Elastos — The Last Element To Fulfill God’s Protocol
The conceptualization of God has always been subjectively described/argued since the dawn of time. Some definitions include the characteristic of divine simplicity, omnipresence (present everywhere), omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), and having an eternal necessary existence. There are different approaches, philosophies, and religions like monotheistic with the belief that there is only one God or polytheism with many gods. Fortunately or unfortunately, this article won’t cover all these mysterious secrets of the universe but will analyze the crypto world with a similar abstraction. Find out what are the God Protocols and why Elastos is the missing element to perfect the first trustless third party in world history. Along the way, this article will also reveal the systemic issues of the current centralized infrastructures and why Elastos is needed to solve them.
History of the God Protocols
Originally published in 1997, Nick Szabo a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency has released his hypothesis of the God Protocols. Basically, it was a protocol that everyone could trust also known as the Trust/God Protocol. In his article, this protocol states all parties will be sending their inputs to God. After receiving the inputs the God will maintain full confidentially, evaluate, and provide a definite result which will become the final output. This is the core concept of the God Protocols perfecting the first trustless third party of humankind.
The first layer of the God Protocols: The Blockchain
In 1997, Adam back made Hashcash, in 1998 Wei Dai made B-money, in 1998 Nick Szabo created Bitgold, and in 2004 Hal Finney created RPOW. All these protocols used new technological concepts yet failed. Eleven years later in 2008, Bitcoin was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto and successfully combined decades of cryptographic research; Merkle trees, hash functions, public-key cryptography, and digital signatures. Bitcoin introduced the first layer of the God Protocols, the blockchain.
A blockchain is simply a decentralized ledger or database containing all transactions across a peer-to-peer network, one where participants can confirm transactions without the need for a central authority. Miners validate new transactions and record them on the global ledger (blockchain) by competing to solve a difficult mathematical problem based on a cryptographic hash algorithm. The solution found is called the Proof-Of-Work. Bitcoin is a payment network without any central authority or banks handling transactions. Bitcoin is open-source (its design is public), nobody owns or controls Bitcoin and everyone can take part. Citizens don’t have to depend on central banks, traditional finance, or even on payment systems like Alipay or PayPal to send money where they want.
The second layer of the God Protocols: The Smart Contracts
Smart contracts were first proposed in 1994 by Nick Szabo, offering lines of code which can be stored on a blockchain and automatically executed when external predetermined terms and conditions are met. They are agreements or contracts which can be coded onto a blockchain. It’s in 2015 with Ethereum that smart contracts became a reality and brought up a new level of capabilities for the computing layer. Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality created by Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Woods, and a few other people. Even though there are many possible areas which have yet to be explored with this technology, there are use-cases today which are clear and exist such as in Banking, Financial Services, Digital Identity, Prediction markets, Decentralized Finance, record keeping, securities, derivatives and supply chain management.
Even with all the developments of blockchain and smart contracts, which all added/improved trustless storage, computing, and capabilities to the God protocol, there are still some huge flaws or vulnerabilities that make it insufficient as a trustless third party. A blockchain is a bookkeeping method. It can allow people to know how A transferred over to B, and this creates a new revolution of transparency and trust, but it does this slowly. It is more trustworthy but less efficient. Blockchain is not meant for transferring movies, and music, and messages, and sending large packets of data. Blockchain is a ledger, not an entire internet, and not an operating system.
Many issues need to be solved for the blockchain/smart-contracts to truly become a trustless third party. Scalability, Privacy, Connectivity, and Data Ownership.
The third layer of the God Protocols: The Oracle
Blockchains and smart contracts create the first two foundations for the existence of the God protocol, provided they are fully decentralized. Smart contracts, however, are limited because unless they are fed external data, they are isolated and unable to execute their programmed function.
Chainlink was a decentralized oracle network solution launched in November 2017 which provides real-world data to smart contracts on the blockchain, allowing them to interact with the outside world without sacrificing their features of decentralization. Oracles bridge both on and off-chain environments together with the use of APIs, working collectively without the reliability of one centralised source. Chainlink solved the connectivity problem by allowing smart contracts to communicate with the real world, thus bringing new life to the God Protocol.
