What is Darcrus? What is dAppsheet?
Darcrus is a token that is tradable on NXT, Waves or any exchange that lists Darcrus. dAppsheet is the team’s first project utilizing Darcrus. dAppsheet will decentralize a business’ application using blockchain technology and automatically replicate their underlying database to tailor any tracking, billing accounting , authentication or service desk application to their specific needs. This will ensure trust and security. We will offer consulting services to businesses who need assistance building their custom GUI for accessing their dAppsheet. Software developed by the team will be open source with the exception of NDA-signed software developed for clients.
Will there be rewards to investors for profits earned from purchases from by businesses/clients?
Yes, a percentage of profits generated by mining and direct client purchases will be used to purchase Darcrus from the sell book of the major participating exchanges. These tokens will then be burned.
Where did the name Darcrus come from? Any particular meaning?
Darcrus came from my head, and checking around to see if there were anything named this.
So Darcrus is going to be structured like a business seeking services and solutions to customers right?
Darcrus is the tokenized software that powers (some) dAppsheet apps. Sigwo Technologies will use Darcrus projects (see roadmap) for its' consultancy business. Closely related to the structure of any service-providing entity; IE Microsoft, Arcsight, Snort, McAfee, etc.
Where did the idea for the logo come from?
My daughter likes the wolf, so she picked a photo she liked and I had a designer wireframe it.
Are you creating your own blockchain or you'll be layering on to of other blockchains?
Kinda both, but only fully private chains will be 'created'. The public chains will work from the platform in which they reside.
How many people are on the team?
Right now, somewhere between 1 and 3. I'll add an operations manager and a JS developer in Jan/Feb.
Who would you say is Darcrus' biggest competitor?
Factom is probably pretty close with their offerings, although I have not dug deep into anything they are doing. Possibly BigChainDB, although they seem to be missing any type of user interface.
Sounds like the Buyback process would keep the DAR market liquid, Is this something completely new?
There is at least one coin that I know of that uses this model, but their profits come from trading (Gambit). Multipools for a certain type of coin (that I built many of) do the same thing, but only if the pool mines profitable coins _AND_ the community mines at that pool. Far too often, multipools are paid for and built, just to have the 'community' abandon the project the following week. This structure is an acceptable way to reward those who hold their coins for the long haul.
In the future is there anything the Darcrus project could be utilised for in the coming IoT boom?
There could definitely be a market for Darcrus and IoT, but that is not our core focus right now. It could be added to the core focus, depending on funds raised. As with any enduring business, strategic plans are built 36-72 months out at a very high level. That strategy will be built in the first few months. Thank you for your suggestion, please keep the great ideas flowing.
Sig, will you be the lead developer of the project? Or will you be the CEO who is handling all things etc? Or both?
Depends on if you are asking about January 2017 or January 2018. I will be on the search for an operations manager and lead developer fairly quickly. I will direct a good portion of my time towards spreading the word and solutions of Darcrus.
Would these tokens be used for licenses or something akin to that as described within the various use cases? Or would they simply be held as reward or value vehicles? Just wondering. I can see many use cases in IT infrastructures. The trick is to provide a product and service that a CIO or equivalent could get their head around.
Yes to both.
Some companies will decide they need a nonpublic implementation, for example medical records. These companies can have our engineers design a totally private chain. To begin, this type of implementation does not require any 'check-in' with a public Blockchain. Some companies, like one that recently contacted me need their database public to verifiably prove the records exist and in what manner they exist. I will be hiring teams of sales and engineers, pairing them together in regions. From my regular current day job, I have many industry contacts that are always looking for new tech and improved ways of giving the customer increased capability
Tokens can be held, sold, or whatever you do with any other coin/token.
There are many use cases and there is no trick. Simply show the value of the product to solve a business use case and support their business processes. A CIO doesn't need to know a thing about blockchain to see a value in automatic and decentralized replication of data services with a double-click. They already accept a lot less with a lot more headache. If we go into a meeting trying to lead with 'this is a blockchain....' we will get laughed out of the room most likely.
Any future plans to have a few companies pilot these projects?
Yes. Sigwo Technologies will be the first to have a pilot dAppsheet. I have several businesses already reach out for a discussion and a security/consulting business want to discuss Universal Second Factor (U2F) in the near future.
The U2F is just a added layer of security to the applications on your platform right?
It's like using Google Authenticator but instead of a phone you use a Trezor or YubiKey. The real work to be done is how to decentrally
authorize users to certain aspects of a file store, database, web GUI, or bank account. I want to incorporate this into the core dApplication.
Why are you using an asset system for Darcrus ? What are the benefits?
Asset have a inflation-less supply, thanks to token you can receive rewards in the future which come from sales, consultancy, providing support, data migration, making businesses life easier and safer and through providing them new features, deploying standard/custom versions of dAppshets, public versions can use Darcrus tokens as fuel (on Waves platform, as example) if they don't need to run on private chain, if company chooses private chain, it still needs to pay for the services we provide.
