RChain update (Debrief 86), July 18th, 2018

Update summary

Medha begins the hangout with updates from the dev team. Great progress has been made in the integration tests, resolving bugs, and in the node testing sessions. About five companies are in the pipeline for the Vancouver Deal Day, with commitments from a local coding academy to build a Rholang/RChain curriculum. The Reflective team has signed deals with three companies: Translo, Inkrypt, and Hellofriend. Other great developments are the communication protocol being rolled out by the H3Uni group and the release of the second logo concept from Girvin.

Timeline

Technical update

Pithia update

Reflective update

RChain Europe update

Validators update

Feedback about the H3Uni protocols

Further RCon3 update from Greg M

Marketing update

Bounty system update

RChain Asia update

Content in brief:

Technical update

Node 0.6 development is on track.

Medha is planning the rest of the work for the Mercury launch and adding item to the sprint backlogs. Seven sprints to go before the launch.

Rholang team

Pull request for the proof of stake contract is cut.

The team is clearing out the replay portion of RSpace, ensuring correctness of the genesis block.

They are enhancing locally free to track what is locally free at the outermost level. It doesn’t match in a pattern with a locally free variable.

Cost accounting is now in the reducer and substitution logic is merged. Working on the matcher.

The team’s found some non-determinism bugs inside the logic of Casper and is now focused on resolving them.

There’s been great progress in the integration testing: Kent and Mike have about 650 blocks in a private testnet to isolate the bugs and flush them out.

Node team

The community had a fruitful node testing session. They could reproduce one of the non-deterministic bugs they saw in integration testing.

The team were able to show a remote server calling a contract. One tester called Michael Birch’s server and called a deploy.

The team’s working on an in-memory implementation for block storage.

Creating a configuration file for RNode.

RNode now prints a git version at startup.

Roscala team

There has been successful progress on the Rosette object import.

Created tests for enabled set.

Website

They have updated the website with the RNode user guide and installation information for RNode 0.5.

The RNode 0.5 Rholang tutorial has been updated.

A new Rholang document, Clarifications on Pattern-Matching, is now available.

RCon3

Looking for validators to take part in the launch of testnet during RCon3.

Looking for volunteers in Berlin who are able to attend local tech meetups to help with marketing.

Registration is open; Early Bird registration is before July 31 and there’s a special rate for students.

Q&A/Comments

Greg M: “This is great progress. I know that you guys hit a few bugs and pulled out all the stops to knock out the ones that were preventing Node 0.5. I appreciate all the work to make sure that that went out. It’s very impressive that with all of the work that’s gone on, we are able to make progress without a lot of hindrance from design decisions that weren’t quite well thought out.”

Medha: “If you think about it in the grand scheme of things, from the interpreter for a brand new language to having the entire blockchain semantics and the consensus algorithm up and running it really is very impressive. In January, our release was the C++ Rosette VM and the legacy compiler that we cleaned up. That was our January 31st release. In July, we are now dealing with some of the nuanced non-deterministic bugs in the blockchain, but all all the tremendous work that the storage team has done building that tuple space out and bringing to bear the architecture, it’s profound if you think of it as software development projects go. Doing a greenfield project of this magnitude, the progress we have made is quite rare.”

Ed: “I’m speaking to a potential validator this afternoon and would like to make sure I have the latest update for them.”

Greg M: “I will be talking about the prospectus focus group and where we are with all of that after we hear updates from the venture arms.”

Pithia update

The team met with a large miner from eastern Washington. They are really eager to get the validator specifications.

There are four companies in the final stage of contract signing. A fifth is in the final due diligence phase.

Five companies are lined up in Vancouver, BC. They’ve set up a focus meeting with Ernst and Young to hear what they are doing so we can introduce RChain into that ecosystem.

Follow up meeting on planning for blockchain training in Rholang. Looking for an expert in the field to assist the training process.

One of the local coding academies is committing to build a Rholang and an RChain curriculum.

Reflective update

Rebecca is the new office manager and executive assistant at the Reflective office.

Official RChain/Reflective Deal Day is happening on July 27th. The panelists include Greg M, Deanna, and Alex Ortiz from lifeID.

Steve Careaga, Lee Carter, and David Otto are in China doing events and working on validator issues.

Three deals have been signed with Translo, Inkrypt and Hellofriend.

The team has launched a podcast series with partner companies.

Women in blockchain meetup is going to be hosted in Reflective office in Seattle at 6:30 on July 25th.

Q&A/Comments

GregM: “These are wonderful companies to hear about. I really enjoy the spirit in each one of them. Shahan, I’ve worked with a group that spun out of Amgen. They’re using formal methods including pi calculus and other process algebraic techniques to get formally verified individualized dosing regimes for a variety of therapeutic substances. One of the things that they need is a delivery mechanism for clinical trials, collecting the data from patients.”

