within their project. For example, a social network launches an internal currency and they sell it to investors. It can be used later within the network. It should be also done in a centralized way. We have to have some web platform where people can do it easily. Of course, probably, it’s not our thing. It should be built on top of Waves. So, we are working with a couple groups of people who want to do that. If you think we should do that on our own, we’ll do this web platform, it is not a problem. But, it is better if we have someone to support, maintain, and launch it because, you know, it should be a third party project. So, it’s going to be launched, definitely, and it should be pretty important for Waves and the whole ecosystem. You don’t have this platform – you don’t have Kickstarter with coins, or tokens, yet. When it’s there, it can change everything, I think. You’ll have this new degree of freedom where you can just exit your pledge and you can sell your pledge. In Kickstarter, when you pledge your funds, you can’t sell it to anyone. You are just waiting for the product.”
Lootz: “I think StartCoin, or StartJoin, is something like that?”
Sasha: “Yea but they used only StartCoins to crowdfund I think. We want to have a platform where you can just spend your dollar, and euros, and everything you’ve got. You don’t need to use the Waves tokens. It is launched on Waves; you have Waves tokens, but it can be sold for everything. We’ll have gateways. We’ll have USD token, Euro token, and Bitcoin token. On the web platform, you’ll be able to spend your fiat money directly. So, it doesn’t have to be Waves.”
Lootz: “So, give me a timeline for those gateways. What’s coming out first? Bitcoin gateway?”
Sasha: “Bitcoin gateway is the simplest. We’re going to revive for this, Coinomat – the Coinomat Project – which was dormant for a couple of months. But, it is time to revive it I think. The Bitcoin gateway will be realized in partnership with Coinomat. It’s not my project at this stage; there’s another coder there. He’s back to work and they have a new team. Bitcoin will be supported through Coinomat at this stage. Later we will probably have to work with different exchanges to create some kind of multi-signature account where, for example, several exchanges can control all the Bitcoins that are within the Waves ecosystem. It’s very easy because this thing was done for NXT. We have this plugin in NXT with Coinomat. It was exactly what we want to have now in Waves. So, Bitcoin is very easy. At the same time, we have a company, a payment system, which is going to support Euro and a little later, it will support USD – in the spring probably. Euro is coming soon. Euro and Bitcoin is coming really soon. We’ll see how it works, because, we should see how it works in general and if there any issues? When it’s all-good, we can probably outsource it to like, bigger companies if they’re interested -I hope they will – and perhaps to a bigger payment system that will be supporting and maintaining fiat currencies on Waves Platform. But for now, I think to test things out we should be in control of those gateways. When it’s all ready, we will outsource it to bigger companies.
Lootz: “Any idea about a Canadian gateway? Is there a Canadian gateway?”
Sasha: “Yea Canadian is doable because you don’t have as many regulations in Canada. So, it’s just a matter of prioritization; what you should do first, and what should come next. The Canadian dollar is easier than the USD dollar to implement here so, we’ll have it. We’ll probably have to do something with the Yuan first, and of course US dollar.”
Lootz: “You mentioned Coinomat. Do the holders of Coinomat get dividends or rewards from the transactions they do?”
Sasha: “Yea sure. It’s going to be a for-profit project for Coinomat at this stage. They won’t charge much, but they’ll charge something of course. It’s like, 1% at the most. Not more, and maybe less, or perhaps a flat fee. So, the idea is to use the functionality we used for NXT and revive the project at the same time because I think it was a nice project. It was the first instant cryptocurrency exchange. Actually, it was before ShapeShift. So, like, ShapeShift came later, so Coinomat was really the first instant cryptocurrency exchanger. So I think we shouldn’t let it go away. We should make it work again.”
Lootz: “I think ShapeShift is having issues at the moment right?”
Sasha: “Probably. I don’t really follow them but … Ok, they’re a very nice project actually. They did some things better than we did and they had more money for promotion. There’s no bad blood here, but I think that Coinomat should come back and should work again. We’ll make Coinomat great again.”