What are the differences between Darcrus and bigchaindb? I see that scalable database blockchain based already exists.
They do not seem to be building complete solutions for businesses, rather just the backend database portion. Also, one size does not always fit all.
Will developers be able to build apps onto of the darcrus platform? I just want to be clear on this. I'm referring to Developers who are not part of the Darcrus team, open source if you will, adding value to your platform, much like how Darcrus will be adding value to the NXT platform, among others.
Darcrus is not a platform, it is a middleware. For example, Waves is the platform, dAppsheet is the middleware that provides session connections via the Waves data transport layer. According to OSI, dAppheet is Layer 5 and up. Waves would take care of Layers 1-4. Darcrus will bring value to the entire blockchain ecosystem, not one particular 'currency'.
You said that you'll be pairing up sales and devs in different regions so these devs will need to be fluent in languages on all blockchains I would assume?
As for regions, that is a future plan. For now we have these things called 'airplanes' that are made for us to travel in.
We also have great technology to have virtual meeting rooms and remote presentations. This happens a lot in the business world, where the sales manager travels to the potential or current customer's site and the pre-sales engineer dials in remotely and conducts a demo.
Why should businesses or anybody with a database utilize dAppsheet ? and in summary how does it work ?
Darcrus is an excellent solution if you have SLA requirements for ongoing uptime and data availability. dAppsheet will allow you to have robust copies of your database wherever you have a dAppsheet Node. It will ensure that you always have a verifiable database in multiple locations. In the case of an event your business will not see service disruption or data loss, except to see the DNS or load balancers failover to the available backend dAppsheet nodes. Changes to the dAppsheet database can only be done if you have access to relevant keys. Later in 2017, Trezor U2F authentication can also utilized for cryptographically verified logins.
How does dAppsheet utilise the blockchain?
dAppsheets can use private chain AND private nodes or use public nodes as a private chain. There is 100% flexibility. dAppsheets will use Darcrus if they are on a public node. On a private node, there is no requirement for Darcrus as of now. In the future, private nodes could be required to publish 'checkpoints' in a public node. Darcrus gains value from the buyback program as discussed in the OP.
Can Darcrus and dAppsheet benefit and expand on another platform besides NXT?
Companies that have signed up to use dAppsheets can choose to use Ethereum as their base platform, if that is their in-house developer’s specialty. The company may choose to select a Java implementation (NXT/Ardor) as well. The flexibility will be incredible and they will still retain the same underlying value of the blockchain decentralization. dAppsheet is a generic term and businesses can choose their own name for their personalize system. Each dAppsheet can be the side/child chain of any compatible platform.
What kind of encryption/decryption and query response time are you looking at? The farther away data is from my geographical location, the more time consuming it will be to retrieve it. Are you going to have any hot spots for enterprises to avoid this issue?
Encryption is done at tx (or data submission) time. decryption happens when data is pulled and a valid private key is presented.
Query response time will vary, depending on the application it is providing services for. Retrieval of information for human viewing will be via web GUI, so the blockchain will not be the bottleneck here.
Input latency will/can be as fast as a bitcoin transaction into the mempool, which is milliseconds. Blocks can be increased to store more data per TX, and the confirmation times can be lowered to verify blocks quicker. So instead of the '5-7 tx per second' bitcoin does now, you can increase blocks to 10mb and do 100 per second if needed. Also, if you need to grow, the dAppsheet can hardfork to increase with the business without expensive migrations. With technology such as Waves, they are projecting 1000's of transactions per second.
As to the worldwide database, it is replicated across many places, but the data is whole at each location. For example, if I set my Sigwo Technologies database up, I would have my 'main' node in Stafford, VA with other nodes close to or on premise of the other locations. My data retrieval does not go across multiple nodes. Much like bitcoin, the entire database is on each node, replicated to all nodes.
If the company uses darcrus, for the public blockchain , do they need to hold an amount of coins or actually have to spend coins per action.
The company does not need to hold any certain amount, but they will need some to pay for the tx fees to the publicly available chain (a private chain from Ethereum or Waves or NXT or Ardor) in Darcrus if that is how the base platform is built. For example, a public Waves dAppsheet, the company would need to have Darcrus to pay the Waves nodes the transaction fee.
What are your plans for a consultancy arm of the project? Given you said each GUI can be customised to a customer's needs, is that something that you envisaged paid professional services delivering. Or will it be so simple customers will expect to do this themselves, or is it just part of the base service?
Answer by MX
Steven is working daily in real life with similar businesses, data centers, databases, he is engineer, he is professional, he will be targeting the same and new businesses just by presenting own solution based on blockchain, there is a chance you will see some GUI during the ICO, we would like to present ready solution with nice GUI which can be accepted by customers at once and provide consultancy next additionally, yes GUI can be also customized for customer`s needs, a percentage of net profit from sales and consultancy will be added also to the buy back reward system.
