Finally back in the swing of things on the way to my personal goal.

I had to solve some things

After an absence due to the circumstances I first had to find a solution for, I am back. Achieving my personal goal has become an even bigger challenge than it already was. Due to the circumstances I was put back a lot. Where I was busy at first, and saw real progress… it has now come to a standstill. Due to the necessary repair of my PC, I had to take out a loan from a good friend of mine, for which I am of course very grateful, but which must also be repaid as soon as possible.

All other things that I had to arrange, such as arranging a new router from my internet provider and a number of other things also took quite a bit of time. And so you are then from “Sit comfortably in the flow and well on your way to reaching your goal”, suddenly put back to a standstill, and a temporary stop in progress.

Restlessness and performing does not work for me

All this caused a lot of restlessness in my head, and whoever knows me a bit… knows that with restlessness in my head I will not achieve the best performances. I can work fine with a time limit. I can perform very well under pressure. That even works a bit like a red flag on a bull. LOL ... But a head full of anxiety and worry ... that's fatal to me, and makes me fall into silence.

Last week I slowly picked up the swing of things again, and because I got rid of the worries and unrest again, luckily it seemed time to celebrate a bit. Maybe I should dance a Polka with Skipper today?

Or, and that's a much better idea ... Take a closer look at POLKADOT crypto! Are you also interested in this? Then read on!

It's all in the name!

Let me start with the fact that Polkadot caught my eye because of its name. I mean, as a woman the name Polkadot was best known to me because of a song by Albert West once. Perhaps known to several people, but “It was an itsy bitsy teeny weenie, yellow POLKADOT bikini ...” and so on. Well, that was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the name POLKADOT. And for that reason alone, my interest in this cryptocurrency was aroused.

That association aside, what is POLKADOT?

The coin has only been released on the crypto market since August 20 and has caused quite a stir in that short period, and is now in the top 10 of CoinMarketCap. That is a very remarkable and excellent performance of the DOT. At the time of writing this Polkadot is trading for $ 5.02!

Oh wow, it actually makes me take a look at the Yellow Polkadot Bikini and start counting the dots on the bikini in my mind. Oh how great would it be to have so many dots in my wallet?

What is the reason Polkadot performs so well?

How come the Polkadot made such a huge impression? What is the reason for this? After the first beginning of my research, and seeing the commercial value of the DOT, my interest only grew.

An alternative strategy.

While Cardano and Chainlink aspire to be Ethereum killers and have their blockchain used as a replacement for Ethereum, Polkadot is looking to coexist with Ethereum rather than compete with it. Considering the daunting task that Chainlink and Cardano face to one day succeed in replacing Ethereum, this alternative strategy may well be worth it.

Gavin Wood

Supported by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, Polkadot is now seen as one of the potential blockchain projects that would provide the features required for web 3.0 solutions. Indeed, the huge hype so far on social media and the meteoric rise of the coin makes me believe that the coexistence of both blockchains is a strategy that others may also want to implement.

Collaboration with Chainlink

Very recently, Polkadot announced a collaboration with Chainlink. The fashionable currency seems to be gaining ground among its competitors. It seems that the yellow Polkadot bikini has not been forgotten in the crypto world and is still popular.

How did Polkadot came to life?

Now a piece of the technique of Polkadot and how Polkadot came to life. Most of the new cryptocurrencies arise to solve a real problem with the help of blockchain technology. However, as anyone who uses the blockchain knows, there are still plenty of problems with the blockchain itself to be solved. And there… that's where Polkadot comes into play. Polkadot was created to solve the problem of blockchain itself.

A blockchain connecting many different blockchains together

Polkadot, as the official website points out, is a "heterogeneous multi-chain technology". In essence, it is intended to be a blockchain connecting many different blockchains together. Polkadot is designed to solve some of the biggest problems that prevent blockchain technology from being widely applied in everyday reality. Two of the main problems with this usage are:

• Scalability - Simply put, blockchain technology as it exists today cannot handle the number of transactions in the intended decentralized world. Today, network nodes process transactions one-to-one, which is a bottleneck that limits higher volumes.
• Isolation - Blockchain networks remain discrete and independent, with no communication and interoperability between them.

To understand how Polkadot wants to solve these problems, we need to take a closer look at Polkadot's structure. There are three terms that Polkadot uses that are at the heart of Polkadot's structure.

These three terms are;

• The Relay Chain - This is the main Polkadot chain that all individual blockchains will connect to.
• The Parachain - Short for "parallelized chains", these individual blockchains will run in parallel across the Polkadot network.
• The Bridge Chain - The bridge chain is built to connect blockchains that do not use Polkadot's governance protocols.

