AskFeebs: The 0Chain Minute — August 22, 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 episode:

Greeting

• Welcome to AskFeebs — a weekly address where your questions on crypto and 0Chain are answered. My name is Derick Fiebiger. I launched a cryptocurrency hedge fund in 2018 called Arturo Capital, and currently sit as Director of Operations for 0Chain. 0Chain is an ambitious blockchain project focusing on decentralizing data storage and tokenizing the value of that storage through a crypto asset, ZCN.
• 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.

0Chain Highlights

• On this week’s episode of The 0Chain Minute we have alot of questions to go over. I was able to have a call with Saswata to go over each question, so these answers are all pretty much straight from him with a few tweaks by me to add more explanation or color to his thoughts.
• We’ll get up to speed on what it takes to be a blobber, the various strategies the team will have going into the deployment of mainnet, what we can expect to be rolled out in beta net next, and several additional topics. Without further ado, lets get into it:

Questions & Answers

Question: I am an ex Storj/Filecoin miner. Looking at Filecoin hardware requirements, 0chain is so much lighter. How come, given that 0chain will be enterprise grade? thanks, ricardo.

• Answer: Filecoin has a heavy protocol to prevent Sybil and Outsourcing attacks, and they do so by implementing a delay in encrypting the data. But we feel such proof of work is wasteful and over-engineering in the new crypto world.
• 0Chain is light weight for various reasons, but a large reason is our consensus protocol. We split up the roles of producing blocks (miners), storing the block history (sharder), and storing files (blobber). By enabling these three services to specialize, they can be really effective at their one task.

Question: What is the definition of a blobber? Is it a standard term in the cloud space? — SEED

• Answer: blobber = storage provider. It is derived from the storage term “binary large object” which refers to unstructured data, and is shortened to “blob”.
• Click for more information.

Question: How will 0Chain approach crypto partnerships going into mainnet? — D

• Answer: Partner with dApps and Blockchain projects — they all generate data and need storage. Currently they use AWS and can easily migrate.

Question: How will 0Chain promote their service to retail customers? — D

• Answer: Through cloud partners such as Oracle, AWS.

Question: Are we still on schedule for Q3 Mainnet?

• Answer: Fingers crossed but may roll into Q4 depending on security tests.

Question: What is the next release for beta net?

• Answer: 0Box iOS app is coming next. Let the countdown begin

Question: What is Oracle’s favorite aspect of the 0Chain solution?

• Answer: All of it. Privacy. Speed of blockchain. Speed of data upload/download. Search feature by file name, user ID, etc. User Interface.

Question: Where do you see the biggest blobbers coming in from? Independent? Other crypto projects? Data centers?

• Answer: I think it will be a fragmented market with MSPs first to join in, followed by the big four — AWS, Azure, Google, and Oracle. Eventually, we’re forecast 50,000 MSPs to embrace our platform as it gives them opportunity to enhance their business.
• For those who don’t know what an MSP is, they are essentially outsourced IT companies; the traditional definition of an MSP is “an outsourced third-party company that manages and assumes the responsibility of a defined set of day-to-day management services to its customers.”

Question: Will view change roll out before external miners or after?

• Answer: Yes view change will roll out before external miners.

Question: Will we be able to experiment with pool delegation in betanet?

• Answer: Yes — can do that now with CLI, and with 0Wallet once we release the apps. The team will also show how to do with CLI.

Check out the recent step-by-step guide for using CLI tools:

Question: Saswata recently tweeted about how users can stake into a pool from their own wallet. When they stake they can receive a cut of mining fees without owning any mining hardware. Additionally, miners, blabbers, or sharders who have the equipment but don’t have a substantial portion of ETH can leverage this pool feature to crowdsource the ZCN. The pool operator receives a yield or fee from delegators — is this fully customizable? For instance, can you set the pool operator fee to as high or low as you want?

• Answer: Yes you can set a fee but it can’t be more than the maximum allowed by the network

Saswata recently tweeted out the hardware requirements of running an Miner/Sharder/Blobber:

Now lets dive deeper into this:

Question: Can you run all three on this or just one?

• Answer: Yes you can run all three. But it depends on the type of performance you want to enable. If you want 20GB data upload in a single session, then you need that much cache memory. And if you want a lot of simultaneous file upload, then you should add another CPU. And if the number of transactions increase to 1000 transactions per second, then you need to add another CPU. Lastly, HDD needs to scale with storage requirements on the network.
• So, to summarize, you can run a Miner, sharder and a blobber with a 4 core CPU, 8GB ram, and 1HDD, but you may need to optimize the hardware as the network grows in speed and storage size.

Question: If I’m someone who’s not tech savvy, how do I know where to start or what data center to choose if I’m collocating? Is data center mandatory?

• Answer: Choose a decent data center because it is cheaper than operating from home and you can save on bandwidth and power, and you won’t incur any penalties for bad operation. Think of being a Uber driver. Would you drive a car that breaks down and leave the user with a really bad user experience? Probably not. You want the best performance possible and collocating at a data center will ensure this by having far more reliable uptimes. The team will be able to make recommendations to suitable data centers in your area — you can ping the team in our telegram or on twitter if you have questions.

Question: The team holds 80% of the total amount of tokens. Will they consider dropping some of them to early investors or destroying them directly?

Token distribution graphic from Token Economics Paper

• Answer: The team does not hold 80%. The team holds 60m tokens which aren’t fully vested and 40m which are locked until/if the price of ZCN reaches $10/token. There is a max supply of 400M tokens, and team tokens is about 25%. There will NOT be any airdrop or burn event.
• You can find the full token distribution information available in our updated .

Question: Have you paid any bounty reward for bugathon/hackathon yet?

• Answer: Yes, and there is more to come. There will be more opportunity for bugathon once we do a pre-mainnet release.

Question: Hi Feebs, maybe if you can comment or elaborate in askfeebs a bit token delegation from security aspect of both sides. Service provider and token holder who delegates tokens. Tnx

• Answer: Service provider has 2 wallets: operational and delegation, with all earnings going to delegate wallet, so he is protected in case of a server hack. Token holder can use split-key to protect themselves

Question: External miners — any estimated timeframe?

• Answer: End of month

Question: Do you consider ever making 0Chain an open-source project? What conditions would need to be met for this to happen?

• Answer: 0Chain is open source. Some repos are not exposed yet but will be soon.

• 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.

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.