Shahan: “Is there any way you can get me connected to that team?”

Greg M: “I’ll absolutely get you connected with them. My biggest contact is Alan Brown, who’s an extraordinary logician. He worked with me on BizTalk at Microsoft, and we crafted a whole approach to healthcare that involved the kinds of techniques that we’re seeing here with RChain and the blockchain.”

Allan: “I think that Dan Connolly is also working on privacy and sharing of medical data.”

Greg M: “Awesome.”

RChain Europe update

The co-op had its inaugural meeting on July 31st and elected its board.

Hopefully, the registration process for the co-op to be an official Genossenschaft will be done before RCon3.

Q&A/Comment

Allan: “In association with RChain Europe, Tim has been putting together this governance conference for December. There might be some conflicts in timing between launch and hopefully, that will get straightened out so that people can attend.”

Deanna: “The dates for the next one are going to be earlier than that. There’s not an overlap.”

Validators update

The prospectus draft for validators is ready.

A validators focus group will be held around the July 26th- 27th time frame. Candidates interested in joining the validators focus group should contact Greg M on Discord (@leiterhaus#0430).

Q&A/Comments

Kenny Rowe: “I know there’s a difference between compliments as transactions and blocks. Are transaction fees collected on comm events or just in collections blocks?”

Greg M: “They’re collected on comm events, but we can verify that by looking at the cost model. We can go through that in a lot more detail in another session where we go through the cost model.”

Allan: “How close is that to being published publicly?”

Greg M: “Medha, where are we on the specs for the cost model?”

Medha: “We’re actually implementing just the straight-up cost accounting right now in the interpreter, so that will provide a mechanism to keep track of costs. After that, we are going to start having some more economic discussions about how much things are actually going to cost, and we’ll come out with any algorithms and a table of costs.”

Greg M: “When do we feel that we’ll be ready to have the cost table discussion?”

Medha: “About a month from now.”

Greg M: “Okay, great.”

Feedback about the H3Uni protocols

The governance forum yielded a positive response to Ian Kendrick’s presentation. The co-op is working with H3Uni on the design of communication protocols to do a follow up.

A unique property of the H3Uni protocol is that it’s non-hierarchical, inclusive, and transparent.

Greg M is excited about the communication protocol being rolled out by the H3Uni group and appreciates the feedback from the participants of the forum.

Further RCon3 update from Greg M

Greg M, Medha, Kelly, Peter Harris, and Ela Kagel met and discussed issues addressing pricing and promo codes for the conference to foster engagement.

There will be a promo code called “Ich bin ein coder.” Greg M will set up a repo where people can send pull requests for Rholang contracts as evidence of being a coder.

A group of volunteers to review the pull requests are needed. There will be conference attendance discounts for the reviewers. Interested persons should contact Greg M on Discord (@leiterhaus#0430).

The community has secured the Adrian Belew Power Trio band to perform at the conference.

Help is needed especially from those in Berlin for the publicity of RCon3, directed especially to high-level members of blockchain 3.0 efforts. Members with their own contacts can also assist.

Marketing updates

The second round of the logo concept from Girvin is out.

Kevin and Dario are working to merge the messaging hierarchy that was published.

Community members with interesting topics they want to write about for blog posts should submit them. There will be an email for submission when the blog is released and information on how to get rewarded for contributing good content.

The team is working on setting up collaborative developer education and getting a developer evangelist for conferences.

Working on prioritization and sponsorship of the conferences to attend for 2018–2019.

Bounty system update

There are ongoing efforts in setting up KPI’s and governance of the bounty system.

RChain Asia update

There is now an RChain community meeting every Tuesday from noon-1:00 pm Singapore time (Mon 9:00 pm PST) for people who live in eastern time zones.. It’s similar to the weekly debriefs. For now, the group is called RChain Asia. All are welcome. Will Qui and Mervyn Chng are the moderators.

There has been great interest from Bitcoin and Ethereum miners in Malaysia to become validators for RChain. Mervyn’s colleague, Mark Pui will be introducing RChain to them; getting them engage with the validator focus group.

Other updates

Reminder that the RHOC-REV swap will take place in December when the mainnet is launched. The developer website token swap page is the only place RHOC holders should trust for information. Beware of phishing attempts as the swap date gets closer.

October 24th will be the date of the all members meeting in Seattle. There have been questions about the nominations process and ballot initiatives. This year’s goal is to have all voting on-chain on Ethereum since RChain is not yet live.

