2019 will be a Momentous Year for Blockchain
As this relatively new technology beds in and becomes part of the standard wiring of the internet / of things / of our lives, there are a few projects out there which really address the future and promise to make the Blockchain revolution, truly revolutionary in a properly disruptive way, which is to say - overturn the established way of doing things; with a novel idea that enables factors of efficiency and a commensurate lowering of costs, with more security and in crypto's case, a new found, oft wanting, level of accountability and transparency, which in turn creates a real sense of trust, which actually translates to trustless. I don't need to trust you, it just is exactly what it says it is, no argument.
The Enablers
I've been fortunate to have been involved in several of these projects so far and for me as both a writer and an armchair blockchain philosopher, it's the platform projects which always grab and pique my attention. The enablers like LISK, GoChain, DAOstack and others like SONM's fog computing, projects which allow other people to benefit from the project's unique vision are building the foundations of the future and that is really exciting. As with all new technologies, it's what you do with it that's important but when the team building such a concept have a real VISION for the future, built upon their own expertise and far reach into myriad possibilities, this is when the extraordinary can happen.
OCT
You may or may not have heard much about OpenCryptoTrust (yet). Among the many 2018 crypto projects in launch / pre-launch phase they are busily building relationships, partnerships and possibilities with trans-national clients in the background and I've been working with them helping explain just what kind of apparent MAGIC they are creating. (If technology is sufficiently advanced it will appear to work like magic.) Unlike many projects which simply offer another potentially useless coin or simply tackle a single, specific issue of provenance in the transfer of ownership of abstract or real world objects, OCT have envisioned and built an open ended technology as a platform to build an array of possibilities in virtually any business vertical you can think of including immediately obvious benefits for telco, fintech, media, logistics & medicine but also with a ready to go solution in the form of not one, but two killer app software packages, directly addressing real world, known and obstructive pain points in the TELCO sector. A sector which they of course, have Master Jedi level knowledge of.
What is OpenCryptoTrust ?
OCT started life as a Wall Street backed proof of concept in Optical Switch Network Design and Blockchain became a no-brainer solution for part of the solution as the technology began to mature. CEO Mayande Walker who is a world leader in the sector and his team of Tech Knights at OCT envisaged overhauling the TELCO industry with a move so bold as to augur the biggest leap in the industry since the jump from copper cables to optical fibre. As you can imagine, leaps of this kind used to happen once every few generations, the last one (copper to fibre) was really initiated about a generation and a half ago and similar leaps will no doubt begin to happen every few years in the near future but for now, building a platform meant that applications for TELCO was really good opportunity to test bed the project capabilities. One which could & would provide immediate results in a sector they could prove and refine the technology upon. Importantly, one in which they were already global thought leaders and it's challenges they already knew initimately. The plan was to later put the technology out there as a platform for a host of industry sectors to benefit from with custom applications. This is the kind of limitless potential which immediately interests me in crypto projects. How far can it be stretched ? does it have the possibility of becoming a mainstream technology in it's own right. What else can it do ? Think Flubber. I Googled it for you already
Watch CEO Mayande Walker explain the main framework of ideas behind OCT's platform
Straight out of the Box
Perhaps at the beginning, even the team may not have even fully realised the potential for OCT partnerships to take their technology into unknown future territories, including the A.I marketplace, perhaps they did ! (they are now actively partnering with AgorAI) and in a symbiotic relationship rapidly becoming a blockchain normality (AI-BC) together will open up huge opportunities to leverage the power of A.I processing and blockchain together for even SME's; small businesses who will no doubt require rapid access to this technology just to survive, grow and evolve their business plans deep into the 21st Century, without being swamped and outflanked by a handful of techno-giants, who already have huge leads in big data processing, which if you ever watched / read Sci-Fi, is an incredibly scary / or exciting prospect, depending on your tech / blockchain perspective.
Blockchain from Scratch
The team at OCT built a hybrid Blockchain from scratch, inspired by Steemit's very own Graphene backbone. 100,000 transactions per second is a usable block production rate for VHV (very high volume), LTT's (low latency tasks) including high bandwidth activities like social media (steemit) and going full circle... trading, for example, cryptokens, (my own concatenation of the phrase there, see what I did?) The OCT team modified the blockchain protocol to perform undreamed of tasks which to the average network engineer, may at first sound impossible. but it is very real and very, disruptive, ergo- revolutionary. I mean, if someone said that you could use blockchain to completely circumnavigate the need for VPN by building super encrypted tunnels through the public internet, would you go WHOA?
