Elastos Weekly Updates — 04 May 2018
“I’m a reflection of the community.”
— Tupac Shakur
And then it was May, when the birds began chatting with the bees, and the bees began chatting with the flowers, and Fay began chatting with other community members on a peer-to-peer chat app with no third party present. How very Spring it has become.
The journey to the summit continued this week with the team headed to Nebraska, and the logo headed to a professional design firm.
We’re in it now. The community is building. The rebrand is well underway. But don’t worry, we’re keeping our name, because we’re the last OS, and that’s not going to change.
Elastos continued its forward momentum this week. Let’s recap.
Technical Dynamics
1. Continued ELA redpacket development and made significant progress into WeChat and telegram integrations
2. Created a simple decentralized chat app using Elastos carrier SDK as a first use case example. The community started to add each other on this app and it was demonstrated to work similar to a regular chat app however, the infrastructure behind this chat app is different in that there is no central server holding your data. All the communication is done peer to peer without any central authority
3. Fixed reflection build error on ios device for elastos.RT along with additional bug fixes
4. Upgraded UI for Elastos.ELA.SPV and fixed some memory leak issues when storing data
5. Fixed RPC interface method, memory leak issues when synchronizing blocks and upgraded command line user interface for Elastos.ELA.Client
6. Modified Elastos Carrier iOS SDK to support arm64 and x86_64 architecture
7. Refined the Dynamic Hash Table(DHT) error codes in Elastos Carrier Native SDK
Please check out our Github links:
https://github.com/elastos/Elastos.Community
https://github.com/elastos/Elastos.Community.Global
Community News
• Elastos has provided an update on its Logo Contest and upcoming Re-Brand: https://medium.com/elastos/logo-contest-and-re-brand-update-b4c170ff318a
• A Developers Bounty Program has been announced: https://github.com/elastos/Elastos.Community/blob/master/ElastosBountyProgram/README.md
• The Elastos Video Contest deadline is July 15th. https://medium.com/elastos/elastos-video-contest-final-version-5efb9fbebf19 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3089082.0#post_a2
April 25
Feng Han spoke at Fordham University about blockchain and Elastos. Professor Xueyong Gu from Tsinghua University appeared on site to show his support, and said he is willing to help Elastos work with the Brazilian government on IoT projects
April 27
Rong Chen discussed potential collaboration opportunities with IoT101
April 30
Feng Han explained the principles of protecting personal data security and copyrights at the HCSAA Summit Blockchain Forum at Harvard University. Feng Han also plans to write a book called “How to Talk to Wall Street About Blockchain” with World Bank Chief Security Architect Zhijun Zhang.
May 2
Elastos Ecology director Dinghe Hu and foundation secretary Hongjie Hu visited blockchain startup AxiomZen in Vancouver and met cryptokitties founder Benny Giang. They talked about potential collaborations for new games with Elastos and expansion in the Chinese market.
Professor Yasheng Huang, the former Associate Dean of Sloan School of Management, hosted a private Elastos technology seminar at MIT. Professor David Clerk and others attended. They discussed how the Elastos OS can be applied to MIT food safety inspection, big data, and blockchain management. Further discussion lead to an in depth talk about how meaningful it could be for Elastos to build a real P2P network protecting users data copyrights and security. A consensus was reached for future collaboration opportunities. Attendees also explored the possibility of starting an Elastos dev community at MIT. https://twitter.com/elastos_org/status/992134210394755072?s=21
Meetup in NYC
Rong Chen and Feng Han will host an event on May 12th at Fordham University.
Meetup in San Francisco: Technical Deep Dive with the Founders
Join Hsin-Ju Cjuang, Rong Chen, Feng Han, and Kevin Zhang for a technical deep dive about Elastos on May 8. Details can be found here: http://meetu.ps/e/Fc9zp/tNLdK/d
Meetup in LA: The Future of Blockchain & The Entertainment Industry
Elastos will be hosting a meetup in Santa Monica (date and location TBD) to discuss how Elastos can revolutionize the entertainment industry. Details can be found here: https://www.meetup.com/LA-blockchain-fintech-cryptocurrency/events/249312404/
Community Contributions
Ys Oki posted a video to Vimeo entitled “Elastos Carrier SDK- iOS” giving a tutorial of simple P2P Chat APP
Link: https://vimeo.com/267561213
Jeremy who runs the youtube channel “God Country Crypto” posted two very solid reviews of Elastos, one a review and another a comparison of Elastos and EOS.
Both Sides of the Coin
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96nOVH7Pn00
EOS vs Elastos
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=945&v=2Ug2hI2D4ps
Dom who runs the youtube channel CryptoTech Tutor posted a review of Elastos.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S7zqHppTXc
Feng Han Speaks With Jim Glassman of JP Morgan
Feng Han had a discussion about blockchain and cryptocurrency with Jim Glassman in March of this year. This week Elastos published part of that talk on their official Medium page.
Here are a few quotes from their exchange.