Q&A/Comments

Christian: “I have a few questions about membership and how the European and Asian communities are represented because this is a co-op in Washington. My question is, if we have this explosion of (I can’t call them members because I guess it’s a legal term) new persons, how will those people be represented? Are they going to have to start their own organizations like in Germany? What does that mean in terms of liability as we get closer and closer to testnet launch?… We have about 10,000 people in the QQ chat and none of them are members except for maybe, two or three…These are just concerns I have because once you pull people in from Malaysia and Vietnam, Japan — and there’s no legal framework there… Where does that put the co-op in terms of its clients?”

Greg M: “That’s one of the motivations why we’re setting up regional cooperatives, and then relationships amongst those regional cooperatives with each other. So, it’s a kind of federated system of co-ops to handle that. People from the Far East or from Europe or from Africa or anywhere in the world who want to become a member of RChain U.S. are free to do that; likewise U.S. citizens are free to become members of RChain Europe and hopefully, as RChain Singapore gets launched in the not-too-distant future, they could become members of that. We want to interlock and overlap to support that, but also, we want to capitalize on local knowledge, local know-how, for handling local issues. I know that’s a high-level answer, but I hope you see where I’m going with this.”

Christian; “I would say it’s more complex where we’re representing different groups. We have representation in Asia, but mostly it’s the Chinese community represented. We have to be very careful of what we say… The same thing with RChain Europe — it’s a German cooperative, but how many French people do we have represented?”

Greg M: “The chair of the managing board is in the UK. I’ve already reached out to a French national with whom we are doing a project.”

Christian: “Right! I guess the point is that when we say someone is representing the community, do we actually have representation from that

community? Also, a member is a legal term with the co-op, so when we say someone’s a community member, what do you mean by that? Are they a paid member of the co-op, or are they just in the Discord channel, are they someone who’s actively contributing to the project for five hours in a social way? I’m saying we should get more granular with the definitions to keep all the legal liabilities clear.”

Greg M: “You’re right, and that granularity is why we want to set up the federated system so we can address those issues and direct people to the right organizations. So, you become a member of RChain U.S. on purpose, and you become a member of RChain Europe on purpose, because there are specific reasons to engage in that community.”

Allan: “I have a comment here. There’s been a certain amount of what Peter Norman calls siloing. We don’t want to end up with a situation where we have RChain just replicating traditional geographical boundaries. We don’t want RChain to be RChain U.S., and RChain Germany, and RChain Ecuador… RChain is different from that.”

Greg M: “Yes! that’s correct. If you look at the details of the design of the relationship between RChain U.S. and RChain Europe, the design of the relationship is such that even though they’re independent organizations, they need each other. So the remit, the economic reason for being for RChain in Europe is to build on-chain governance tools including an identity solution for all the RChain federated co-ops as well as the ability to capture and express sentiment and will. Sentiment is things like likes and thumbs up and all those kinds of things on social media, and will is things like votes or commitments to act, to execute. But on-chain tools for those things can’t exist without a chain, so RChain U.S. is delivering the chain.”

Christian: “Is the siloing something to do with the corporate realm where departments don’t talk to each other and become specialized? I don’t

understand what is meant by siloing.”

Greg M: “No, there are different ways that siloing can happen. Different cultures, whether they’re geographic or otherwise, can become insulated and insular. What we’re trying to do is to design these relationships so that there’s a natural mixing that happens because of their interdependence. So, it becomes impossible for them to silo because they have to talk to each other because they need each other to get work done.

Christian: “Okay, but in terms of just understanding who I’m talking to at the end of the day, there are supposed to be formal definitions. I’m still going to call them regions. We have all the Asian population representing RChain come to a community meaning every Monday night. What do you want to call that?”

Allan: “I think that should be called ‘Community Debrief +12’, because it’s characterized by the time zone and not by the citizenship or jurisdictional affiliations of the people.”

Christian: “I think there needs to be a resolution from the Board on this. Either way, it’s still got to be cut up so people understand how they can interact with the project, where they can go. RChain Europe is the first formal extension of the U.S. co-op, right? This is an experiment but I just thought that bringing it up would be important going forward.”

Greg M: “You’re right, and we’re working on this but I do hope that people understand… As we talk about organizational scaling, there has to be both differentiation and integration. Again, biological metaphors are perfect here. Within a human body, there’s a differentiation between the heart and the lungs, and yet they must also work together in order to make a whole body. Likewise, there’s differentiation across species and yet these species work together to knit a whole ecosystem.”

Jim: “If I am working on identity and governance, do I also join the EU cooperative to do that work?”

Greg M: “If you want that work to be delivered back to the RChain

community, it’s a good idea”