Day two of SOS18 is behind us and it was again a day of great new concepts, improvement proposals and lively debates.

Elad gave us an insight into the new APIs Swarm offers.

The second day started with Swarm’s developer Elad Nachmias with a talk on Swarm APIs. Since last year Swarm has received an upgrade in the form of three new supported Bzz API schemes: list, hash and resource. He walked the audience through the steps of how to run a Swarm node and how to use the new Bzz schemes.

Nodes were the main talking point of another Swarm member, Louis Holbrook. In his vivid presentation, he presented the PSS — Postal Services over Swarm. As he explained, PSS is a way of relaying messages using a Swarm node. He gave an overview of how a node functions as a relay and rounded the talk with a live setting up of a relay node.

Louis Holbrook kept the audience in a good mood with his witty and humorous talk on PSS.

Money stream instead of a static account

Next in line was Dietmar Hofer from Artis with an interesting concept of streaming money. As he explained, today’s money transfer is always discrete — a certain amount at a point of time. Instead he proposed an account balance made up of continuous stream of inflows and outflows which would reduce transaction costs, trust requirements and improve privacy. There are some payment models that would benefit from this new concept and he encouraged the audience to explore new options.

Dietmar Hofer spurred a lively Q&A with his concept of streaming money.

PC nVidias to rival AWS

In his presentation Livepeer’s Eric Tang showed the room the principles behind their decentralised and censorship-resistant video. The basic idea is that anyone, who can offer computational resources for transcoding, can join the network and provide value. He followed up with an overview of the general technical traits behind Livepeer, which in essence works as a transcoding market, and highlighted some of the issues that they still need to resolve.

Livepeer’s Eric Tang showed how their scalable decentralised video transcoding works.

The last talk of the first round was reserved for Jelle Gerbrandy from Paratii who presented their decentralised video platform in the making that lets users share video content without the middleman and get rewarded for it.

Blockchain OS for the new age

The second round was kicked off by Jacek Sieka and Boris Petrov from Satus research team. They gave a brief overview of Status, the mobile Ethereum client, and Whisper. In Jacek’s words, Status is a messenger and a gateway to the Ethereum world, while Whisper is a protocol that allows for private communication. As he pointed out they are still balancing some issues, like privacy vs. performance, reviewing the protocol for publishing and doing a lot of work on the ecosystem as a whole.

You can’t do it without a good snack.

Louis Holbrook then continued with his second part of the presentation, titled mutable resources. It showed how to link dynamic content to a constant Swarm address, which is an essential capability for creating decentralised systems on Swarm.

Overcoming the limitations

We rounded the day off with Mainframe’s Shane Howley that gave a talk on PSST and Swarm’s Ralph Pichler that talked about the Swear & Swindle contracts.

Since the PSS has some limitations when it comes to sending messages Howley proposed a PSS sockeT (PSST) that would alleviate these shortcomings (these include unreliability to deliver messages over several relays, size limitations and others). The socket takes inspiration from current internet protocols and acts in a similar way. The protocol’s design is done, now implementation, simulation and formal specification await.

In his final talk of the day, Pichler presented how Swear and Swindle contracts work as a means of arbitrage in case of promised services and make sure that those services are either provided or the customer is compensated. As it is proper, he gave the room a quick tour of the code.

There you have it, the end of day two. We still have one full day of great talks ahead of us it and then ’s hackathon time on Friday. Stay tuned!

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