I am a software engineer who works on protocol-level development in the cryptocurrency field. In my free time, I also contribute to many other non-cryptocurrency-related open source projects.
No.
For all I know you could be Craig Wright. Why do you perpetrate the myth that you are an ETH dev while making it impossible to test this claim?
I'm sorry if I give people the feeling that I'm perpetrate the myth. I might be Craig Wright, and I might not. The only thing I want to emphasize is that what I am doesn't really matter (I might be a bread!) as I don't hold any real control of Ellaism!
No, but I might consider buying one!
I haven't watched any, unfortunately!
I love strategy and simulation games, such as Civilization, Cities Skylines, Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, etc.
My favourite artists are Aloe Blacc and OK Go. My favourite movie is, you guess it, The Shawshank Redemption!
I love all coins that have no premine and no dev fee. And I have holdings to many of them!
It all really depends on how much efforts we put in it. I think the chances are slim, but if we try hard, we may!
Around September 2017, I was frustrated that there isn't a version of Ethereum that really has no premine or dev fees. I decided to create one. I made a Parity config of a new chain, spinned a bootnode, posted the config on Bitcointalk Forum, and called it Ellaism. A few other founding developers and investors got interested in this coin, and started mining it. I myself was (and still am) a developer that seldom participate in coin mining, and it took me a few hours to setup mining on my gaming desktop. So unfortunately, I wasn't able to mine block 1.
There were more people than I expected who were interested in this coin, so things appeared to be a rush. It was only after a few days later did we finish set up an Ellaism website. However, at that moment, we still lacked many other things, and we had many users getting stuck setting up their nodes or miners.
Another obstacle was also present. In the first few days, it was even not possible to send transactions. The reason was that our block gas limit was lower than the gas required for sending a basic transaction. In the mean time, however, recent Parity versions (it was around 1.7/1.8) do not work well with (arguably a bug of) low block gas limit, and it refuses to raise it. Although the fix was short, releasing a new version of Parity isn't. What I did was to tell miners to instead downgrade Parity to 1.4 temporarily (where the issue didn't exist) and mine block till block gas limit raises to a reasonable number, and then switch back to the newest Parity version. That worked.
My definition of Ellaism is that it's a version of Ethereum without any premine or dev fees. Ellaism is the only coin I have founded myself so far.
A lot of people also asked for a roadmap of Ellaism in the beginning. Unfortunately till several months later I wasn't able to present one. The thing is, Ellaism was simply created to be "a version of Ethereum without premine or dev fees", and there wasn't any original vision or purpose.
When a no dev fee coin is created, it is fully in the hands of the community (and you!). Many people has later defined awesome visions and purposes for Ellaism.
Having no premine and no dev fee is the only distinguishing factor for Ellaism originally. Besides that, we're currently one of the first proof-of-work blockchains that support WebAssembly scripting.
I can't speak for the full Ellaism community, but for myself, I'd say the main focus for me right now is still building a better developer and user experience. Good tools and documentations that make developers and users easier to get their hands dirty are invaluable.
I really can't speak for everyone (and I think that's a thing you should decide by yourself before investing or developing!). Speaking for myself, I invest my time in Ellaism because it's still one of the only coins that is both with EVM or WebAssembly scripting, and fairly distributed with proof-of-work.
A coin's survival usually depends only on a) whether there are still developers working on it, and b) whether it still has an active community. I see a lot of coins become dead because of their founders abandoned it, but I don't recall many due to market price. Plus, we're a no premine coin, meaning anyone can pick up our work even if we all quit today, and he or she wouldn't feel any bit of unfairness.
No premine and fair distribution make a coin's survivability much better. Not to mention that we also have a good value proposition -- being one of the only production proof-of-work coin that has WebAssembly scripting.
Unfortunately, I'm not a visionary. I really can't say or promise anything for Ellaism in 10 years. However, in the short-term, I do see a lot of potential usage in finance, IoT, gaming, goverance, identity, etc, if we can get fast WebAssembly scripting. I do hope any visionary in our community can help to answer this question!
The blockchain itself is working well as of this moment. As we expand, the major issue we will be facing would be about how to scale. Unfortunately, this is an area that's still under active research, and I don't have a satisfying answer for it either.
There isn't any "surprise" unfortunately! I'm doing some research for self-governance for Ellaism, but until I dig deeper, there's probably not much I can tell!