What about if I said internet billing for enterprise could be charged for the exact amount of bandwidth you actually used, no guesswork, over priced, under used, block contracts ? or that (on a fully optical switch) network, circuits could be provisioned by a network controller from a laptop in near realtime, not the usual 90 day turnaround time and then torn down instantly when not required? If you work in TELCO, this is the stuff of dreams. The cutting edge of the TELCO sector, which is an enormous, global, essential infrastructure industry, so you can imagine it's causing quite a stir... and this remember is actually a launch project for the OCT platform. Who knows what will be possible in the near future for other verticals with similarly longstanding obstructive and cumbersome issues to overcome ? They used to say the Sky's the Limit. That's probably going to change to Light Speed's the Limit. How long will it be before that no longer holds water ?
The Proof is (in) the Pudding
Building consensus on a network is an essential part of the blockchain soul. Proof of brain, which Steemit uses is clever. This article is Proof of Brain in action. It works in conjunction with Proof of Stake, PoS or Delegated proof of stake DPoS in (Steemit's case) using a pool of democratically elected witnesses to write the blocks. It's a convenient and efficient way of securing the network. It is democratic..but in ordinary Proof of Stake networks, large stakeholders are rewarded for their larger stake, so Proof of Stake quickly becomes not much more fair than Proof of Work. Large Mining operations end up running it, pools become the only way to realistically contribute / earn rewards and the idea of undue influence quickly rears it's head. OCT came up with a novel idea to return crypto to it's liberally idealistic roots by coming up with a totally new consensus algorithm called Proof of Duration to work in conjunction with Proof of Stake.
Smart Democracy
Consensus types have become a hot issue and an area of rapid development in the crypto sphere to tackle these issues and OCT saw an opportunity to create something completely new to address the imbalance of PoS. Proof of Duration is a smart way of re-democratising the network to attract smaller miners who will have an equal chance of being selected to cement a block based on the duration of their hodling. (I'm sure it will be emulated / copied in the future). PoD means that someone who holds few tokens for a long time has the equivalent opportunity as someone who held a lot of tokens for a short time. It encourages hodling (staking too). It's really smart and the one thing which we all rely on as a constant unwavering feature of reality, TIME, is difficult to argue with. It's so standardised, even if our perception of it can be radically different from one moment to the next, it's always the same. Proof of Duration brings fairness and the opportunity to build a truly global network runnig on a variety of machines from servers to phones, with a wide demographic. It's a token that may help change attitudes towards mining and prove that it's still worth participating in for single machine users, (I.M.H.O).
Light Footprints in the Sand
There has been a lot of nay-saying about Bitcoin and crypto mining in general due to massively intensive processing, which it has been argued is using MASSIVE amounts of energy and produces even more emissions, killing the planet and wasting a lot of money in the process. All good points but nobody talks about data-centre energy bills. Junk Food factory footprints and a million other usual suspects. Skyscrapers with the lights on all day and night, etc, etc. (facebook stores somewhere in the region of 250,000 images per minute. That's a lot of cloud and clouds don't run on fresh air.) Ok real clouds actually do, but you get the picture, everything uses energy and where we can save some, we should do, both economically, ethically and practically. When we (eventually / BIG IF) become a TECH1 society, which can harvest all of the energy from our Sun, it won't matter so much how we power up but for the time being, or until solar panels become much much more efficient, we're very wasteful beings and not particularly efficient either, so the OCT team have also come up with very light mining software to run softly in the background.
Proof of Stake means you don't have to keep notching up the difficulty rate every 5 minutes and require chips to be built and cooled in outer space for the network to function. It is envisaged that you will be able to run OCT mining on a cell / mobile phone. That's a really positive step forward. Combined with Proof of Duration, it will no doubt be a very attractive app to run and one that is hoped will create a widely held network with many small stakeholders. Democratic and ethical, low carbon, sensitive to need. A nice touch ! Visionary is really just a combination of simple & great ideas aimed at the future, now.
Here's one of the animated films I produced for OCT about mining the OCT token which explains how and why it works.
What about these KILLER APPs?
Not one but two. BD-WAN is like SD-WAN but is BlockChain Defined, as opposed to Software Defined, Wide Area Network software. It's pretty industry specific but it does something very exciting and revolutionary for TELCO operators. Real time provisioning (as opposed to 90 day turnaround) and pay as you go billing, which had NEVER been achievable before. We're talking about getting major TELCO companies (national carriers), excited.
Here's one of the animated films I produced for OCT about BD-WAN which explains what it does.
If you would like to find out more about OCT visit the website
the writer is actively involved in the OCT project, nonetheless it is also a project he is genuinely excited about and one that (IMHO) is potentially a gamechanger for the sector