A lot has happened in the past few weeks!

Last Monday I attended Grincon. Grin is a privacy coin that’s an implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol. It’s got one minute block times and didn’t have a premine or founders reward. I really respect that and I think it aligns incentives and sets the project up for long term success. When discussing the roadmap they made a point to point out the things they don’t know or weren’t sure about. They could do this because they didn’t have as much financial incentive to inflate expectations. They even went so far as to make the block reward at constant 60 GRIN forever instead of giving Grin a capped the supply like Bitcoin has. This gives less of an incentive to early adopters to hold coins but favors long term adoption instead. This I’m less sure about. Currently their lead and seemly only full time developer is being funded though donations which they asked multiple times for at the conference. I respect what they’re doing but I’m not sure if it’ll be sustainable. I do really value working software and real world adoption though and the tech is definitely the coolest thing I’ve seen since Ethereum. But, I think there is some middle ground between telling a complete lie and raising hundreds of millions of dollars vs being 100% honest and having to rely solely on donations to fund development. Regardless I love experimentation. Try it out! If it works then it works. If not go back and try again.

I saw some people I knew at the conference and met a ton more really smart interesting people as well. It was nice to hear positive validation of what I’m working on: “Oh and if it doesn’t work out the things you’ll learn will be valuable at your next job.” is something one of the people there said to me. Usually when I tell people I’m working on building my own blockchain they look at me like I’m trying to build my own rocket ship to go to the moon. Another quote that stuck with me regarding the current state of the world: “You know how people say the day is darkest before the dawn? The reverse it true as well.” We laughed and processed to stuff our faces with the finger food piled on the table in the lobby.

Hearing about all these cool technologies like MimbleWimble and CukooCycle got me thinking a lot about different ways in which Ellipticoin could be set up. One idea I had was to create a hybrid proof of work/proof of burn version of hashcash. This could work by having miners burn some coins and then after some amount of time (24 hours say) they could “mine” those burned values. You’d do this in the same way hashcash works in Bitcoin where you concatenate the block hash with a nonce but instead you concatenate the block hash, the nonce, and the burned transaction. This then makes mining much more expensive because the when you’re mining you have to pay for the for the energy to run your mining rig but also you have to pay for the currency you’re burning. You could then put constant multipliers on the amount of energy burned vs the amount of currency burned as desired. Burning currency is better for the environment and it also levels the playing field a bit because you don’t favor people who have access to cheaper energy. It’s hard to bootstrap a currency off of proof of burn though because you have a chicken or the egg problem. What made me think of this is that Grin is using one mining algorithm (Cuckatoo31+) and will migrate over to another one (Cuckaroo29) over time using sliding constants. That sounded like a great idea. Using a similar sliding algorithm you could bootstrap the network with proof of work and slowly transition to proof of burn. I could also use their idea of no premine and no founder reward and launch this network without having to do a token sale! If I put a fixed cap on supply of the currency I think that would be enough to incentivize people to mine it. Another more envelope pushing idea I had was to have the burned tokens be deposited into a DAO on the platform. There could then be some sort of on-chain governance structure that decided where to spend those funds such as on development of the protocol itself.

I’m still thinking the first iteration of Ellitpcoin will be a scaling solution on top of Ethereum because that’s where it has the potential to get the most usage. It will, however, be possible to use most of the components of that system to build a standalone blockchain, like the one I described above, as well. I’m also a big believer in the Stellar Consensus Protocol which could be used to build yet another network. I could use the same components to build a Polkadot parachain. I could build Proof of Authority networks. Each of these networks would require a way to gossip blockchain data, a way to communicate with and process smart contracts and api for users to interact with the system. I want to build the simplest implementation of those components and iterate from there. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about software development in the past 15 or so years it’s that iterating on working software leads to better results than planning how the software will work upfront. Our assumptions about the world are very often incorrect. It’s not until we try things that we can tell if they will really work or not in reality.

One such component that needs to be built is a way for users to interact with the Virtual Machine. Last week I released a functioning version of exactly that: WasmRPC! Here’s the updated Ellipticoin Base Token contract which now implements a WasmRPC interface. Since WebAssembly only has integer and float types I needed a way to represent more complex type like strings and maps/objects in binary format so I could pass complex arguments to a WebAssembly program and have complex values returned from it. Instead of writing my own standard for the binary format I used the existing standard CBOR. Basically WasmRPC says data should be communicated over CBOR and describes how errors should be handled and provides some optional imports as well.

It’s a similar to the CommonWA standard which the Perlin network uses. I’m really excited for the Perlin network launch which is scheduled for late spring/early summer. I feel like they have very similar goals to Ellipticoin and they’ve been coming out with some great open source software like life and noise. I discovered CommonWA after putting together WasmRPC. Each spec shares some functionality but there are different functionalities as well. CommonWa defines all resources as URLs for example. This might not make sense for Ellipticoin since Ellipticoin won’t natively be interacting with external resources. I would love to find common functionality and come to agreement on certain parts of the spec though (potentially around error codes for example).

Standards like these will be good for users of the platforms because they will allow them to run their smart contracts on multiple platforms with minimal or no modifications. I value freedom and I think it will be important in the future to be able to move between blockchains so you can us the one that best aligns with your values and best fits your needs.

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The day after Grincon I went back to the city and worked out of the Compound office for the day. It was great to catch up and hear about all they’ve accomplished over the past few months. They’ve already got millions of dollars worth of value flowing through their protocol and it’s one of the most used Dapps in the world.

It was also great to get feedback on Ellipticoin from Geoff and the team since they are so deeply involved the space. – These next few weeks I plan to get transaction processing working and get a testnet up again.

As always I’m always excited to chat more about all of this. If you have any feedback or would like chat more drop in the Telegram channel and say hello!

Until next time,

-M