Even if Oracles, however, are a revolutionary breakthrough, they still don’t solve all the aspects of scalability, decentralization and privacy since these challenges exist both at the core infrastructure, at the consensus level, and at the smart contract level. They also unfortunately don’t solve data ownership which is one of the most important parts of an ideal third party. In the next part of this article, you will finally understand why Elastos is so critical.
The Last Element of God’s Protocol: The Decentralized Network OS
“While we have many chains, in the end, they will all come together under one network and we will have the Internet of Money, the Internet of Value, the Internet of smart-contracts, the Internet of promises, the Internet of identities/reputations with decentralized systems that can change the way we interact as a society, one network, many chains”. -Andreas Antonopoulos
The design idea of Elastos originated from Rong Chen, a former Microsoft senior/executive software engineer with now 35 years of experience designing Operating Systems. For more information about Rong Chen and the history of how and why Elastos came to life, I recommend this article;
An Operating system is like Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS/iOS, Google’s Android OS, Linux Operating System but Elastos is not like the traditional operating system, it’s a decentralized network operating system, which means “Besides being open source, technically speaking, the biggest and most important difference is the Web OS. Elastos’ technical guiding ideology is, the internet doesn’t involve computing, and computing doesn’t involve the internet. In short, we are making sure the value is there on the internet. In other words, all the network communication between virtual machines is generated automatically. This phrase is the core and key of our technology.” — Rong Chen
Elastos is creating an industrial network operating system to connect every hardware and citizen safely together, where everyone owns their code and can join an internet of value that is decentralized and for everyone all whilst removing potential hacks, distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) and centralized internet data.
Elastos is an everlasting framework with two levels of operating system abstractions working in tandem: (1) Elastos Runtimes — various local virtual machine operating systems, where dApps are sandboxed inside PC2s; (2) Elastos Carrier — the network operating system for the Smartweb Computer, which handles all communication logistics between PC2s. “Protocols can be swapped or replaced in time, but the OS abstraction API set is forever. This is really the Holy Grail for the new Internet”.
Elastos has a decentralized autonomous organisation (DAO) called The Cyber Republic with 12 community elected teams of the individuals who represent and act as the Governance Layer for this new Network Operating System. They collectively control a treasury for years of sustainability and prosperity and can make decisions on the direction and state of the protocol. There is also the Elastos Foundation, a dissolving entity which manages and funds over 70–80 developers from around the world to build the core framework. The Foundation, as the Elastos pillars development are complete, will progress into a legal Consortium after 2021 nurturing the ecosystem with the core teams for years to come.
Dissolving Elastos Foundation has been our commitment for the long term benefits of ELA compliance to regulations. Core teams will continue for years to come, I believe. But it’s not my call, hope you all understand. Satoshi left, Bitcoin took off, that would be a leap of faith. — Rong Chen
Elastos is the last decentralized Network Operating System and there are six blockchains in the ecosystem so far, but blockchains are only one component of the four pillars of Elastos.
