QuarkChain Bi-Weekly AMA Summary-09/07/2019
QuarkChain holds a bi-weekly AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Telegram/Wechat groups on Saturday at 7–8 PM PST. This is the summary for AMA from last week. We welcome any questions, comments, and suggestions.
Part 1: Questions about the Blockchain Economy
Q1: Welcome CBO Ting Du. You participated in the roundtable discussion a while back to explore how the blockchain technology can empower the real economy. Can you share some key points that you raised during the summit?
A1: Shanghai Summit is a summit organized and held by the Yangpu District Government. It is quite different from the previous summits I joined before. In particular, I was participating in a high-end roundtable discussion which guides future policy directions. The participants came from a wide array of areas including industry, government, research institutes, academic institutions and so on. QuarkChain participated as business representative.
As we know, the recognition of blockchain in society has been changing all the time. At first, there were doubts; but nowadays, different industries, be it the government, enterprises, academia or research institutes, all begin to embrace and accept blockchain. So what is the biggest change for blockchain in terms of recognition? What makes the society to change its understanding of blockchain? My opinions are as follows: firstly, blockchain itself has changed dramatically; it is no longer considered merely as ICO, a means to raise funds from the masses or scams. Instead, it can truly impact the future economy. Thus, the change in perception is a positive and good one. However, I think from the viewpoint of the blockchain industry, the transformation is not incomplete and is still ongoing. Secondly, some external factors also caused the change in perception, for example, Facebook’s launching Libra, news from J.P. Morgan, the establishment of digital currency research institute of PBoC, all these news enable people to envision the future of blockchain. It imposes a sense of crisis upon innovators of blockchain which prompts them to accelerate the speed of development.
How does blockchain improve, optimize or solve the bottleneck of different industries? What is the solution and commercial deployment of blockchain applications in different fields? In my opinion, firstly, blockchain innovators in China need to pay attention to global opportunities because blockchain is a global platform and all the innovators face the same problems and opportunities. Secondly, we need to pay attention to opportunities that will arise in the future, especially the integration with 5G, AI, and big data. The current problem is obvious: can the current public chains empower the real economy? The answer is absolutely NO. The speed of public chains is too slow and the chains are not flexible. In that regard, the technology of QuarkChain can greatly benefit the real economy that adopts blockchain technology like such as invoice factoring for businesses, deliveries, and e-Commerce businesses. At present, the factoring businessis becoming more fragmented with smaller clients, which translates into smaller orders whose size can be several thousand dollars. In the traditional business model, such orders are difficult to monitor and handle. The key for blockchain to serve as good solution will lie in realizing transparency and high efficiency while maintaining a low cost. If achieved, Blockchain can serve as a reliable credit instrument in many ways.
Q2: In the essay “2-year anniversary of 94” that you wrote, you raised a few interesting points. One is that “the upgrade of consensus mechanism will not bring any changes”. , The other is that “it is time to forget about Killer App and focus on improving infrastructure”. Firstly, we all know that QKC is the only public chain that supports a variety of consensus mechanisms. Other public chains may only support one consensus, and what they can do is to upgrade the consensus. According to what you said before, does that mean that these public chains are limited in how much they can change? The second question is that everyone is actually looking forward to Killer App as proof of the value of blockchain technology. If a blockchain project only focuses on infrastructure improvements and does not have major applications, will people feel that blockchain is unreliable?
A2: The upgrade of consensus mechanism will not bring about any major changes. That first question you raised is confusing since most blockchain projects with major successes or of larger-scale are focusing on changing consensus mechanism. Think about it: which consensus mechanism has the most promising future? It is difficult to tell. Till now only PoW truly proves itself. As for QuarkChain, our assumption is that any consensus can exist in the QuarkChain ecosystem. They can co-exist and can be deployed. Changing one consensus is just a vertical expansion and upgrade with no big changes. Only by changing the underlying technology logic will blockchain see a bright future.
As for the second question, if you pay attention to some popular projects which were launched last year, you can count the number of projects launched and what they delivered so far. If you have any interesting findings, you are welcomed to post and discuss with us. You will find only very few public chains can deliver. Changing the underlying technology is extremely difficult and it is a long process. In my opinion, it is not the time for massive DApp exposure; the Killer App will come out after that. In contrast, we are confident with DApp and I am sure that a true Killer App will come out.
Q3. QuarkChain announced a partnership with Unicom VC. Can you talk about the next steps for collaboration?
A3: For the future steps, on the one hand, we hope to work together to build an ecosystem; on the other hand, we would like to cooperate at the frontier of blockchain, especially in the 5G field such that more people can benefit from the blockchain technology.
Q4: It will take more time for 5G to become available worldwide. How can you expand your blockchain network?
A4: Actually it’s not true. If you take a look in China, 5G stations are everywhere already and we can buy a 5G mobile phone this November. We want to get some experiences first, and I believe the global market will catch up very soon.
Part 2: Technical Questions
Q1: How to make sure every data on the chain is correct from the beginning?
A1: This is the problem that Oracle needs to solve: how to ensure that the data on and off the chain is real.
Q2: The central bank digital currency supports dual offline payment. In other words, even in the whole region with no signal, two users can still transfer money by touching their mobile phones. What is the principle of implementation and how to avoid the double-spending attack? Would QuarkChain develop dual offline payment technology in the future?
A2: I do not know the specific technical details. But at least for now, Bitcoin can’t achieve dual offline support. If it is a relatively small transaction and both sides trust each other, it is possible to achieve. But we have not yet seen a specific blockchain technology to achieve this function.
Q3: Sharding technology poses a problem of the high transaction cost. How does QuarkCHain control the cost issue and how do you plan to overcome the issue?
A3: First of all, the gas fee for cross-chain transaction is 30,000, and the gas fee for in-chain transaction is 21,000. Relatively speaking, gas fee for ERC20 is generally between 30,000 and 50,000. So our gas fee is reasonable and in fact much less.
Q4: Lots of miners and QKC holders are actively joining mining events. Besides the release of mainnet event in October, can you update us about the current mining activity?
A4: PoSW consensus has been working properly for a long time. Now everyone is actively participating. Miners can calculate the profits of mining through calc.quarkchain.io. The earnings are about twice of that of ETH. At the same time, according to their own computer power, they can calculate the number of tokens needed to stake for different shards. In order to stake enough tokens, participants can borrow from community members or purchase. In addition, the development of future shards needs corresponding staking. As long as you have QKC, you can participate in this event. Later, with the opening of smart contracts, users can raise token through contracts.
Q5: Why there is no Killer App at this stage?
A5: On one hand, blockchains have not been widely accepted. On the other hand, there are lots of issues waiting to be solved such as many data and assets are still difficult to reflect on the blockchain. Also, there are throughput and storage capacity problems.
Question：What is the biggest change for blockchain in terms of recognition?
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