Lootz: “Will we be able to trade alt-coins through the multigateways?”
Sasha: “Yea. I think that many alt-coins are becoming important now. We have Ethereum… I like Litecoin now because Litecoin is back to life. They implemented the features that Bitcoin can’t implement. I think Litecoin can have the Lightning Network sooner than Bitcoin, and that can be pretty big. The Litecoin founder, Charlie Lee, is very active. He’s pushing Litecoin everywhere. I think that there can be something pretty interesting there. So probably we’ll have Litecoin, Ethereum, and maybe some other coins within Waves Wallet.”
Lootz: “Lately I’ve been seeing SysCoin (System Coin)…
Sasha: “Yea I have to look into it. They were focused on some kind of like, decentralized marketplace.
Lootz: “It’s a little bit different than OpenBazaar. There’s no down time. If your server drops, your stuff won’t come off the market. It’s a decentralized market place basically but they also have escrow system built in. People who want to be arbiters can handle the escrow. They can make some money being an arbiter in the system. It’s all built into the system. There are actually very skilled coders on that team. Take a look when you get the chance.”
Sasha: “Yea I remember that they wanted to implement tokens too, but then they made a pivot and became focused on the marketplace. But, we’re working with everybody that wants to work with us. So, we’re very open to cooperation. Everybody that knows me knows that I am always ready to talk and cooperate with people. If someone wants to work with us, we want to work with you guys. So, come to Waves Platform and let’s cooperate.
Lootz: “The way I see it ... there are so many different niches and so many different technologies. Maybe one day, when you’ve got this great engine, and this great muffler, a great exhaust system, and you’ve got somebody building some great wheels … Maybe a few years down the road we’re going to have some type of Ferrari system where they’ll all work together.” (It’s an analogy comparing the crypto ecosystem with the time and care that goes into making a luxury sports car.)
Sasha: “Yea it takes time but once it’s done, it can be big.”
Lootz: “Talk to me about transaction times. What’s the plan? Is the rumor true that it will compete with central exchanges like Polo?
Sasha: “It should, yea. If you have centralized matching, it can be as fast as any centralized exchange. The settlement takes time, but the orders are matched very fast so you can see that your order is executed. You have to wait for the actual settlement, but you have your order executed. So, it can be fast. If we have some issues with like, throughput, we have a roadmap for throughput too. It’s not a secret actually; I want to implement Bitcoin NG for proof of stake system. Bitcoin NG is some kind of approach that allows you to like … it can also be implemented in Bitcoin. You have like key blocks, and you have like, small blocks between them. So, the miner that generates the key block can keep generating new blocks until the new key block arrives. So, the miner doesn’t have to wait for 10 minute like in Bitcoin, for the new block. He can keep generating the blocks. It’s called Bitcoin NG. It allows the use of mining power more efficiently and of course, it improves the throughput. You can increase throughput like … I don’t know how many times, it’s hard to say, but you can have around 100 transactions per second or even more, up to 1,000. You have to wait for the finalization, but at the same time, you can push more transactions into the network. It can be realized for a proof of stake system. I don’t see any reason not to do that after we have more features. Like, when we have gateways, we have DEX, and the load of the network is pretty big, we will have to realize this throughput enhancement that will allows us to have a thousand transactions per minute. I don’t think it will be a thousand transactions per second, but up to 1,000 is doable I think with this approach. We will have to realize that thing that we have been working on with Leonid, the professor from Boston, that allows us to have a smaller local database. That is going to allow miners to process transactions faster. You don’t have to store all of the blockchain data. It can be big too, and no one did it before either. These combinations of two approaches, of like, the authenticated data structures approach that allows the reduction of the load on the local node, and the Bitcoin NG approach, that allows the pushing of more transactions into the blockchain. This combination is going to allow us to have a very robust and productive system. If we are able to put some type of smart contract functionality on top of that, it’s going to be a very versatile and very complete system. So, this is our goal. I realize that you do need to have contracts, and now I’m looking for ways to make this functionality as fast as possible, and as useful as possible. So, we’ll have contracts too. Now, we have to add featuresm like, more features. We have to have gateways, and we have to have the DEX. Basically we want to have everything that we promised, everything that you can see in our wallet. All those inactive tabs, they have to become active. This is our goal for the next several months.”
