Our general AMA from 7/20/2018 has ended! This AMA was a general one where we accepted any kind of questions from tech to our team. Thank you all yet again for engaging with us! We received 100+ questions including many thoughtful ones from our awesome community in just the span of two hours. We will be distributing points as soon as possible!
Most Thoughtful Questions
Congratulations to our community and supporters for asking the following questions which we have chosen as the most thoughtful questions for IoTeX’s General AMA on 7/20/2018.
Q1: I’d like to know what the intention or goal for rolling out the Academic Paper (DKSAP-IoT) and Yellow Paper (Roll-DPos) is. Is Iotex not afraid of existing/coming competitors copying the idea and recreating it?
IoTeX is happy to share our research and development progress with the community and receive feedback at the early stage. We highly believe that a good project can only be done through the group effort of the community. The innovation in this area is endless and it is our great pleasure to contribute to the development of the blockchain technology.
Q2: What are the results of participation in the event “Korea Blockchain Week”? I and many members of the community are very interested in learning about the test results:
- Did the network testing work successfully or not?
- What difficulties did the development team have to face?
- According to the results of testing, which surprised the development team, both good and negative ones (if you can give a link to these results or reports)
- Is it planned to further test the network with the involvement of more participants and is it possible for members of the community to connect to this event in fact, if such an opportunity exists, on what conditions?
How well the network module is depends on the scale of the blockchain participants it could support and the the communication latency. We have tested our network module on tens of the nodes. So far, it turns out to work well. However, we foresee that there will be more challenges surfaced once we reach hundreds and thousands of nodes.
One of the difficulty is to guarantee our project quality (e.g., performance, robustness, code style and etc.) during the fast development face. To overcome this, every tech team members are working super hard. We keep investing enough time on research & system design to make sure we’re on the right track given the tight schedule. We always look ahead the long term solution while unblocking ourselves with short term fix.
During the test, the one beating our expectation is the robustness. We found our testnet are continuously running well with 0 maintenance effort much longer than expected. On the other side, we learned that TPS is not only affected by the consensus design, but also the throughout implementation.
Lastly, yes. We will gradually open more features (e.g., wallet) in our testnet so that community participants can dogfooding our blockchain.
Q3: How did you manage to get to the top Binance?
As far as we know, Binance actively monitors blockchain projects on the markets and they have certain metrics to evaluate each project’s technical strength, innovation, team capability, progress and deliverable vs. roadmap, impact, etc. We don’t have the visibility to the detailed criteria (and perhaps no one does). If you are working on a project, you should apply. If your project met their criteria, they will contact you.
Q4: IoTeX has an interesting roadmap. What are your marketing plans to grow in terms of customer base? Do you guys have any partnerships that you guys can validate?
Currently we don’t have a marketing roadmap to share, we just do it in a very fast pace to achieve more as soon as possible. Especially for partnerships and start building the ecosystem, there will be much more unexpected factors to affect the results. What we can do is trying our best to put more efforts to boost the progress. And as you know, we don’t promise until we believe we can accomplish. It is our discipline to keep our words to you, the community. But still, we will share with you any good news as soon as possible when it is legally allowed to be disclosed so that both of us will be on the same page! Currently we don’t have any partnerships which can be disclosed more details now. But we will make announcements as soon as they can be disclosed.
Also, we’d love to share more details with you about Marketing. — community knows that we have a specific way of doing things — again, we hear your feedback and are already incorporating it, but we would like to explain our perspective in three key points. First, we are not looking to raise funds and are in “build mode” on both the technical and BD side — there is not a MASSIVE push for marketing at the moment, although we realize we need to step it up to support our token holders. Second, as a platform for IoT DApps, we are currently focused on working with IoT companies / developers to build REAL partnerships. Unlike other projects that have consumer end users, many of our end users will actually be IoT companies. The way to attract these companies is not through traditional digital marketing (e.g., social media, Telegram), but rather formal and private interactions. We look forward to sharing the fruits of our labor with you very soon. Finally, some projects (not naming any names) are actually looked down upon in the crypto world for their excessive “no news” marketing, even though it leads to strong price action. We sincerely believe that the longevity of our project will be secured by our technology and DApp ecosystem, not by the short-term marketing pumps that have become the norm in our industry.
