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Most Thoughtful Questions
Congratulations to the supporters who asks the following questions! You will get 500 points as thank-you-gift.
Q1. Can you explain why IoTeX is unique?
At a high level, it may seem like IoTeX is working on similar things as others in the blockchain 3.0 space — we have a blockchains-in-blockchain architecture, our in-house Roll-DPoS consensus mechanism, and are innovating on various privacy preserving techniques. Even though our peers in this amazing industry are working on similar innovations, everyone approaches this differently in terms of design and implementation. We are designing our innovations not as standalone / siloed components, but as a collective infrastructure TAILOR FIT for the Internet of Things.
To give you and example, there are several companies working on privacy. One big topic in privacy is stealth addresses, and Monero and other privacy-focused companies are implementing dual-key stealth address protocol (DKSAP), which is state of the art. However, it is not lightweight enough for IoT, so our cryptography team has enhanced this already state of the art privacy-preserving technique. DKSAP-IoT, our lightweight stealth address protocol, is able to reduce the computational overhead by at least 50% when compared to DKSAP scheme, thereby paving the way for its application to blockchain-based IoT systems.
Q2. Why do you think big enterprises/companies will prefer to use a blockchain instead a Private Service offered by Oracle/SAP? What are the real advantages?
The real advantage is the connectivity without needing to pull data off of the network — you mentioned Oracle/SAP which provide on-prem and cloud-based database solutions. Although these may be secure for storage, to transmit data between on-prem database to on-prem database or from cloud to cloud, you must pull the data off of these databases and transmit them via email or other messaging channels. This is a security risk — it is clear that cloud is a safe storage facility, but the transmission of data may be prone to attacks. IoTeX solves this problem by creating the ability for sub-chains of connected devices to transmit data to other sub-chains / full nodes in a decentralized network — the data does not ever need to leave the IoTeX network, can be analyzed, and can be transmitted quickly.
A barrier to mass adoption could be that this requires enterprises to join the IoTeX network (or at least be a “receiver” of data as a full node) — however, we are confident that enterprises will see the true value.
Q3. How do you plan to gain adoption fast enough that the market will not be saturated with other iot protocols by the time you launch (sigfox, Lora etc) or advantages you could offer？
While our developers are working very hard to create our new blockchain infrastructure, our marketing and business development teams have started to create partnerships with various industry sectors and IoT startups. Other IoT protocols, while affecting the communication process between IoT devices and/or gateway, do not have significant effect on our blockchain infrastructure.
Q4: Why iotex choses to be privacy oriented as compared to other IoT blockchains? What is the benefits of privacy in IoT?
Privacy is key for the future of IoT. Think about all of the raw data and results based on analysis of that raw data. This includes the status of valuable inventory, personal information (e.g., health records), geolocations, and more. Having this data in the wrong hands is not only a security risk, but also a monetary risk.
To leave you with a parting thought — the world is changing quickly. Data will be the most valuable asset in the world soon. Hackers are getting better at hacking, and we need solutions that can be truly private to ensure that the world’s most valuable asset is safeguarded accordingly.
Q5. How do think IoTeX is different from other projects similar to Internet of things?
We want to separate this question into two parts: how are we different from IoT projects that use DAG and how are we different from IoT companies that don’t use DAG.
For the first part: IoTeX does not use DAG. IoTeX believes that DAG is an interesting technology, but is still in its infancy. The original PBFT has high communication complexity, e.g., O(N²), and is not scalable. dBFT is much better thanks to the delegates. Our Roll-DPoS consensus mechanism (yellow paper coming soon) is a variant of DPoS which leverages PBFT for voting/endorsing the newly created blocks as well.
For the second part: there are several companies working in the intersection of IoT and blockchain, each of which have made upfront design decisions / tradeoffs to fit their unique visions. Some are utilizing hybrid cloud / blockchain models, some are permissionless, and many are working on different layers / components of blockchain 3.0 (e.g., device identity, narrow band IoT bandwidth). Here at IoTeX, our design decisions stem from what we think the world will look like in the long-term (10+ years). At the core of our design, we value true privacy (not just pseudonymity), as connected devices will not only collect data, but also make decisions on this data. Another upfront design decision was to focus on our grand vision of machine-to-machine interaction and autonomous device coordination. Many companies are thinking of ways to replace the traditional cloud/edge/fog computing infrastructure — even though our blockchain infrastructure is a good candidate for this, we are going beyond how to make today’s technology better, and thinking about designing for the future.
Q6. IOTX will be mineable for 50 years, with mining rewards decreasing over time. What will happen after this time?
Although the amount of tokens that will be rewarded is going to decrease over time, the value per token will be increasing given that the IoTeX ecosystem is growing bigger and stronger. By taking this into account, we hope the mining rewards would not decrease. Additionally, a miner will also be rewarded by executing smart contracts. This part of the reward will grow together with various use cases as they are onboarded to our network.
Q7: IoTeX as a platform for others to build DApps for IoT. Each IoT DApp runs within one subchain and can communicate with other subchains via the rootchain. If the IoTeX is overloaded, What impact does it have on devices or programs using Iotex platform? What are your plans to prevent overload?
The subchain is quite flexible in the IoTeX blockchain infrastructure. In the case that the IoTeX network is overloaded, the new subchains might be provisioned automatically. Moreover, sharding may also be enabled in the rootchain to accommodate the high traffic overload.
Q8. Do you plan to create sandbox environments, with the creation of specific modules that allow coding in other popular programming languages so more devs could contribute? (with no knowledge of golang)
IoTeX as well as many other blockchain platforms are decentralized. The nodes in the network agree on some protocol to communicate with each other. That said, you could implement a IoTeX node in the programming language you’re familiar with, but it has to follow the IoTeX network protocol. Within one implementation, there is usually no need to use multiple programming languages to implement different modules and then interoperate. The exception might be that we could choose to use C to implement some performance critical components.
Q9. What will be in place to prevent delegate centralisation? If 1 vote = 1 token, “big players” can just vote for themselves and their friends, and as a result will have a high probability of getting picked as a delegate if they have voted in multiple nodes, despite the end selection being random
First, delegates (or Super Nodes) will usually need to publish how they plan to share their mining rewards in order to attract votes from other nodes. This plan is publicly accessible to every node in the network, and the voting process is transparent in that all voting records are maintained on the blockchain. An individual node is free to vote for any candidate and change their vote at any time. They get rewards proportional to his/her number of received votes vs. the chosen delegate’s total votes.
Second, it is true “big players” will have a higher chance of getting picked as a delegate, but if they ever misbehave (for example, produce invalid blocks / transactions, or fail to meet their commitment to share rewards), they will lose votes and in turn risk losing their delegate position.
These mechanisms are the underlying cryptoeconomics in the blockchain ecosystem to ensure that chosen delegates perform their responsibilities (mis-behaving delegates will be quickly voted out), and each voter gets rewards in his/her best interest.
Q10. IoTeX Team, I have a question on Delegated POS and what the specific requirements would be for a stake holder to run a node or masternode. How many tokens would one have to hold and will the nodes have tiers?
We will provide a voting mechanism for all the nodes/participants in the IoTeX network. Any node can claim the intention to run a delegate (or masternode as in the question), and all nodes in the network cast a vote (1 token = 1 vote) for all candidates. Candidates receiving the most number of votes become delegates for the IoTeX network. This process is repeated every epoch.