Lootz: “Can you explain the idea behind improving authenticated dynamic dictionaries and how it could be used? Is this unique to Waves?”
Sasha: “Yes it can be used anywhere. For example, the Cardano system – it’s from IOHK. Charles Hoskinson is the leader there and they are trying to use this too, because it is open source. Of course, it can be used by anybody. So, the idea here is to allow miners not too store all the data. For example, imagine that you have 1,000 assets, or 10,000 assets – 10,000 different tokens in the network. You can’t really store all the transaction data for all the tokens. You care only about, for example, the token that you issued, but you still need to verify all the blocks if you are mining or if you are just using the system. You have to verify all the blocks. But, in order to do that, you have to have the full transaction history. This authenticated data structure approach allows you not to have the full transaction history, but store only some kind of digest of the history, and you can use this digest to verify the transactions. There is some like, cryptographical proof that you have to store locally. You don’t have to store the transaction data; you only need to store this proof. You can verify all the transactions in tokens that you don’t really care about using this proof. You still have to verify the blocks. So you need to verify all transactions, even for tokens that you don’t really have any use for. In order to be able to verify it efficiently, you need to have those proofs, which are pretty small. You don’t need to store all of the data, and you can verify it really fast. It can be used also for the native token for Waves. Potentially it can be in any kind of cryptocurrency, also for Bitcoin probably. It is a very interesting approach. The idea here is not to store all of the transaction data, but to store some kind of merkle tree. This also comes from Bitcoin. This merkle tree approach is some kind of enhancement of the merkle tree. You store this merkle tree and you can verify all of the transactions using this merkle tree structure and not the full data. This is an approach that is really useful for scalability, and it will be used by many systems, I’m sure.”
Lootz: “The only problem is that when a decision needs to be made on Bitcoin, you need a full consensus from everybody. Is there going to be some kind of consensus with Waves or is it going to be like you know, a group, that will help make decisions in the future?”
Sasha: “I think that my idea is to use the whole community. So, Waves Community Token is made especially for this. You can reach out to your community and ask them to vet some projects or to decide on something. We will see how it works, but the idea is to have this voting token. It is very important, so everybody can have it. Everybody who wants to participate can participate. We will have some kind of board I think, some kind of foundation, further along the way I think. This year, within half a year, we will have a standard structure, a foundation, which decides on the general direction of Waves Platform development. Now, I’m talking to many people now so it is kind of complicated. I just want to kickstart the business side of the project and have more startups coming to us. They need to start crowdfunding with us. Those kinds of organizational things can wait. We need to move faster now. We had some issues with slow development so we need to catch up and start moving faster. All of that bureaucracy can slow us down. My goal now is to make the business side really work.”
Lootz: “This Waves Community Token, that’s what WCT is, this token comes out today or tomorrow?”
Sasha: “Tomorrow, yea, during office hours. So like, when people are in the office, we will launch it. So, I think in 12 hours or so. It’s 2AM now, here, so, I’m going to be in the office in about 8 hours. When people are there in about 10 to 12 hours, we will distribute the token to all the people who have their Waves out of exchanges. If you have your Waves tokens at some exchange, at Bittrex for example, you don’t receive the community token.”
Lootz: “The first distribution is going to be 20%, and then for the next 9 months, it’s going to be 10% every month. The way it works is, between the 16th and the 15th of next month, there are going to be snapshots taken. This initial one was only 15 days.”
Sasha: “Yea, yea, 15 days and the next distribution will use monthly snapshots. So, you will have daily snapshots during the month, and then you just average out. So you make some average balance in the snapshots that were taken during the last month, and you have some average balance distribution. Then you send the tokens out according to it.
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