Satoshi Supported the Idea of Alt Coins in 2010 and How That Relates to the ARK Ecosystem ARK ACES Follow Mar 23, 2018 · 6 min read

Okay, I suspect you think I embellished that title a bit. But here is some strong evidence that it really isn’t so embellished after all. I have done a lot of reading on the history of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and was able to find a few conversations back in 2010 that relate to the current design of the ARK ecosystem and the ACES project. Take a look at what I found.

There was an interesting conversation with Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2010 regarding alternative blockchains. I was fascinated to read this exchange, because there has generally been what I perceived as a culture of Bitcoin maximilism up until 2017. Satoshi was not a Bitcoin maximalist, and as it relates to ARK, Push Button Blockchains could be said to be the opposite of maximilism.

Would Satoshi be a fan of ARK? Here’s a direct quote, which applies to alternative blockchains and independent projects, where we could see the reference to BitDNS and consider how this relates to the Push Button Blockchain concept in the ARK Ecosystem:

“Piling every proof-of-work quorom system in the world into one dataset doesn’t scale. Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately. Users shouldn’t have to download all of both to use one or the other. BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either. The networks need to have separate fates. BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might be increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it’s easy for lots of users and small devices.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto, 2010.

A response by Hal Finney hints at how something like ARK’s Push Button Blockchains combined with ACES (Ark Contract Execution Services) could fit into this.

“Satoshi, are you endorsing the idea that additional block chains would each create their own flavor of coins, which would trade with bitcoins on exchanges? … these chain-specific coins would be used to reward miners on those chains, and to purchase some kinds of rights or priviledges within the domain of that chain?”

— Hal Finney, 2010

“Right, the exchange rate between domains and bitcoins would float. … It will be much easier if you can freely use all the space you need without worrying about paying fees for expensive space on Bitcoin’s chain.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto, 2010

So interestingly, it seems Satoshi would have been supportive of this alt coin market that exploded in 2017, and even the idea of using marketplaces to exchanging coins and services. But still, we have many chains trying to pile every coin or token on one chain, which was not what Satoshi recommended. Of course, we all saw some downsides of piling everyone onto one chain during the CryptoKitties popularity blow up. As a result of this and Bitcoin’s struggles, the focus has shifted to scalability in a big way. We already have a solution for scalability, but it may not be the money grab that some are seeking because it separates chains and doesn’t produce artificial scarcity in blockchain space. This idea of using all the space you need is made readily available with ARK’s Push Button Blockchains, and the entire ecosystem is enabled with interoperability. We as a cryptocurrency community should not care where this interoperability comes from, but we suggest it should be cheap and empower users. That’s where ACES comes in. The ACES team is also a big fan of the plans put forth by Binance in launching a decentralized exchange, as well as the many other numerous projects building open source interoperability software. We can see many possible avenues for implementing trustless and decentralized mechanism into the ACES ecosystem in the near future. As such, our focus will remain on making tools easy to launch and develop so that even when decentralized tools are ubiquitous, users and developers can continue to customize software to their needs and contribute to the success of this ecosystem.

ACES enables the blockchain economy by allowing micro-chain projects to connect to the liquidity and functionality of the entire blockchain ecosystem. We cannot achieve this with protocol-specific interoperability, but protocol-specific interoperability is almost certainly cheaper, faster, and possibly more trustless than a protocol-agnostic interoperability. ACES focuses on protocol-agnostic interoperability because it allows us to integrate all potential future developments in the space. Protocol-agnostic interoperability combined with Protocol-specific interoperability is a powerful concept that adds massive efficiencies to the entire space.

Our emphasis on a marketplace directory and customized services enables participants in the blockchain economy by allowing the existence of interoperability businesses. These businesses could be viewed similarly to the type of businesses that operate on Amazon. Some may be small and unprofitable, just experiments or hobbies. Others may be massive multi-million dollar operations squeezing out small margins on high volume. There are things that work about this type of market and things that don’t. In an Amazon marketplace you do not have a trustless market. You must trust your provider to give you the product you asked for and in the quality you were advertised. This doesn’t always happen, but often times there is an extra layer of protection for users, some times in the form of insurance. Blockchain insurance is not something that is widely used yet, but we believe it could be a highly useful and profitable venture if it were to exist. And of course, because ACES is trust-agnostic, in the same way it is protocol-agnostic, this means we can implement services that are trustless or trusted. This ensures that users get the cheapest and most efficient service for their particular requirements. For the marketplace to succeed, our focus needs to be on automation, programability, and user experience.

The Marketplace

The ACES team is going full throttle on building out the marketplace for service registration, deployment, and use. We are building out these features on the open source marketplace repository. Anyone is free to clone the marketplace and expand, contribute, and host their own versions of the ACES marketplace. We will keep an up to date version of the marketplace at the ACES marketplace subdomain marketplace.arkaces.com.

Though we are still in the earliest phases of the marketplace development, we will be constantly pushing out latest updates to GitHub and to the marketplace subdomain so you can see where we are at and try out the current features.

Here you can see the beginnings of how the marketplace will be laid out. We will be keeping the layout as simple as possible to aide in integration with web wallets, etc.

We have added a service registration page, so users hosting ACES services can already register their services to this directory. Later, we will add more user-friendly ways to post your services and search for others.

Clicking the Use button for a service will bring up more details about the service. These pages are populated from data provided by the service-provider when they use the Marketplace API. For now, you’ll only see details about the service, but in later releases these pages will also provide the UI for using the service as well.

The service registration for the marketplace is the first of several milestones for the Marketplace project. In the next couple of months, we will be building out this project and adding user registrations and sign ins, a user-interface for executing marketplace service contracts, and the marketplace UI for listing and searching services.

At the end of this milestone, users and developers will be able to customize ACES services and list them to any available marketplace, allowing users to have instant easy access to consume those services. Later, we will expand the administrative tools to help developers and service providers to quickly launch, monitor, and maintain their collection of services.

All of these tools will be available free and open-source and can be followed, forked and contributed to at our repository.

If you want to read more about the conversation Satoshi had in 2010, you can find it here.