The Colony Whitepaper

Today, we are happy to (finally!) release the Colony Whitepaper.

The whitepaper is a technical document, intended to define the Colony Network. While we are releasing it publicly, it is not a marketing document. It has been written as a blueprint for the implementation of the contracts, not to persuade anyone of the merits of the system it describes.

The whitepaper is an evolving document. At the top of the whitepaper, immediately underneath the title, is a date in YYYYMMDD format. This indicates the last day that the whitepaper was updated. As development continues, and improvements to proposed implementations are made, and mistakes are inevitably discovered, the whitepaper will change — perhaps significantly. Its current state represents our current best-guess for the final system.

The whitepaper does not represent a commitment from the Colony team to make the network of contracts described in the whitepaper. This is partly due to the fact that it is an evolving document, and so the intended final product may change as development continues. But this is also due to the fact that we may get hit by a bus.

The whitepaper contains unknowns. Values for constants are given, with no guarantee that they are correct, or values are omitted completely. As we implement the network, and testing takes place, we intend to firm up these values. This evolution of constants will surely continue after the network is deployed and greater numbers of people begin to use it, in order to ensure the smooth-running of the network as a whole.

Here it is:

https://colony.io/whitepaper.pdf

We are very keen to receive feedback from the community as we enter this next stage of implementation, so please do reach out to us with any feedback you have after reading the whitepaper. You can reach us via slack, email, or for extra points, by raising a Github issue.

Alex Rea is a recovering astrophysicist. After getting his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, he abandoned the world of academia to start building Colony. There, he does whatever needs doing but is happier the more technical the work is.

He first got involved with the cryptocurrency space in 2011, and still hasn’t figured out the best way to explain what a blockchain is to a layperson in five minutes.

Colony is a platform for open organizations.

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