Lead Developer Laudney on Reddsight and Social X

RH: Congratulations on the launch of the Reddsight block explorer and APIs.

Who worked on this part of the Reddcoin project? Laudney: /u/bigreddmachine and /u/userNameNotLongEnoug worked on the front end and styling. I worked on PoSV-specific data structures and core logic. RH: Why was this new service developed and released “under the radar”? Laudney: In addition to the main branch of development as described in the official roadmap, we also have several side projects that provide relatively minor but still important pieces to the overall "jigsaw puzzle". An official blockchain explorer and APIs have been internally considered for some time. Recently the community explicitly requested it so we felt the time was right to bring it to fruition. RH: Please could you give a couple of examples of how APIs could be used? Laudney: The APIs are very comprehensive. They provide even more functionalities than RPC calls built into reddcoind. /u/BrownSlaughter is already using them to build a new version of the RddCompanion browser extension that allows users to see the balance of addresses and how long it takes to stake, without need for a wallet. One can also use it to build wallets or reporting tools that show interesting statistics of the Reddcoin blockchain. With a bit of work, one can also implement payment services for e-commerce. It's also useful to note that one can actually set up and host these APIs on their own servers if they so desire. There is detailed documentation at

https://github.com/reddcoin-project/reddsight-api RH: How many other cryptocurrency projects provide this level of functionality? Laudney: Recently Bitcoin has seen several startups provide cloud-based APIs. You can read about them here:

http://www.coindesk.com/cex-io-joins-bitcoin-api-race-launch-plugchain/ A couple of them also support Litecoin and Dogecoin mainly due to the fact that all of them are PoW and therefore code change required is minimal. To my best knowledge, Reddcoin is the first major PoS cryptocurrency to officially provide a service like this. RH: How is the Social X Whitepaper coming along? Laudney: In the cryptocurrency world, there is this unwritten convention of "releasing whitepaper first, code second". I personally followed that convention for the PoSV announcement and release. But recently I've started to think about why this convention came to existence and whether it's helpful and my conclusion is quite interesting. What are the benefits of releasing a whitepaper early for an open-source project? There are several. First, to establish the precedence of the idea. Second, to gather feedback. Third, to recruit people to work together on the implementation. When it comes to my Social X whitepaper, all these benefits are dwarfed by the risk of giving away too much of our game plan too early to competitors. If you think about it, no company releases details of their upcoming new products long before they are actually able to ship those products. It's almost ludicrous to give away technical specifications and vision before seizing the first-mover advantage in the market place and dealing a blow to competitors with element of surprise. Based on this reasoning, I've been focusing on writing code and the whitepaper in parallel and plan to release the whitepaper when implementation is largely finished. RH: So you're already working on the code - exciting to hear! One last quick question for you: do you do a lot of reading? Who are your favourite authors? Laudney: Yes. Reading is part of my daily routine. My favourite authors are Carl Sagan and Neil Stephenson.