Where do you see cryptocurrency, as a whole, in the near and far future and where does Ellaism stand in that future?
Cryptocurrency and decentralized applications have already become a necessity for a lot of people, esepcially those who live in a developing country without stable governments. I can't say anything about far future for cryptocurrency, but in the short-term, I think this situation will continue.
Ellaism does have its value proposition, but where Ellaism stands and how much Ellaism can contribute to the overall cryptocurrency community really depends on what we (the community) do about it.
Is it possible to achieve real decentralization of Ellaism? If we want to make a really decentralized coin, we cannot do without creating a constitution. And work out the voting procedure. A constitution is a set of fundamental principles.
Decentralization has many definitions. I think here we're mostly interested in how the coin is governed when an upgrade needs to happen. Many coins nowadays handle it by making hard forks, and it can be argued to be a way of decentralization, which I usually refer it as anarchism. Everyone is free to choose who to follow. In case of disagreement, we split the "nation".
Anarchism does have its benefits, but it also doesn't seek everyone to agree on things. This sometimes makes upgrades disastrous. So some coins instead choose democracy which sets constitution and voting process on chain, to force everyone to agree on an upgrade happening or not.
This is only one part of decentralization. Many other aspects of decentralization involve how fair the coins are distributed, how mining power are allocated, and how equal people in the community can voice out, etc. No matter what path we choose to continue forward, I don't consider anything to be "real" decentralization, because I can't think of a good definition of that. Instead, we try to make our decentralization better, by making upgrade process more transparent and clearer, distribution fairer, mining power not centralized, etc.
I absolutely love their work!
I would just say more is better. The first goal is to make sure there are public nodes that can serve those who cannot run full nodes themselves. The second goal is to make sure any peer can connect to enough other peers to avoid eclipse attacks and make the network more decentralized.
If we managed to get a self-goverance system on chain with its own constitution and voting process, then a simple way to "upgrade" donate and mining token is simply to force-set their code as agreed by goverance voting. Via this process, the self-goverance system can use the voting process to completely decide who has access to the donate and mining token and how the fund and token will be used.
Have you thought in the future to launch a decentralized exchange based on the Ellaism network? If we take as a basis a ready-made solution, how difficult would it be to setup?
Many existing decentralized exchange requires either only operating on one single blockchain (ERC-20 token decentralized exchanges), or requires its own blockchain to operate. So unfortunately we probably don't have much code there to be reused.
Launching a (mostly) general decentralized exchange on Ellaism is indeed possible, via relays, bridges and HTLC. However, I don't yet find any ready-made solution and we probably need to code it up ourselves.
I love Steve's ERC-721 project. I'm also really interested in games, as well as existing dapp rewrites in WebAssembly.
How do you evaluate the professional knowledge of Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin? Do you think they are geniuses?
For Vitalik Buterin, while I don't agree all of his opinions and do think some of the decisions he made in the past regarding Ethereum might not be the best, I do think he has the professional knowledge and leadership to lead a field, and he's doing a good job of it.
For Satoshi Nakamoto, I haven't read much history about him, so unfortunately I cannot comment much.
Is there a possibilty that ethash chains/networks connect and/or work with each other to boost performance and security?
To boost performance, what we can do is to relay two chains together and allow fund transfer. This relieves a crowded chain while also boosts the other chain. This is totally doable and we do already have some relay implementations. However, no simple solution would have capacity exceeding current combined capacity of those chains.
To boost security, we may be able to use results of a larger coin's proof-of-work. However, this would require the other chain to be "pegged" to the larger chain, and as Ethereum is going proof-of-stake, it may not really be worth it.
Follow up question if yes, which chain is more possible to do this and implement ellaism ETH, ETC, something else?
All of the coins are similar technically. So for relays, once we deploy it to one chain, it's trivial to migrate it to another chain.
It is not a bad thing to do if what we're trying to do is to save energy. However, many people argued that economically, PoS wouldn't actually save anything compared with PoW, and at this moment, the most major issue related to Ellaism and PoS is that we don't yet have a good PoS algorithm that can work securely for a no-premine coin.
For Ethereum, before rent lands (if ever), there're still a lot of optimizations we can do for node implementation to reduce storage size. I'd say the urgent problem is scaling, but not rent.
Thank you @ellaismer
Based on your answers I would recommend Rick and Morty Season 2 Episode 6 if you have 20 minutes of free time 💯