By reading the brief description of the three components above, you have probably already gained a high-level vision of how the Polkadot network will work. Connecting to the relay chain is to solve the interoperability problem, where the smart contract function ensures that all transactions between individual chains are executed faithfully. Parachains can solve the scalability problem by processing transactions in parallel.

Another idea behind the Polkadot network is shared security. Security resources are bundled within the Polkadot network. This allows individual chains to make use of collective safety without having to start from scratch.

Polkadot has a Proof of Stake culture, and that's where the DOT coin comes into play. Validators will secure the relay chain by staking out DOTs (the Polkadot token), participating in consensus with other validators, and validating evidence of collators.

The role of Collators is to maintain the parachains by collecting parachain transactions from users and to produce state transitions to be given to the validators.

The last two roles are Nominators and Fishermen. Nominators select good validators and use DOTs to further secure the relay chain. And lastly you have the Fishermen, they are the last safety frontier; they monitor the network and prove bad behavior to validators.

I am NOT an expert!

Wow… that looks like a well-secured blockchain to me, but as I have mentioned many times before. I am certainly not an expert. I am only sharing my own findings here, and what I find striking in this is the division of roles that must guarantee safety. My feeling tells me that they have succeeded by implementing it in this way. But yes, I can also be completely wrong. The future will have to tell.

The role of the DOT token

Now we have looked at the structure of the Polkadot blockchain, and then it is time to look at the role that the DOT coin plays in this.

The DOT token will serve three main purposes within the Polkadot network.

They are:

• Governance: Token holders will have complete control over the protocol. Privileges which are normally reserved for miners on other platforms including determination of fee structures, protocol changes, and parachain additions or removals, will be given to the token holders. These functions are not formally granted to token holders, but they will be able to participate in the decision-making process by virtue of being token holders. This participation function will be built into the underlying code.
• Operations: DOT tokens will facilitate the underlying consensus mechanism of the Polkadot network. Token holders need to be active participants and "bond" tokens (putting them at risk) to discourage malicious behavior.
• Bonding and Payment: This is the value mechanism. DOTs will be given out as rewards for active participation in the network. You will also need to bond DOTs to add new parachains, which is a type of proof of stake.

The initial supply of DOTs for the Polkadot Genesis block is 10 million. 5 million of these DOTs were auctioned off at Polkadot's ICO in October 2017.2 million more DOTs are for further pre-launch contributions, and the remaining 3 million are reserved for the Web3 Foundation.

However, this 10 million initial supply is not a hard cap. The creators envision the supply to be inflationary to give incentives to participate in the proof of stake mechanism.

Polkadot is designed to have a bare structure, addressing most of the complexity at the middleware level. At this early stage of development combined with the continued rapid evolution of blockchain technology, it is hard to say how Polkadot will specifically fit into the future landscape.

Nevertheless, here are some of the possible usage scenarios.

• A blockchain project wants to increase ETH but requires verification by a private bank chain before accepting ETH.
• As with the above, a payment processor may require the same type of verification before accepting payment in BTC.
• A decentralized exchange parachain enables BTC deposits using zero knowledge proofs from a Zcash parachain.
  Internet of Things: there is a hurricane. The weather oracle confirms it, and the IOT oracles confirm the damage. The private insurance chain issues a token payout.

Let's take a further look at the Polkadot team?

Polkadot's founder is Gavin Wood, who is the co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum. He is also the founder, CTO, and Chairman of Parity Technologies Ltd, which is supplying the development team behind Polkadot. He is also the founder and President of the Web3 Foundation, which aims to nurture technologies that can benefit the envisioned Web3 ecosystem of a truly decentralized Internet. I guess that's a very good thing, with taking all the knowledge he has build over the years with Ethereum it gives a good solid base to gain trust and to build on the future.

Also in the team Robert Habermeier. He has a research and development background in blockchains, distributed systems, and cryptography. A longtime member of the Rust community, he has focused on leveraging the language's features to build highly parallel and performant solutions.

And last but not least is Peter Czaban. Peter is the Technology Director of the Web3 Foundation, where he works on supporting the development of the next generation of distributed technologies. He obtained his Masters of Engineering degree at the University of Oxford, reading Engineering Science where he focused on Bayesian Machine Learning. He has worked across defense, finance and data analytics industries, working on mesh networks, distributed knowledge bases, quantitative pricing models, machine learning and business development.

The Polkadot is now for sale at various exchanges and it seems to be going well for the DOT.

I think back to Albert West's song, sing in my mind "It was an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow POLKADOT bikini…". The song was a big hit at the time, would that turn out to be a predictive outcome for Polkadot?

I dream on a bit ... and know that I have a long way to go before reaching my personal goal, but I will get there!