Q1. It has been overlooked I think but in my opinion, it was a very important moment when earlier in 2018 Raullen and Zhijie were teaching a distance learning course regarding Tech of blockchain and IoT at Nicosia’s university. I mean how many projects have done this by truly sincerely sharing their knowledge with new students of the field, personally I’ve only heard IoTeX doing this. Also, we’ve seen that recently IoTeX partnered with the University of Cincinnati. My question is whether courses like that are still being done or are being planned to be done and why is that important for the team of IoTeX to allocate some of the efforts into these spaces of academics?
A: First, thank you for the recognition of our academic contribution! As we stated earlier, we think the blockchain industry development heavily relies on the cryptography knowledge base. As the team with a solid cryptography background, it is our obligation to explore for more innovations and make more contribution to sharing the knowledge to more talents. That’s why we also open-sourced lots of our codes to the public, free to use. That’s also why we always say that there is no “real” competitor in the current blockchain industry — everyone should put lots of work exploring, researching, to strengthen the development and future killer application/ innovations regardless to do it individually or with other companies/research parties. By teaching lessons and working with academic labs, we will have more opportunities to reach more talents, speed up the innovation exploration, and all these will ultimately benefit our own development. Collaborating with top researchers in academia is also crucial for bringing the cutting-edge research innovations to the IoTeX blockchain.
Q2. When looking at Iotex core’s insights at Github it can be seen that since June of 2018 there has been quite a downtrend in commits up until now with spikes in August and end of October. Should this be interpreted that the majority of the work has been done and this is actually a good sign? Any clarity please.
A: Each project has its own development style. For us, we built everything from zero and finished most of the initial codes in June. Then we slowed down the committed speed intentionally. At the same time, we did several rounds of code review and code refactoring to improve the network. That’s a lot of work which will not be shown by the # of commits. (e.g. add action envelope and sealed envelope by yutongp · Pull Request #371 · iotexproject/iotex-core · GitHub) So the # of commit is not the only factor to evaluate the workload. And usually, we commit our code intensively before every code release so you will see some spikes. It means that we began to freeze our code for final testing, but those codes are built gradually in the past few months.
Q3. For important mainnet releases I’m sure the team will conduct various bug bounties for the community so they can potentially find any bugs and work for the hackers would be rewarded but is the team thinking of raising the stakes a bit and paying more and finding very high level hackers globally to test the robustness of the network? Would that be both technically and economically efficient and why?
A: Yes we are thinking of launching another round of bug bounty program. We prefer to set a reasonable reward for the contribution since the bug bounty program is not the only way to test the network. In addition, in most cases, we not only give a one-time reward for the developers who helped us discovering bugs/vulnerabilities but also keep the long-term relationship as they will help us working on IoTeX network-related works. We will also have accordance bounty program for these additional contributions. We believe raising the reward to a much higher level is not the only way to approach the high-level hackers. We may utilize a few platforms to help us spread the program details.
Q4. Will the Committee of block producers be selected only through a consensus Roll-DPoS mechanism? Or will there be additional mechanisms to eliminate centralization and possible collusion?
A: Yes — we are currently in the final stages of designing our block producer ranking and rewarding schemes. The ranking scheme will define how block producers are chosen, and it will not only be reliant on stake/votes but also other factors to prevent centralization and collusion. The rewarding scheme determines how block producers are rewarded for participating in consensus. We will be releasing individual blog posts on both of these schemes over the next month.
Q5. What, if any, the role will IoT endpoints have in maintaining consensus? Do you plan to protect the endpoint from any attempt to compromise it’s private key if it needs to be stored on an IoT device that might live in a less than secure location?
A: IoT devices will not be responsible for maintaining consensus — this task is the exclusive responsibility of IoTeX block producers as our Roll-DPoS consensus mechanism is a variant of delegated proof of stake (DPoS). These block producers have minimum HW/SW requirements to ensure that consensus is processed securely and efficiently. However, IoT devices (acting as full nodes or light nodes) will be responsible for downloading the latest history of transactions so they can participate in transactions. In other words, endpoints will periodically sync the latest version of the blockchain.
In addition, the security of endpoints is crucial for any blockchain-based IoT applications since the IoT endpoints are essentially responsible to provide trusted data to the blockchain. For protecting endpoints from compromise, a piece of secure hardware is highly desirable for storing the private key on IoT devices. Moreover, a well-designed key management mechanism is also important to ensure the long-term security of IoT systems.
Q6. Dear IoTeX Team, I wish you had (or are having!) good holidays. I’ve got one question about Roll-DPoS (or DPoS in general): not speaking of exact numbers/percentages/mechanisms, we know that the block rewards which a BP earns will get shared among those stakeholders who voted that BP, proportionally to their stake. But what about those who voted for all the other candidates that actually did not make it in the candidate’s pool? Will they be excluded by the sharing of the rewards? Or is it that all the block rewards from all the BPs get collected and shared among all voters regardless of who they did actually vote? Thank you.
A: The sharing of block rewards from block producers to those that voted for them will not be built-in to the protocol (as is the case in PoS projects like Tezos). Instead, it is up to the block producer to determine how they will allocate their block rewards. For example, some may choose to re-distribute 80% of block rewards to those that voted for them (weighted by votes), and commit the remaining 20% to further development of the platform. We have even seen some block producers re-distribute 100%+ (i.e., they will pay more than the block rewards) to win votes. This is ultimately determined on a case-by-case basis — there may even be some block producers that do not re-distribute any funds to their voters, but will still be voted in by contributing to the network in other ways (i.e., DApp / tool builders, project awareness).
As such, there will not be any defined rules requiring BPs to share / not share their block rewards. From IoTeX’s perspective, we will only provide voters with a high degree of transparency as far as block producer metrics/uptime to help people make the most informed decision.
Q7. Hi! How did spend holidays?
1) to you any offers from your competitors on IoTeX to technologies sometimes arrived? if yes, that what?
2) in the future you plan to merge with other companies?
3) we know that IoT technologies help to save significant money to ordinary users, but further this technology will rise in price or become cheaper for ordinary users?
A: Hello! The team got to spend precious time with our families over the holiday / New Year break, but we also worked diligently. We are more inspired than ever to do great things in 2019!
1/2) We do not see other blockchain companies as “competitors” and we actually work with other similar projects on research and development. We are happy to be part of the blockchain industry which is very collaborative. However, we will not “merge” with other companies but we will definitely continue to build strategic partnerships with DApp builders, investors, and other companies. Our goal is to build our community with talented and passionate companies and community members!
- IoT technology is advancing very quickly — not only are devices/chips becoming more cheaper and powerful, but new connectivity technologies (i.e., 5G) will greatly improve the capabilities of the IoT industry. We feel this trend will continue — today’s IoT capabilities will become cheaper, but new exciting technologies will emerge at higher price points that may replace some existing capabilities as well.