Insight into Blockchain & Qtum — Patrick Dai

The Qtum team has been busy developing just like almost every team in the blockchain space. The more people we meet, the more questions we get asked, but they tend to start with the basics. What is Blockchain? What are tokens? Where’s the meaning in the Qtum project? What’s the difference between Qtum, EOS, Ethereum, and every other blockchain? And, what’s the difference between an ICO and equity financing?

For many of these questions, it’s difficult to have an accurate understanding. There are many reasons causing this problem. One being that blockchain technology is a combination of a concept of technological change and organizational change, which can be difficult to explain to the general public.

Before 2014, the industry didn’t have an idea of what is a blockchain. From 2009–2014, industry practitioners just called everything a coin or cryptocurrency. Since 2014, the industry has changed to advancing beyond the technology being used for its financial attributes.

Blockchain networks themselves are a complex set of systems and software engineering, mathematical principles, cryptography, network architecture, consensus mechanisms, and economic models. Without the cultivation of higher education in a science and engineering background, it’s difficult to understand.

Expecting everyone to understand the technology behind the blockchain, the innovations in the space and get an accurate understanding of the project, is similar to expecting everyone to understand the concept of partial derivatives in calculus, and binary entropy functions. For the most part, fewer than 1% of the population will every truly understand all these different aspects that make the technology what it is.

This is why, most of the time, explaining blockchain technology to “CEOs,” “journalists,” or “anonymous” and having them try to make a judgment of a project, is especially hard. No matter how intelligent a person is, most people limit their expertise to a particular field.

If blockchain technology itself were only a simple technology innovation, it wouldn’t have caused such a massive uproar between scientists, economists, mathematicians, government officials, the press and so forth. The blockchain is the essence of change in what we can conceptualize.

In the form of organization reconstruction, the transformation of social collaboration mechanisms, pooling together, creating a new concept. This concept is ordinarily difficult to recognize all of a sudden, and even if we understand it clearly, it can be difficult to accept.

If someone told you, in the next 30 years, perhaps all the companies will disappear, everyone will say you are a crazy. But this kind of “company” organizational structure, in the thousands of years of human history, has only existed for 300 years.

Blockchain development can make humanity quickly establish a new kind of “organization structure,” this kind of autonomous organization structure exists on the blockchain network, protocol, and in our minds. Everyone can grasp the idea of a company. But I feel the next era will be this is a protocol-based commonwealth.

A protocol-based commonwealth with the development of Internet and blockchain technology will make virtual organizations become mainstream in the next 10 to 20 years.

Qtum will be part of the new era of societal collaboration.

Brett and John attended a local blockchain meetup in Shanghai on August 6th. It was great to see projects like Rootstock & Po.et present, chat with old friends, and meet people. Interesting to hear about the World Sustainability Project and how they are trying to promote blockchain technology to solve the UN’s 17 Social Development Goals by 2030.

Qtum Joins ACCESS

The Qtum Foundation is proud to announce that it is now a member of the Association of Cryptocurrency Enterprises and Startups in Singapore (ACCESS). ACCESS is the leading blockchain industry association fostering society’s transformation to this new technology in Southeast Asia.

Qtum shares the vision and mission of ACCESS, understanding the need for providing a united public voice and platform for the ASEAN cryptocurrency and blockchain community to better engage with private and governmental entities.

Exchange Support

CHBTC & Jubi

CHBTC will add Qtum to their platform on August 8th and Jubi has already begun trading of Qtum.

Development Updates

Changes made through this week to the core wallet:

Bugs fixed:

[RPC/EVM] Fixed a bug where getTransactionReceipt would return 0 gas when a VM exception occurs

would return 0 gas when a VM exception occurs [RPC/EVM] Fixed a bug where getTransactionReceipt would return no data after restarting a node in some cases

would return no data after restarting a node in some cases [RPC] Fixed a minor typo in the RPC help documentation for DGP options

Work completed:

[DGP/Consensus] DGP and several bug fixes and tests for it were merged into the master branch

[EVM/Consensus] The default gas limit is now 40M instead of 5M

[Tests] Fixed several tests that were broken by either MPoS or DGP

[MPoS/Consensus] This was finally merged into the master branch (MPoS is now known along with a few other things as Smart Stake Protocol)

[RPC/EVM] Added several limits to smart contract RPC calls to prevent users from creating invalid transactions

[EVM/Consensus] Reverted a change where we allowed send to be null in the EVM. This allowed some interesting use cases but was determined to compromise some security assumptions that many existing smart contracts use, so it is safer to not allow null sender.

[P2P/Mempool] Added several checks to ensure null sender and other invalid transactions are not allowed on the mempool

In-progress work and soon to be fixed bugs:

[Build/Gitian] A lot of work has taken place to make Gitian work for building Qtum. This is only working right now for Linux, but OSX and Windows should be fairly easy. This allows us to create precompiled Linux wallets for x86, x86–64, ARM, and ARM64 with a single command, allowing us to finally run a Qtum full-node on a raspberry pi as well as other similar ARM devices. This full-node is command-line only, but capable of staking, using smart contracts, auditing transactions on the blockchain, etc. Pretty much everything a PC can do, the raspberry pi can do.

Running Qtum on Raspberry Pi

Qtum Expenditures for July

Qtum Expenditures

Total expenditures in July: 187.5209 BTC

Post-crowdsale expenditures: 839.4983 BTC

1) Qtum Salaries and Benefits: This portion of the expenditure includes salaries and insurance for all members and other benefits.

2) PR & Marketing Costs: the part of the cost, including overseas market costs and the Chinese market costs. Overseas & Chinese marketing costs include: overseas market partners, media, meetings, meetups, hackathons, social platforms, community management, etc. July included costs for a future sponsored event and two hackathons, which is why the cost was above our average.

3) Operating Costs: Operating costs include office rent (Shanghai and Minsk), travel and accommodation, office daily expenses, and other miscellaneous expenses.

4) Compliance Costs: overseas legal services costs, cost of legal services in China, patent costs, financial transparency labor costs etc.

5) Business Development: initial commercial deployment and development costs, etc.

Expense Breakdown