QuarkChain Bi-Weekly AMA Summary-09/21/2019
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: QKC emphasizes scalability. Have you ever thought about entering the social media space using sharding technology since social media can solve many problems related to exposure?
A1: Indeed, social media is one way to increase traffic and many community members have mentioned whether Wechat can work on shards with high throughput. We think there is a lot of room for expansion. However, if we simply copy the existing model, it is very difficult to succeed. On top of that, the decentralized user experience is not necessarily good. At this stage, we are still discussing the specific business model.
Q2: What kind of support and help did QuarkChain obtain from the cooperation with Unicom Venture Capital? How will QuarkChain get the most out of the cooperation with Unicom Venture Capital?
A2: Unicom is an expert in the field of communications and 5G is also a very hot topic at the forefront of the communications industry. We hope to cooperate with Unicom in several frontier areas, including research and development of 5G and blockchains, as well as related investments. We think this will be a very exciting area in the future! At present, the cooperation between the two sides is just a warm-up. As a mega-size enterprise, Unicom is cautious in all aspects of work. But as an innovative incubator, a research center, and an investment institution under Unicom, Unicom Venture Capital has great potential in the development of 5G, AI, and blockchain. We will work together to set up a Blockchain Innovation Laboratory to explore applications of blockchain technology in energy security, iron and steel industry, big data, and security.
Q3. What is QuarkChain’s philosophy? What is the biggest challenge you are facing?
A3: QuarkChain aims to build a new, ever-evolving blockchain network with high throughput through the use of the unique sharding technology. I think the biggest challenge is the uncertainty of the market, which has a large volatility these days. At the same time, we think there exists tremendous opportunities at the market awaiting to be unlocked. Since we are a long-term project, we need to address the uncertainty and make proper planning for our development ahead! Value creation is another important topic for us. We just released our technical white paper titling Boson Consensus: A scalable blockchain consensus (Read it here:https://github.com/QuarkChain/pyquarkchain/blob/master/papers/boson.pdf). From the paper, we derive a blockchain sharding system with three main principles:
1. Global security for all shards
2. Multi-consensus/ledger model support
3. Secure and efficient cross-shard
These principles are also applicable for other blockchains such as consortium, tokenless or private as long as the blockchain needs high throughput and flexibility.
Q4: What values can blockchain technology bring to society? What values in particular will Blockchain/QuarkChain create?
A4: There is no doubt that blockchains can support fairness, efficiency, openness, transparency, and better privacy and security protection, areas in which the current Internet system underperforms. These advantages can be seen not only through the storage for valuables (Bitcoin digital storage) that you have seen or experienced, but also through the open global ledgers (ETH smart contract) and through other Dapps. In the future, you may experience QuarkChain better cross-border transfers and micro-payments, better privacy protection and security solutions, better Dapp applications and so on.
Q5: What do you think about the recent fluctuation in cryptocurrency prices and how to deal with the changes?
A5: I think the short-term rise or fall did not have any directional significance. Especially for our work, we cannot take this as an indicator. At the same time, we are also very concerned about the trend of the market and look forward to doing better work to support the development of the community.
Q6: How can QuarkChain build communities better and how can it promote itself?
A6: One is to convey the information correctly; the other is to convey the information to more people. In a fully competitive market, the preparation work before promotion is also important and is something we focus on a lot. But as you know, sometimes the best publicity work is the product itself and the technology. Products will speak for themselves! Please look forward to our future work.
Q7: What’s the QKC token economic model and how will its architecture ensure the scarcity of the token and help to growth token price?
A7: The tokens will be reduced to 88% every year. Here is more information about the token model: https://medium.com/quarkchain-official/fixed-supply-token-model-with-dynamically-added-shards-chains-52db23a35aa3
Q8: How does QuarkChain plan to beat the vast Ethereum ecosystem?
A8: I think existing the Ethereum ecosystem will exist unless Ethereum makes a big mistake (such as failure to launch ETH2.0). We will create a new ecosystem, a more diversified ecosystem by our multi-consensus/ledger support.
Q9: If Ethereum launches its 2.0 successfully in the future, how will you beat it? How would you attract people to join the QKC ecosystem?
A9: Ether2.0 is working better than Ether1.0, which we already achieved that if you check out our mainnet.However, we are able to support a more diversified ecosystem by supporting more ledger/consensus/tx models. This means we could run Bitcoin/Ether/Litecoin/ZEC/Grin/… all these chains together, for example by forking them, so that they could work together in a single network and communicate with each other in a completely decentralized way!
Q10: It is difficult for businesses based on accurate news reports to compete with newspapers and news agencies. Do you think you have a better advantage than those media outlets and beat them?
A10: That is an interesting business model. My understanding is that blockchain may help businesses to verify the information.
Part 2: Technical Questions
Q1: How can a lightweight wallet like Qpocket ensure adequate decentralization, and is there a desktop wallet that synchronizes block data？
A1: We have a desktop wallet that supports metamask. QPocket connects to a node provider that is commonly used in the industry, or simply an official node. In the future, the wallet will provide its own node for users to use, and will provide the function of manually setting nodes in the wallet. Users can switch nodes or set their own trusted nodes.
Q2: Is the replacement algorithm for 6–7 shards still in the planning? I have CPU servers and I would like to put them to work for some time until there come GPUs again.
A2: Yes, please check QCEP-2 (QuarkChain Evolution Proposal 2): https://github.com/QuarkChain/QCEPs/blob/master/QCEP/qcep-2.md.
Q3: Can you tell us a little bit about the proprietary technology of the QuarkChain network, its novel approaches, and the intellectual property that differentiates it from other solutions?
A3: I think the best IP is our boson consensus. Please take a look here: https://github.com/QuarkChain/pyquarkchain/blob/master/papers/boson.pdf
Q4: QuarkChain launched testnet 3,1, can you introduce more about it?
A4: Yes, it is based on our latest code and support smart contracts/mining on root chain (via PoSW), new hash algorithm , and multi-native tokens.
Q5: What is the consensus algorithm of QuarkChain?
A5: We could adopt any single chain consensus (PoW/PoS/dPoS/BFT) for any shard and root. Different root and shard chains can adopt different consensus. Overall, the sharding consensus is based on Boson consensus. Please check out our technical white paper here: https://github.com/QuarkChain/pyquarkchain/blob/master/papers/boson.pdf. I think this is one of our major contributions, which allows a network running different consensuses or ledgers!
Q6: Can you provide some insights as to the technical architecture of QuarkChain?
A6: To summarize in a few words, we are a sharding project that
- achieves global security for all shards, unlike a lot of existing projects that rely on some local security, which is much weaker
- supports multi-consensus/ledger/tx models while existing ones have to rely on a single model such as PoS
- its cross-shard is very efficient
Website
https://www.quarkchain.io
Telegram
https://t.me/quarkchainio
Twitter
https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Medium
https://medium.com/quarkchain-official
Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/quarkchainofficial/
Special Quiz:
What are the three main principles that QuarkChain’s blockchain sharding system has?
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