There hasn't been a lot of drama of late in the crypto world but an event in Dublin last night reminded me of how polarising it can be. The evening was entertaining to say the least ...
Hedera Hashgraph
Hedera Hashgraph a next generation technology that is not Blockchain but is positioning itself to compete with the likes of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Eos and others to be the distributed ledger technology that will transform the world.
Hedera Hashgraph promises a lot, even nano payments and in the test net they are getting huge figures for transactions per second. They have bold claims and plenty of criticism for their competitors.
Hashgraph Ireland
Last night I attended a meetup in Dublin run by Hasgraph Ireland. The event was at the Deloitte Blockchain Lab in Dublin's Silicon Docks where Jordan Fried of Swirlds was speaking. His college Ken one of the Developer Advocates was also present for questions.
Jordan is a articulate and convincing speaker. He described the principles and governance structure of the Hedera Hashgraph and convincingly made the case of how it was better than everything else.
So what is is all about?
The key differentiators of this platform to alternatives revolve around
- the governance structure
- the method of achieving consensus
- consensus timestamping
- fair ordering of transactions
- speed
- both immutability as well as controlled mutability
- private as well as public transactions
These features according to Jordan give Hedera Hashgraph the edge.
Consensus
Jordan spent some time describing the methods of achieving consensus for other blockchains and pointed out the flaws with each. This was an interesting overview and he did raise valid points. Hedera Hashgraph has benefits (theoretically at least) in some areas.
You can see the CTO Dr. Leemon Baird describe these in the following link
Governance
A cornerstone of the roll out of this proof of stake platform will be an overseeing members council with 39 members, which will be made up of CEOs, titans of industry. This is where the talk began to get interesting.
39 Psycopaths...
One of the attendees compared CEOs to Psycopaths and then proposed that Hedera Hashgraph would be overseen (initially at least) by 39 psychopaths. According to some studies possibly 1 in 5 CEOs are psychopaths.
There was little detail about the CEOs but the current proposal is for each to serve up to a maximum of 6 years before being rotated off the council. They would get an share of the network fees but would not own the stake.
Snake Oil...
Jordan began his presentation noting the talk would be quite technical, but in reality it was not. It was entertaining and he had many great anecdotes such as; Pablo Escobars Paternal Brother forking Bitcoin, the story of a kid who got sent Bitcoin for holding up a sign saying "mom send bitcoin" at a football match, but he didn't give a lot of details on the protocol, how it works even the higher level items such as how the stake would be delegated, who the delegates would be ...
One of the attendees called him up on this (rather rudely) at the end congratulating him on his sales pitch but noted he shouldn't have said the talk would be technical. It was more like a snake oil pitch than a technical presentation. A heated debate ensued between other attendees passionate about aspects of the technology.
Conclusions
A platform like Hedera Hashgraph is interesting because they are taking a different approach. They have something that differentiates them from the rest, it's also interesting that even though they are not live yet they already have had several ICOs built on top of their platform.
Jordan made noise about fair ordering of transactions which would be a USP, which is a fair point but in practice we will see how this will play out.
Old World Order
Hedera Hashgraph is not open source, its open review. They have a patent on the technology and there are restrictions on it's use.
The platform seems more flexible than a blockchain in that there can be immutability or controlled mutability, anonymous transactions or not so there are more ways that Hedera Hasgraph can fit with the mainstream financial systems of today.
This technology will be appealing to enterprise and I would put it into the same category as Ripple. This may well be the distributed ledger technology that business favours because of its flexibility, speed and control but I would not put it in the same category as Bitcoin, Steem and others.
Please share any insights you have about Hedera Hashgraph
References
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-psychopaths-australian-study-finds/
- https://www.hederahashgraph.com/whitepaper
- Image sources from the whitepaper
Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.
Aaaaaand that's why you were just at an advertising campaign instead of an actual meet up.
I was pretty disappointed to discover their practices were "old world" as you say, it pretty much makes it inapplicable for anything below enterprise level solutions, which is where they seem to want it. That makes any genuine grassroots community culture dead in the water. I really appears that they're just hijacking the goodwill around a lot of blockchain enthusiasts in their meetings and such around the world. I think the best we could hope for is a user group if they decide to release a free version (doubtful). Otherwise unless you're attending for your own company or a client, it's a waste of time.
They did say that it was free to use but you could not modify or submit pull requests to it and if you wanted a private use case you had to pay a fee. They also talked a lot about a fair ordering of transactions, which is appealing but I think in practice we would have to see how this would work.
It did feel a bit like an advertising campaign, it was very slick and they came across very professional. They had the attention of the suits in the room and if their governance model works that could be a big plus. The big question is will they ever achieve decentralisation of stake ... and control of the platform. They don't believe in the power of the crowd to arrive at consensus. The handpicked experts from the existing institutions know best in that respect!
There were lots of positives to it, but also lots of questions.
Right, that's exactly what I want to know, the technical details you didn't get to hear about. I've been reading the whitepaper and I've started trying to implement some of what they talk about, just to see how far you can get with the whitepaper alone. Given their approach I presume that they've left out some important stuff.
I think a lot of people are under the impression that they are going to run a public chain but AFAIK they have come out definitively against this idea. Their clients are banks, and other financial operators, such as credit unions, but not the general public. It's really a private chain solution which is the established industry holy grail of
blockchaindistributed ledger systems.They want the consensus aspect of the protocol to be transparent, distributed and open but the governance aspect of it to be tightly controlled by "experts".
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You certainly get to some interesting talks in Dublin. By the sound of it they could have put in the word Hybrid aswell seen as though it was open review not open source....catch up soon or very soon if you are online now...
never a dull moment in crypto
Yes, I think the fact that Hashgraph is not a public Blockchain and the fact that the advisory board is controlled by these rich people is kind of scary for a "normal" Crypto Investor. But wasn't there talk about that Hashgraph will have some kind of ICO later this year? Or did I get something wrong?
It was not mentioned how much would be sold and the timescale of the distribution. The focus of the talk was on the technology rather than from an ICO perspective.
Awesome post about blog chain the main focus on fair transection due to convines many peoples
Kept it up
Cryto is a great deal..wish i knew about cryto earlier hedera hasgraph Is proving to be a wonderful platform..but as the saying goes only time will tell..thanks for the info @eroche
Hedera Hashgraph is a platform attractive because they are taking a different approach. There is a chance to learn a lot through your post. Thanks for the nice post
I believe that your review was great about and this platform will go a long way Hedera Hashgraph. But I'm never against this blockchain because I believe it will survive and will come a long way to believe that I'm working on it.
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Awesome thanks for the comment.
Do not worry, my friend, they are sincere words. A pleasure to meet you.
Definitely sounds too centrally controlled to be a good general purpose cryptocurrency...
That is my impression also, it is an interesting take on the governance aspect though and if they achieve decentralisation over time it may work out well.
It's like they want to kill any possibility of their own idea taking off.
Well the justification for that, which they were at pains to stress, was to stop forking of the code. Who knows if this is a better approach than squabbling for years about things like the blocksize.
That's a bit of a bad justification given that code forking has only been followed by extreme growth and increased innovation in the blockchain space.
The drama in Bitcoin was caused by Bitcoin refusing to fork for so long, thus not allowing different philosophies to compete in a free market.
I agree with you and I think closed controlled code only stifles innovation.
Coins mentioned in post:
Nice post @eroche
Nice sharing
Credo in questo progetto il mondo ha bisogno di queste innovazioni