1. ELA main-chain DPoS + PoW leveraging Bitcoin for security (60%+ of the bitcoin miners secure this chain)
2. Ethereum side-chain for smart-contracts with 133 000x more hash power and scaling through DPoS without losing decentralization since it’s tied to the ELA main-chain secured by Bitcoin
3. Elastos has its own Credit Oracle network in development based on Chainlink called ElaLink, which uses in-house DPoS nodes for consensus and receive payment in ELA. The next generation of De-Fi will be increasingly personalized and entirely private. For more info: https://elastos.info/development-begins-for-elastos-native-credit-oracle-network/
4. DID Sidechain (Decentralized Identifier): A W3C-compliant blockchain for decentralized identities that provides critical data to dApps
5. NEO side-chain with more hash power and decentralization since it’s tied to the ELA main-chain secured by Bitcoin. The original NEO only has 7 consensus nodes. NEO side-chain on Elastos is technically superior
6. Token generation side-chain
7. Infine scalable side-chain possibilities
Remember: Protocols can be swapped or replaced in time, but the OS abstraction API set is forever. This is really the Holy Grail for the new Internet. — Rong Chen
Elastos should be viewed in a similar light to Bitcoin. Remember earlier when we talked about how Bitcoin came to life? Adam Back made Hashcash, Wei Dai made B-Money, Nick Szabo created Bitgold, Hal Finney created RPOW but all the elements alone were not enough. Bitcoin was the first to bring together decades of cryptographic research; Merkle trees, hash functions, public-key cryptography, and digital signatures. Well, Elastos is going the same thing, but instead of doing it for the monetary system, it’s doing it for the internet. It’s the first to bring together a host of technologies into one unique utility suite to create a Smartweb, a fully autonomous and decentralised God Protocol. These are the elements;
1. Blockchains; Bitcoin like mainchain, Ethereum/NEO smart-contracts, Personal credit Oracle with ElaLink, Digital identity chain/credentials, Token issuance. Elastos allows any chain to join its network and benefits from greater security, scalability, and decentralization.
2. Personal Cloud Compute(PC2) / Run time environment. ElastOS: A mobile application for developers to create and launch truly decentralised apps (DApps), which can’t be shut down or controlled by any third party, called Capsules.
3. More than 400 000 Carrier nodes: A decentralized peer-to-peer network that replaces the IP-based system and transports traffic between DApps and virtual computers.
4. Hive 2.0: Providing users with a series of decentralized storage solutions via elastOS (private, shared & public).
”If we could have peer-to-peer trading of digital assets with private ownership, that’s true capitalism for the first time on the Internet. Today we trade offline goods, but can you trade online virtual digital assets and build a virtual economy which protects users data? To send a digital asset you have to send code not, for instance, a file that can be played by a media player. Let’s say if I send you binary code which is my encrypted data, I if I sold it to you, you can now run it and whilst I still have a copy on my hard drive if I run it on the network, it’ll say okay Rong you don’t have the right anymore, that’s where when you share value, your sharing code. When your sharing code we call it a Smartweb. A Network Operating System is the real solution to solving our internets virus, DDoS and piracy issues”. — Rong Chen
I recommend this article for more information about the potential value of ELA. The article covers the Ecosystem Value, Economical Value, and Speculative Value after reading the article. The next parts of this article are personally my favorites.
The Hydra
In Greek mythology, The Hydra was a mythical creature with many heads, If you tried to cut off one head, two more would grow back in its place unless you knew the right solution. This is a picture representing all the current centralized monopolies that own all the data. Fortunately, Elastos knows and has the right solution in hand to take back.
The current Internet cannot protect users’ privacy and data, resulting in de facto data centralization, which seriously hinders the prosperity of the Internet economy moving forward. With centralization of power, comes lack of security, transparency, and responsibility as the entities become so colossal that their power become monopolistic, meaning they can make their own rules at the expense of their consummers. For example Facebook and all the big tech sell people’s data without any consequences. This data doesn’t even belong to them, since it’s the users that produce the data, meaning the decision over what’s done with that data should become a choice at the user level. The absence of data ownership is a crucial privacy concern as the world progress into a digital era. Only Elastos could truly solve this issue.
Even, Mark Zuckerberg who is currently trying to issue Libra/Diem is announcing that Facebook is going to be a data privatization platform, this is actually not only the blockchain but also the support of a completely decentralized new generation of the Internet. Elastos has the right vision and is the only one that people can truly trust. The infrastructure that caused all these problems won’t become the solution of these systems. I recommend reading this article to understand the value of data privatization which is a multi-trillion dollars target making ELA an asset within a new major class, which promises to give back to humanity their most valued resource, data.
