On February 24th, Nebulas founder Hitters Xu held his first live Reddit AMA with the goal to strengthen Nebulas' connection with the community and help community members learn more about Nebulas.
Hitters holds holds high accolades in the blockchain community as the founder of Nebulas (NAS), founder of Antshares (NEO), former Director of Ant Financial's Blockchain Platform, and Pioneering founder of China Blockchain Community.
Some of the top questions from the AMA:
Q1: Can you explain how you and the team plan on integrating DAG into the Nebulas architecture? I saw Robin and others discussing DAG which is exciting, but as far as I know it's not mentioned in the whitepaper.
Does everything still seem on track for end of q1 release?
Xu: In most blockchain systems, transactions are executed serially, one after another. We are trying to implement a parallel execution model into Nebulas to boost the performance in multi-core/multi-cpu system, improving the TPS to fulfill the tech requirements of new scenarios.
In the new model, DAG is just chosen as the data structure to record the dependencies and orders of transactions during executing them parallelly.The scenario of DAG in Nebulas is not the same as with IOTA. We hope that this parallel execution model could help other blockchain systems boost their performances. After the new model has been verified on Nebulas, we will submit it to the Ethereum community.
Everything is on track, stay tuned for mainnet launch at the end of Q1.
Q2: Can we get a synopsis of how/when Nebulas will market themselves to the masses?
Xu: Nebulas highly valued the impact of community. Our team will be initiating a new round of rebranding before we launch our main net at the end of Q1. A brand new web page titled “Go Nebulas” will be newly featured, providing more opportunities for all tech or non-tech community members to better contribute to our society.
Q3: Regarding the POD algorithm, can you talk about the specifics of "highly important accounts" and the possibility of becoming a bookkeeper, particularly if/how there will be any benefit to large stakers of NAS who are not active developers on the Nebulas blockchain
Is there potential for stakers of NAS to partner with Developers who are working on projects they believe in, so they can share in the benefits the POD algorithm will bring a successful App/highly important account?
Xu: Nebulas Rank and Nebulas Force are build on the PoD algorithm. Via Nebulas Rank, we will be able to source for experienced developers.
Unlike POS, the underlying logic of PoD itself is against extra bonus for stakeholders. Existing consensus mechanism PoS give bonus to stakeholders. It will make the rich richer and eventually, harm all individuals within the ecosystem in the long run.
On the contrast, PoD is designed as a positive feedback consensus mechanism which encourage efficient uses of system. As believers of blockchain, we prefer to redistribute our resources to those who aid in the construction of Nebulas economy. Stakeholders can choose either to hold their assets or to reinvest them. Either stakeholders, developers or investors can be benefit from the growth of ecology.
Technical details with regards to PoD will be further illustrated in the upcoming mauve paper, due end of Q3 in 2018.
Q4:
Question 1: Is the calculation & confirmation of NR & SCS value centralized or decentralized? If decentralized, how does main net reach consensus on these values?
Question 2: As defined by whitepaper, total number of NAS token is 100,000,000. Bookkeepers get 4,000,000 each year, while developers get 1,000,000 each year. How to keep incentive when all tokens are released?
Xu:
Q1 - NR & SCS are both decentralized. Using merkle tree, they’ll be stored on chain with bits of bytes. Then every nodes can verify the result very quickly. More details, such as the completeness and feasibility of NR, will be released in our technical yellow paper later.
Q2 - You can think of Nebulas as a non-inflationary economy. The system's own issuance is just to ensure that the consensus mechanism works and to ensure that the economy is not deflating, just as bitcoin and ether mining mechanisms.
Thus, our economic model also uses an inflation model that initially plans natural inflation of 4 million tokens annually, of which 3,000,000 are rewarded to bookkeepers and 1,000,000 to developers. Eventually, all base protocols of Nebulas are recorded on chain, the final inflation ratio can be adjusted by community votes.
Q5:
Question 1: Thank you for doing this. From the moment you left the NEO team to coming up with Nebulas and until now, what are the biggest difficulties you have faced?