There will be differing levels of 'ease' for a dAppsheet. But even if/when we build a 'GUI dAppsheet Customizer' businesses will still need the deployment and security expertise for integration --> migration of their data. Things in businesses are never 'light switch ready'
Can you elaborate on what you mean by powering 'some' of the dAppsheet apps? How will other dAppsheets run if not using DAR? And will you be hiring a sales team to go out and sell your services when your platform is ready?
First part of your question: some companies will decide they need a nonpublic implementation....IE medical records. These companies can have our engineers design a totally private chain. To begin, this type of implementation does not require any 'check-in' with a public Blockchain. Some companies needs the database public to verifiably prove the records exist and HOW they exist.
Yes I will be hiring teams of sales and engineers, pairing them together in regions. From my regular current day job, I have many industry contacts that are always looking for new tech and improved ways of giving the customer increased capability.
Are you creating your own blockchain or you'll be layering on to of other blockchains?
Kinda both, but only fully private chains will be 'created'. The public chains will work from the platform in which they reside.
Am I right in saying that Darcrus and dAppsheet is looking to disrupt the Data Center industry. I mean it sounds like the problems Darcrus and dAppsheet is trying to solve are generally specific to Data Center services. At least where disaster recovery is concerned...How much data will allocated to each DAR? And how many entry credits to the network will each DAR represent?
No, not trying to disrupt the datacenter. There is no 'data per DAR’ unless you mean 'how big are the blocks' and the upper limit has not been set. I'm trying disrupt 'how' things are stored, replicated, accessed, and verified. The data is not stored like SIA or STORJ on private person's storage. The company's data is stored on their own hardware (or cloud solution if they choose) but the data is automatically replicated in full across the company's node system.
If you create a big blockchain database. how will you cope with data bloat? how much data can be stored in a block and what is the Blocktime?
Blockchain bloat is not a concern unless the company decides it wants to/requires to keep their database pruned. Block data storage and times are 100% customizable per implementation.
How can it be customizable? if they use your chain they need to comply with your transaction and confirmation times right?
For example, I can fork NXT to a private chain and customize it. Each business can have its own Blockchain, meaning they can give the requirements.
So a company can delete data which is in your blockchain?
No, a company (or anyone without proper authorization) can't delete anything from someone else's chain.
Why should they switch to using the blockchain ? if it does not cost anything more they will just leave it there. If all companies think the same it will bloat as hell. or are there some kind of side chains?
Most companies do not have a storage size problem, they have a verification and recovery problem. The current organization I am working for has petabytes of info...that data isn't going to get magically smaller. But Darcrus will solve replication to our hot site, restoration of services, and verification of the data as it is written to the dAppsheet's blockchain. No more fumbling with data archive tapes, outdated or non-licensed software, and broken restoration polices because they are too long or incur downtime that is not 'worth the risk to the company'....until you need that data recovered.
I was reading about an example about medical records of a hospital being stored on a private chain, and as we know when we want to obtain a copy of these records we have to pay them as the system stands currently with fiat. so would we be able to pay for access to our medical records on the chain using dar tokens, but the payment would be thru the public ledger?
When you go to the hospital's site, you pay in fiat and it would be up to the hospital's prerogative if they converted to DAR on the backend. The DAR payment would be on a public chain. I honestly do not see this part happening, as DAR is not a currency 'replacement' token.
Can dAppsheet help in anyway to get medical records online and still be in a secure manner without having to go to the hospital or having them mail it but actually getting it through the chain
Yes, 100% , a hospital can provide outside connection to the records. But I honestly do not see it happening due to current HIPPA regulations and the risk the hospital would have to be comfortable with. This could happen in 5-7 years though.
When in future hospitals can legally use a decentralized database, would the Darcrus team need to be involved to make this hasten or would the hospital IT administrators be able to handle this from their end?
It will depend on how competent their team is. I want to provide a complete solution, but implementing something that has 1 2 3 instructions is still too much for some. There are opportunities for us to have administrators assigned to deploy a dAppsheet as an onsite admin, basically in this scenario we become a contracting company for services and personnel.
With customers' data being in the blockchain, I assume that customers will be able to access their data from anywhere in the world with a internet connection?
This, again, is up to the business policy for that particular company.
Is dAppsheet hacker proof?
It is not hacker proof, it protects any info that's hacked with encryption. Thus making the hacked information essentially useless. Hacked information can be properly secured as for example was BTC-E database, which is stolen from few years but properly secured and not cracked as of now.
As most businesses use Microsoft for their data requirements, what will the platform be built on?
It 100% depends on the business. I know that one implementation will be built from our alpha NXT w/ Nodejs and React GUI version. NXT will run on Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
