There hasn't been a lot of drama of late in the crypto world but an event in Dublin last night reminded me of how polarising it can be. The evening was entertaining to say the least ...
Hedera Hashgraph
Hedera Hashgraph a next generation technology that is not Blockchain but is positioning itself to compete with the likes of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Eos and others to be the distributed ledger technology that will transform the world.
Hedera Hashgraph promises a lot, even nano payments and in the test net they are getting huge figures for transactions per second. They have bold claims and plenty of criticism for their competitors.
Hashgraph Ireland
Last night I attended a meetup in Dublin run by Hasgraph Ireland. The event was at the Deloitte Blockchain Lab in Dublin's Silicon Docks where Jordan Fried of Swirlds was speaking. His college Ken one of the Developer Advocates was also present for questions.
Jordan is a articulate and convincing speaker. He described the principles and governance structure of the Hedera Hashgraph and convincingly made the case of how it was better than everything else.
So what is is all about?
The key differentiators of this platform to alternatives revolve around
- the governance structure
- the method of achieving consensus
- consensus timestamping
- fair ordering of transactions
- speed
- both immutability as well as controlled mutability
- private as well as public transactions
These features according to Jordan give Hedera Hashgraph the edge.
Consensus
Jordan spent some time describing the methods of achieving consensus for other blockchains and pointed out the flaws with each. This was an interesting overview and he did raise valid points. Hedera Hashgraph has benefits (theoretically at least) in some areas.
You can see the CTO Dr. Leemon Baird describe these in the following link
Governance
A cornerstone of the roll out of this proof of stake platform will be an overseeing members council with 39 members, which will be made up of CEOs, titans of industry. This is where the talk began to get interesting.
39 Psycopaths...
One of the attendees compared CEOs to Psycopaths and then proposed that Hedera Hashgraph would be overseen (initially at least) by 39 psychopaths. According to some studies possibly 1 in 5 CEOs are psychopaths.
There was little detail about the CEOs but the current proposal is for each to serve up to a maximum of 6 years before being rotated off the council. They would get an share of the network fees but would not own the stake.
Snake Oil...
Jordan began his presentation noting the talk would be quite technical, but in reality it was not. It was entertaining and he had many great anecdotes such as; Pablo Escobars Paternal Brother forking Bitcoin, the story of a kid who got sent Bitcoin for holding up a sign saying "mom send bitcoin" at a football match, but he didn't give a lot of details on the protocol, how it works even the higher level items such as how the stake would be delegated, who the delegates would be ...
One of the attendees called him up on this (rather rudely) at the end congratulating him on his sales pitch but noted he shouldn't have said the talk would be technical. It was more like a snake oil pitch than a technical presentation. A heated debate ensued between other attendees passionate about aspects of the technology.
Conclusions
A platform like Hedera Hashgraph is interesting because they are taking a different approach. They have something that differentiates them from the rest, it's also interesting that even though they are not live yet they already have had several ICOs built on top of their platform.
Jordan made noise about fair ordering of transactions which would be a USP, which is a fair point but in practice we will see how this will play out.
Old World Order
Hedera Hashgraph is not open source, its open review. They have a patent on the technology and there are restrictions on it's use.
The platform seems more flexible than a blockchain in that there can be immutability or controlled mutability, anonymous transactions or not so there are more ways that Hedera Hasgraph can fit with the mainstream financial systems of today.
This technology will be appealing to enterprise and I would put it into the same category as Ripple. This may well be the distributed ledger technology that business favours because of its flexibility, speed and control but I would not put it in the same category as Bitcoin, Steem and others.
Please share any insights you have about Hedera Hashgraph
References
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-psychopaths-australian-study-finds/
- https://www.hederahashgraph.com/whitepaper
- Image sources from the whitepaper
Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.