Qtum - Blockchain made ready for business
Blockchain has now gone from being just a technology for Bitcoin to something so much more, as many in the industry are coming up with different systems based on it. Blockchain became popular when Bitcoin was first introduced several years ago, to help consolidate different databases into one that can be shared by multiple users, allowing them to make revisions as well as access it simultaneously, regardless of where they are. Furthermore, these databases are completely open to the public, giving all users access to the information and records contained therein. This has made this technology of great value as most have never seen anything like it before. This feature of the network ensures that it is also impenetrable, as a hacker cannot find its' nucleus to hack into. In the same gist, developers have now come up with a new application called QTUM (knows as Quantum).
QTUM, based out of Shanghai, China essentially works by using the best of technologies from both Bitcoin and Ethereum ( programming language), so as to combine the two to get a platform that can work by producing decentralized applications. It introduces an element of 'smart contract' through the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM} on the one hand, and 'master contract' on the other. The aim behind this is to reduce the reliance of business on humans, thereby also reducing human error and other complications that may arise while tracking business transactions using the Blockchain database. They hope to do this by enabling the programs to run independently without requiring any sort of guidance. Although it seems like it will be awhile before business owners actually start using this model, QTUM will soon be released in beta.
The QTUM Team
FLTR; JOHN SCIANNA, BRETT FINCARYK, NEIL MAHI, PATRICK DAI, YUNQI "CASPAL" OUYANG, JORDAN EARLS
As to how efficiently QTUM will work can be gauged by the continuous success of Bitcoin since it first made it's debut in 2008. There have only been minor complaints about the digital currency and its' usage. This fact alone should silence the critics about the feasibility of this Blockchain-incorporated technology. However, the critics would watch to see how successful the technology is, as EVM and Bitcoin are known to not be compatible with each other. The question is as to whether these issue will be resolved. The support that the technology has already received from gurus in the industry is testament to the fact that this is indeed a revolutionary concept. In its' completed form, QTUM will be available for use not only on laptops but will also be available on mobile devices.
Jordon Earls, lead developer / co-founder of Qtum
Was kind enough to answer some questions for us
Q. What are the strength and weaknesses of the project? And where do you see threats for Qtum?
A. One of our strengths is that we know who we are targeting to use our blockchain and we have the right backers to make the connections we need.
Qtum is being built with compatibility with existing economies and ecosystems in mind. This primarily is focused on Ethereum and Bitcoin. However, we are building what we would consider to be the best of both worlds. Taking the simplicity of the account model for smart contracts, and the power of the UTXO model for the underlying blockchain. The UTXO model specifically has proven to be more scalable and more compatible with existing protocols. This includes the SPV protocol, which will be used to make decentralized and trustless light and mobile wallets and applications. We have extended this to also include smart contracts, so that for the first time it is possible to interact with smart contracts without using a centralized server or API.
Because we are building this from some existing projects, we share some of their weaknesses as well, though we have implemented some things to reduce their impact. In Bitcoin, there has been debate over blocksize and various attacks by filling up blocks. We have alleviated this by making the block time faster, as well as allowing for slightly larger blocks. In Ethereum, there have been many attacks on certain opcodes which are cheaper than they should be. We have alleviated this by allowing for multiple gas "schedules" (gas price of each opcode) without any kind of forks. Although our aim is to build off of known secure and proven code, there is some new code as well that has not been proven (primarily the Account Abstraction Layer). We will be holding a bug bounty when we release the testnet to try to find and fix any bugs in this new code before we release the mainnet.
We also see some threats from other community and consortium projects. But since this is largely an open-source community, we will all benefit from competition. We also seek to embrace other projects to bring the various disparate communities together into a common alliance.
Q. You've raised 1M dollar with the help of Angel Investors. Now your seek 10000-15000 Bitcoins for future development. What are the consequences if this target is not reached?
A. We will reserve any unsold coins to sell to institutional investors at a later date. The only real consequence is that we might have to take some time from focusing on the code to sell the remaining tokens to people who will use them in our network. Finally, we have plans for what happens if we do not raise as much as expected now and later, and it just means we might drop lower-priority optional projects for Qtum. However, we do not expect for this to be a concern at this point.
Q. In what regard do you consider Qtum different from The Stratis project?
A. I don't know enough about Stratis to comment on it.
Q. In which field will Qtum excel? I.e. onto which market next to the finance will the most marketing resources targeted to?
How do you see companies active in that market implement Qtum to their products. A. Some of our largest backers see Qtum playing just as large a role in IoT as it will in finance. When you think of the identity management systems that are needed for people, similar tools will be needed for a secured IoT. We can see these potentially on permissioned side-chains of Qtum.
This is an enormous market for blockchain technology, and it is crucially needed. Last year we saw the largest DDoS attack ever done with unsecured CCTV cameras, we think blockchain technology can help mitigate these attacks to a large extent if we could pinpoint what devices are acting maliciously. The SPV protocol is our big strength that enables this to be done on small and lightweight devices that are not capable of downloading and processing the complete blockchain.
Qtum is also built with mobile dApps in mind, decentralized applications running on the blockchain, but being interacted with and controlling traditional Android and iOS mobile applications. We believe that with this we can enable businesses to bring dApps to the consumer and other use cases previously out of reach by smart contract platforms.
Q. Many (new) crypto projects use Blackcoin's POS implementation. Do you consider The Blackcoin project a competition?
A. Blackcoin's PoS 3.0 implemented a lot of new features and fixed many of the attack vectors in PoS 2.0 and 1.0. We owe them credit for creating the PoS 3.0 implementation that we have ported to Qtum. However, we do not feel that Blackcoin (which is mostly still Bitcoin from a smart contract point of view, complete with all of the limitations, such as not being Turing-complete) is suitable for all of the goals we have for a smart contract platform. We would like to emphasize that we embrace our competition, and hope to build a large community bringing many different projects together.