Q5: Tell about charity programs, how much can I spend and where will the money go?
In the first charity program to ETH Foundation, everyone can donate up to 0.2 ETH. The funds were directly donated to ETH foundation address using our smart contract, to support the frontier blockchain research.
In the second charity program to Dorahacks, everyone can donate up to 0.15 ETH. The funds were directly donated to Dorahacks address using our smart contract, to foster the next generation of blockchain and IoT developers. Using the donations from IoTeX’s charity program, DoraHacks will support and fund the development of blockchain and IoT-related projects in their hackathons. Feel free to check more details here
How we use smart contract to make the whole process transparent:
How To Proxy Payments During Charity Donation Campaign
Q6: What type of partnerships is IoTeX looking to achieve and will partnerships be made during the test net phase? To succeed a project needs creators on its platform. How will IoTeX make sure, that developers and IOT projects will build on top of the IoTeX platform and prefer IoTeX over other platforms?
As far as partners go, we are looking into several different categories: research institutions, hardware manufacturers, enterprises, application developers, connectivity providers, and more. Currently we are actively working on partnership and will share with you the good news soon when it is ready (during and after the testnet development).
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. Therefore, our target users are specifically distinguished with the ones of other projects. The problems we are solving are quite unique.
Q7: Does Roll-DPoS have a minus for today? If there is something, how will they be solved?
Roll-DPoS is a randomized variant of the DPoS algorithm which aims to achieve good trade-off in terms of decentralization, security and scalability. Considering the resource-constrained IoT devices, DPoS-like consensus algorithms provide promising solutions for handling heterogeneity of devices in blockchain systems. The Roll-DPoS consensus protocol will go through a peer-review process by the research community and we will further improve it if needed.
Q8: With the help of what mechanisms does IoTeX blockchain resist the attacks of intruders?
It is a rather complex issue for resisting a wide range of attacks for a blockchain system. From the software development view, IoTeX will write intensive tests to ensure the corner cases can be found in the early time. Before the mainnet is online, penetration tests will also be conducted on our code base. We will also provide best security practices for deploying the IoTeX nodes in the network.
Q9: Watched your Strive testnet demo and the part with deploying IoTeX on lightweight devices was amazing to see real world using blockchain for real purposes — quite rare currently in the space of crypto. My question is regarding Configuration 1 demonstration of TCP/IP network simulation where Raspberry PI was delegate node and Pocket beagle acted as a full node. Could you please expand a little bit how Roll-DPOS was working there regarding the tech between 2 devices and did consensus face any errors?
The delegate node (Raspberry PI) starts a number of independents threads to simulate Delegates, and Roll-DPoS is working among these Delegates to run the consensus protocol and generate next block. The full node (pocket beagle) keeps receiving blocks from Delegates. Consensus can tolerate up to 1/3 of faulty Delegates. In local network it is very unlikely to face error.
Q10: When and how is it planned to promote the project exactly as a technology that people can use in everyday life?
We have a comprehensive strategy to move forward step by step across tech, marketing, and partnerships. Recently we have heard your feedback for more explicit marketing/promotion loud and clear; however, this takes time to deliver holistically. We promise that we have discussed in great detail internally and are implementing things as we speak. A day in crypto is like a year in real life, and in this bear market it is clear that our public actions are magnified especially for those that see their portfolio values dropping with the rest of the market. We care about our community greatly and want nothing more than to deliver profits to our LONG-TERM investors and TRUE supporters.
As a platform for IoT DApps, we are currently focused on working with IoT companies / developers to build REAL partnerships. Unlike other projects that have consumer end users, many of our end users will actually be IoT companies. The way to attract these companies is not through traditional digital marketing (e.g., social media, Telegram), but rather formal and private interactions. Some projects (not naming any names) are actually looked down upon in the crypto world for their excessive “no news” marketing, even though it leads to strong price action. We sincerely believe that the longevity of our project will be secured by our technology and DApp ecosystem, not by the short-term marketing pumps that have become the norm in our industry.