In our ongoing mission to decentralise the operation of the “Witness” (a name currently under review) nodes, which provide the order of transactions on the DAG and consensus to the Obyte distributed ledger, we are pleased to announce that it is time to offer the community the opportunity to change the next address on the list of these order providers attached to each user’s new transactions.

The new candidate to express their desire to run a node is the Bosch Connectory in Stuttgart, Germany.

Obyte & Bosch Collaboration

As many in the community might already know, Obyte and the Connectory have been working together for some time with the main collaboration starting with the Bosch Connectory in Stuttgart. Obyte has participated as a technology partner for two hackathons organised by the Connectory. Also, Obyte and the Connectory are working on a permanent Lego City display that demonstrates how Obyte and Bosch technology can be used together to transform the way modern day cities operate in terms of energy usage, traffic control, payments systems, working spaces, and charging of electric vehicles.

During the first hackathon Bosch created its own asset — the Bosch Coins on the Obyte platform and began to use it for mock payment for goods and services (coffee and 3D printing) in the Connectory. Now, Bosch is looking to use the Obyte-powered Bosch Coins as a mechanism for internal payments to digitise and optimise their inter-departmental bookkeeping. The second hackathon generated a use case that won the last round of Autonomous Agent developer contest, an ongoing use case being developed to launch a decentralised marketplace for the rental of power tools from Bosch and other manufacturers. Other use cases that combined Obyte and Bosch technology developed during the hackathon include a vending machine that accepts Bosch Coins as payment, a peer to peer energy trading marketplace, and a platform to book, pay for, and gain access to shared office spaces like conference rooms.

In addition to its cooperation with the Connectory, Obyte has expanded its collaboration with Bosch and has developed a demo of a solution using its prosaic contracts and oracles to create secure and transparent digital contracts for the Direct Purchasing Department of Bosch Rexroth. This solution allows Rexroth to digitally sign contracts with its suppliers and automatically maintain dynamic, up to date information about raw materials pricing of the machine parts covered by the contracts, which will greatly improve price accuracy when placing re-orders and efficiency when reconciling the orders by the accounting department.

Statement From the Bosch Connectory

In a slight departure from our usual procedure, the Bosch Connectory has not provided a pledge or video interview. Due to corporate policy the Bosch Connectory can not engage in public community discussion regarding its candidacy, and Obyte asks the community for understanding and respecting this fact. However, due to our multifaceted cooperation and close relationship fostered over the last two years, the Obyte core team feels confident in presenting the Bosch Connectory to the community as a candidate to run a Witness node on the public ledger.

However, Bosch announced its intention to run a node in its Medium article posted on October 23rd, 2019. As stated in this announcement, Bosch as a company is DLT agnostic and is supporting decentralisation in the overall DLT landscape and the concept of foundations with decentralised governance, for example by maintaining nodes on different DLTs already today. Therefore, because of its support of decentralisation in the overall DLT landscape, the Bosch Connectory in Stuttgart has set up a stable environment for running an Obyte node and is hereby offering to act as a Witness, if it is in the interest of the Obyte Foundation and Obyte community. The Bosch Connectory may decide to stop running its node in the future but should this happen, the Connectory will do its best to give proper prior notice to the Obyte community.

Furthermore, Antonius Gress, Head of the Connectory said, “Although there has been a lot of hype about blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) over the course of the last five years, very few practical applications and useful products have emerged from the noise. Most DLT projects are over-promising and under-delivering. In Obyte we found not only a project that is doing it the other way around, but also a platform that enables an easy and fast implementation of use cases with well known Javascript and quick to learn Oscript language and tons of ready to use features.”

PLEASE VOTE TO DETERMINE WHETHER THE CONNECTORY BECOMES A NEW ORDER PROVIDER!

So in order to understand whether there is support from the Obyte community to replace one of the nodes run by Tony Churyumoff, the founder of Obyte, with the Bosch Connectory, we need you to register your vote on this simple question:

Do you approve of the Bosch Connectory becoming one of the default Order Providers (also known as Witnesses) on the Obyte network?

Yes

No

Please go to Polls section on Obyte.io to register your vote or find the “Poll Bot” in the Bot Store in your wallet.

Going Forward

Although, this might not seem like a big deal, it is! So please vote!

The poll will be open for ONLY 2 WEEKS (until 18:00 CET on Friday December 27th, 2019), so please don’t delay. The results will be visible in real time, and once the vote is over we will announce the result in a new blog post.

Only one vote (the last one) per Obyte address counts, and the votes are weighted by the balance currently held by the address, like votes done by shareholding in a public company. If a majority of the weighted votes cast are in favour of making the Connectory a default order providing node then the default hub will broadcast the new list, which will give us 3 nodes who are not Tony!

Soon we hope to be announcing more candidates, so please watch this space. We will continue to work on building the best decentralised distributed ledger technology platform that we can! Thank you for your trust and support.