AskFeebs: 0Chain Address — May 7, 2020

Each week, hosts an AMA with 0Chain’s Operations Director, Derick Fiebiger, to address questions from the community. Without further delay, let’s dive into this weeks address:

Greeting

• Welcome to AskFeebs — a weekly address where your questions on crypto and 0Chain are answered. I’m Derick Fiebiger, Director of Operations for 0Chain, and I thank you for joining me. Let’s hop into things.

0Chain Highlights

• 0Chain has released an updated roadmap, , and paper which can all be found on the . In addition, major updates include payment and vesting protocol integration. View Change remains the biggest obstacle moving in to BetaNet.
• Payment Protocols: Last year on alphanet, you were able to upload files but unable to select blobbers. With the new payment update, we can set parameters for read/writes and completion time (ie enterprise grade vs lower speed). This allows you to edit the required challenge completion time, allowing you to choose specific or preferred blobbers. You can do random or preferred blobbers. For example, you can choose someone specific you trust, or you can utilize the random feature. It goes from uploading files on 0Chain network to this freedom of having different utilities.
• Vesting Protocol: This is being able to lock tokens to generate instant interest. If you lock 1 ZCN for 1000 days, you can get .11 ZCN instantly as interest. This allows you to use the services for “free” since you are not spending any of your principal. Both of these protocols are available through the CLI which is available on our . Soon this will be available on the explorer and the app — then I will do a detailed run through. I will break it down into terms I understand so that it can translate well for other people who are like me.
• 0Chain is an ambitious blockchain project focusing on decentralizing data storage and tokenizing the value of that asset through their ZCN token. The focus of this channel is to focus on briefing the community on 0Chain updates and providing insightful answers to community questions.
• Wanting answers to your questions on the next episode of AskFeebs? You can message Chad, our Community Manager, via or submit them via from our weekly thread. One disclaimer on questions, we want questions that cannot be easily found on Telegram, etc. These will be questions that require some more in-depth answers from the team.

Questions & Answers

Question 1: Node discovery, when a prospective miner send a transaction to register as miner, what info is included in this transaction? Does it need to be inserted manually? E.g IP, PORT, Stake address? In other words, how is a miner’s register tx different from a usual client tx? Once the prospective miner transaction is registered with the sharders, does a client need to do a pull request or is the data pushed to the client? does a client need to query sharders before sending a tx given active set is changing?

• I spoke with Saswata on this and he said clients will talk to the DNS service regardless if you’re sending a staking transaction or standard fund transfer transaction: The DNS service is a Lambda function that will allow you to ask for the latest magic blocks, (when there is a ViewChange, Magic Block is created, one block that shows what the new Active Set is) asking for the active set which will show the active Miner/Sharder
• Once you have Miner/Sharder list, then you can also get the blobber list from the smart contract
• On the app you won’t see any of this, this will all happen on the back-end on 0Wallet or web wallet. But you can access it on the explorer or through your own app if you want

Question 2: How often does active set (AS) change?

• TBD. Within 1 day to a month. Why? There are a couple things you need to balance:
• 1. Client response — every minute : Every transaction need to check the AS, bogs the latency.
• 2. Want to find the sweet spot where the latency isn’t bogged down, but we also want to maximize decentralization so that we’re constantly shuffling AS

Question 3: Do I have to constantly send new staking transaction for each view change?

• If you are a miner and want to be in the active set, you will stake tokens to increase your chances. You don’t have to stake again, your transaction will remain on the network for as long as you keep it on there. As long as your transaction is on the network, you could be in and out: 1st round could get in, 2nd round out, third round in on SAME staking tx. You don’t need to be constantly making staking transactions.

Question 4: What is the status for video streaming like movies, videos?

• Answer from Saswata: Right now not high priority. Focus right now is getting main net up and running and dStorage running smoothly on top of it. At the end of the day the main task for video streaming will be the media player that interacts with our protocols. So fortunately this is layer 2–3 application that can run concurrently with our layer 1 protocols.

Question 5: Please explain in more detail how does the private vs. public network works? If enterprises will want private editions, how will that translate for the benefit of zcn holders? What will you do to incentivize public network and thus maximize token value?

• The difference between a private network vs a public network is quite simple. Blockchain (or Decentralized Ledger) technology enables an immutable ledger of transactions. Let’s define immutability and ledger.
• What’s a ledger? A record of activity, kind of like a sign-in sheet at, say, a hospital — where you write down your name, time, and date before going into the hospital. Now what’s the problem with the hospital record? Well it can be erased or tampered with. I could scribble out my name and write someone else’s, or I could change the time I came in. Blockchain solves this problem by creating a system in which the ledger is maintained by the network, and it can’t be rolled back or modified once something is added to that ledger — this concept is also known as immutability. More specifically, immutability means it can’t be changed. So a private blockchain network is like a gated community, where only nodes allowed through the pearly gates are allowed to make changes and additions to the ledger.
• This is nice for enterprises, particularly for a new technology such as blockchain, where they can control the platform and aren’t vulnerable to the same kind of attacks as the public networks. A public blockchain is the opposite. There is no discrimination to nodes, so long as they meet the performance requirements (right computer hardware, good connection). The advantage is it’s decentralized, and very hard to attack. The disadvantage is its immutability — it’s much harder to make changes through governance, and the network itself is potentially vulnerable to some unforeseen flaw in the code. So, most large enterprises will want to start out using private networks.
• How does it benefit 0Chain? If a major company starts using 0Chain, this adds legitimacy to the protocols, major funding for additional features on the public network, and builds a scaffold that will make it very simple for a firm to transition to public as it becomes more battle-tested and its cost/performance advantages are more evident.

Feebs: That’s it for this weeks update. I want to keep these as short as possible. I will see you guys next week!

Thanks for taking the time to read and watch our AMA. Please tune in for the next episode of AskFeebs. Please subscribe to our channels and keep your eyes open for our next episode of AskFeebs.

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