“The current market needs a better credit reporting system should first clarify the ownership of personal data, break the monopoly of heads, and promote the free transaction and circulation of data. The Key signature is conformed and the content is encrypted on the chain to ensure the privacy of the information subject and realize the protection of data privacy; finally, to achieve friendly supervision, any violation of data privacy can be monitored and traced to achieve penetrating supervision” — Feng Han
Elastos complete the God Protocols by successfully bringing together a combination of unique components to create a perfect platform, one where everyone is equal and can produce wealth by creating, owning, buying and selling digital assets online like physical goods today. An environment where no third party and no single entity controls the platform itself. A true Smartweb for all. Your data, your control. The concept that everyone trust “God”, and “God” knows everyone’s secrets (with big data) is important to understand because the God can’t possibly be a corporation or a government. It can only come from a consensus agreed by the public.
“The paradigm shifts of the IT industry in the last forty years is also important to understand.
PC — you own your data, but everyone was in his/her separate data silo.
The World Wide Web, Web1 — partial data ownership being transferred to Websites which is controlled by monopolies.
Mobile Social Networks, Web2 — not only is all data being stored in clouds and owned by big brothers but your data is also meddled with by big-data and AI algorithms.
PC2, Elastic Personal Cloud Compute empowers individuals so they are on an equal footing with all businesses.
The Smartweb, Web3, returns back to the founding fathers’ dream of the Internet being a decentralized utility domain for all of mankind”. — Rong Chen
The Tree of Life
In the Tree Of Life, Blockchains, Smart-contracts, Oracles, and other potential blockchains protocols represent the roots. They grow deeper into the soil collecting nutrients/water/energy solidifying the foundation and security of the Tree. The trunk of the Tree represents the decentralized network OS, supporting the whole living system. The branches and twigs represent the next waves of businesses leveraging the ecosystem and the leaves would simply represent the fruits/flowers of their economical benefits. Finally, the users/activity represent the sun, to stimulate the process of photosynthesis transforming light energy into encrypted energy.
’The operating system is the foundation and soul of all software’’ — Rong Chen.
“Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy,” — Michael Saylor.
Bitcoin indirectly supports the Elastos vision and both together will help to enable the 4th Industrial Revolution. The Elastos Internet Operating System focusing on re-decentralizing the Internet is also part of the World Economic Forum an International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. Only Elastos, Chainlink, ConsenSys, and Hedera are part of The Global Innovators, an invitation-only group of the world’s most promising start-ups and scale-ups.
In the end, the Tree Of Life is represented as the whole Elastos ecosystem since it supports/utilized all these current and potential new elements/layers at the roots. As you can see, Elastos enable the Era of Quantum Wealth which is the beginning of the true Web 3.0.
Note: The author do no longer believe that Elastos is the last element of God’s protocol, my views have changed a lot and I do not want to mislead people with this article.
For more info about Elastos:https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/elastos/
Elastos’s websites: https://elastos.info https://www.elastos.org
For more info about the Era of Quantum Wealth: https://elanews.net/2018/07/23/feng-hans-elastos-and-quantum-wealth-lecture-2/
References
- https://cyberrepublic.press/elastos-oracle-and-credit-technology/
- https://nakamotoinstitute.org/the-god-protocols/
- https://bitcoin.org/en/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Segxvh5He2I
- https://medium.com/@elastos_orchard/the-odyssey-of-rong-chen-5df2cd5e8b13
- https://www.learnreligions.com/tree-of-life-in-the-bible-4766527
- https://csfs.colostate.edu/colorado-trees/what-is-a-tree-how-does-it-work/#:~:text=Trunk%20%E2%80%93%20generally%20a%20single%20%E2%80%9Cstem,(2)%20anchor%20the%20tree.
- https://hackernoon.com/why-elastos-is-building-a-new-internet-with-user-rights-and-freedom-at-its-core-x02r34bq
- https://medium.com/@malcolmlynett/elastos-the-best-investment-opportunity-since-1693-750de8353c14
- https://www.onetribeapparel.com/blogs/pai/meaning-of-tree-of-life