Question 2: What are the next steps for the Nebulas team to push adoption of this platform?
Xu: Frankly speaking, there are no “biggest difficulties” as we face new challenges and fast developments in the blockchain industry on a daily basis. We just have to deal with them constantly.
Seasoned industry players usually plan ahead, predicting and preparing for unknown. Blockchain is a fast growing organism with its own consciousness. As blockchain insiders, we should be fully immersed in this industry and get ready for any challenges, even to lead a revolution. These are what keep you going in tough times.
For your second question, our culture revolves around 3“E”s - “Explore, Embrace, Enjoy”. We encourage more people to explore the endless opportunities, embrace all the awesome applications and enjoy the fun of blockchain.
If we put Nebulas as the Android system in blockchain world, we encourage DApps build on our blockchain, especially those targeting users and traffic such as decentralized digital marketing (i.e. Google adwords), decentralized payment methods and decentralized social network. These are all very interesting projects Nebulas will wholeheartedly support.
Q6: Will ICO projects be able to launch on the Nebulas blockchain?
Xu: First of all, Nebulas is an open sourced public chain project. Nebulas is capable of supporting all functions offered by Ethereum today including issuing tokens and running smart contracts. We encourage developers to develop DApps on Nebulas to build up the ecology.
Furthermore, Nebulas provides creative solutions for the concerns and problems of ICO:
NR will allow investors to make more informed decisions on ICO projects. NF can help developers and communities initiate projects and issue assets in a less frictional and controlled manner. DIP will support and encourage developers to contribute to the ecosystem.
Q7: What is the target performance? I believe that the one with the best scalability will likely survive better. Does NAS perform better wrt other competitors (e.g., tps)?
Xu: In our testnet, we get 200+ tps. We’re continuing to optimize the performance of Nebulas in order to support more applications on Nebulas.
Q8: What do you see as being the first widespread use of smart contracts? Will smart contracts ever be something a normal (layman) person will actively create themselves? Or will smart contracts be mostly things that happen in the background of our lives, mostly seamlessly and unknowingly to us while we do things like exchange digital currencies, etc.?
Xu: I think token sale is the first widespread use case of smart contracts. I believe that there will be more use cases for end users in the future.
Nebulas use Javascript V8 Engine so more developers can write smart contracts in their familiar ways and create more friendly apps for more common people. Yes, We Believe that in the near future, there will be endless possibilities and countless applications and there will undoubtedly be even more amazing opportunities for everyone to contribute in this blockchain ecosystem.
Q9: Why did you and Aero decide to start Nebulas and not stay with NEO?
Xu: I’m actually planning to write a book with Aero recently, to share our stories in the blockchain industry with the community. We built China’s very first blockchain community, BitsClub, together and we incubated China’s early blockchain projects together, including NEO. As blockchainers from the very beginning, we have lots of geek stories to share.
We’ve left NEO before founding Nebulas. We didn’t leave NEO for Nebulas. These are two unrelated matters. All efforts I've made is to prove the blockchain vision, including when I joined Alibaba’s blockchain department to set up Ant Financial's Blockchain Platform.
We chose a most challenging way to seek my role and mission in this industry. Nebulas comes from the summary and thinking of the entrepreneurial practice in the blockchain community for a long time.
Q10: Can you elaborate the current and the further Token-supply and give us a timeline about when the fully supply of 100.000.000 tokens will be circulating?
Xu:
Current:
35.5 Million NAS in circulation today
In 20 days after main net release:
45 Million NAS(Bonus will be unlocked)
20 Million NAS vested to Nebulas team will be unlocked across 3 years, 33.3% each year. Remaining are Community reserved NAS, which will be released according to Nebulas' operational expansion and ecosystem construction. We will publish announcements before that.
Official website: https://nebulas.io
Github: https://github.com/nebulasio/go-nebulas
Slack: https://nebulasio.herokuapp.com
Telegram(EN): https://t.me/nebulasio
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nebulasio
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