Jim Glassman: I don’t think that young people will have this relationship (with an internet economy). I don’t think people who use it will care.
Feng Han: But will they care when they know that big data can become their wealth?…But do you think young people will care if they know how their data is being used? Because they don’t know about blockchains, the Internet giants can collect data from everyone, and the customers are unaware that this data can be turned into their own wealth through blockchain.
Feng: I believe that in the future, the blockchain industry needs not only a certain kind of chain but also a trustworthy operating environment, so we need Elastos.
Feng Han: Many people like me think that the blockchain will bring a similar revolution to society like the Internet did, even more than the Internet. It will change everyone’s wealth and assets.
Jim Glassman: I think you’re right.
Rong Chen’s History of the Internet
Rong Chen gave an on camera lecture to entrepreneurial students at Tsinghua University about the internet and blockchain. This is a long and thorough look at the journey technology has taken from the beginning of the internet up until blockchain and what Elastos can bring next. So get a nice glass of something, sit down, and enjoy. Here are a few excerpts from Rong.
“The driver is a ghost”
“On the virtual machine, there can be no driver, no daemons, and no direct access to the internet.”
Referring to blockchain miners:
“This is a simple principle of economics. These people are subjectively for themselves and objectively for others. Who can understand what that means?”
“So, the future of operating systems is to run many virtual machines on one computer, whereas the past was running multiple tasks on one computer. If you can run 10 virtual machines on a computer, the application inside the virtual machine does not know the distance. It does not know how far away it is from the application and how far away it is from the service. These two virtual machines do not know whether they are installed on one machine, or on both sides of the Internet, the Internet of Things, or this LAN router. The difference between running 10 virtual machines or 100 million virtual machines on a computer lies in the power of the computer. That is the true limit. Logically speaking, both an Internet and Tencent’s Wechat can run 500 million virtual machines, right?”
“I am an amateur when it comes business matters, but I do remember two things, one is necessity, and the other scarcity. Breathable air is a human necessity, but the air is not scarce, so I don’t have to pay for it. If it’s not a necessity, I would not pay for it. For example, I want a specific mobile phone. It must be scarce.”
“If I wanted to learn computers, I would migrate to efficiency. Learning how to go back to our roots is the best. Therefore, people who study computers must do the opposite. How can I create scarce virtual goods? Don’t create something that is abundant. If something is scarce, I can sell it. I have 100 e-books, remember. The birth of Bitcoin in 2009 made this possible. It was impossible before, because everything was able to be copied. Now that Bitcoin has arrived, we can possibly create a smart economy or a private economy based on the blockchain.”
“Today’s Internet has no private property, only an oligopoly. “
“Any exchange of digital assets faces the execution of a program. The execution of a program depends on the execution environment, which is also called the operating system.”
“Therefore, today’s smart contracts must be escorted by an operating system.”
“Traditional websites that have IDs, scarcity, and verification, are already much cleaner. So why do they need to have consensus? This site sells books and users can find non-fake books here. This is not enough, though. The site must have a consensus. While these four capabilities — ID, verification, scarcity, and consensus — are great, what is the thing that is even more important? Decentralized mediation. This accounting book is not a decentralized intermediary. It is simply building trust. Can one person do decentralized mediation, and is one person able to to distribution? No. Actual decentralized mediation is when people work together to do this.”
Elastos to Co-Sponsor and Speak at Omaha Summit 2018
Rong Chen and Feng Han will be speaking during a VIP dinner as part of a panel entitled, “Value Investing and Quantum Wealth” on May 5th.
The Omaha Summit is in its 5th year, designed to bridge financial insight among global leaders.
More to come next week.
https://twitter.com/elastos_org/status/989908435251720193?s=21
Thoughts and Conclusions
“Blunt is simplicity. Meandering is complexity.” Ken Segall, Former Creative Director of Apple
This week Elastos announced the direction of its new logo and rebranding. It was revealed that the community engagement of creating logos, and the subsequent voting and discussion on this process, was a preliminary event to lead to a professional design firm creating an original logo from that inspiration. This unique combination of community engagement and professionalism, as Elastos begins its journey into the public eye, is worth thinking about in terms of another projects unique beginnings — early Apple.
Rong is Rong. There is no reason to compare him to someone else, but if one were to try, Bill Gates seems logical, if for no other reason than Rong worked alongside him for years. But when you really lift the rock of Rong’s vision, things under the surface are a lot more “far out” than Microsoft ever was. This is why the comparison to early Apple is so interesting.
In the 1970’s, Steve Jobs stood at the intersection of the counterculture movement of the 60’s and the coming technology of personal computers. It was this free spirited, Eastern philosophy laden, anti-establishment mindset that primed him for taking technology to a place of mass interconnectivity.
Rong Chen now stands at the intersection of a new kind of counterculture: decentralization, and a new kind of coming technology: blockchain. But he is not just creating something new. He is also fixing an internet that was never built correctly in the first place.
And yet, at first glance, Rong doesn’t seem anything like a San Fransisco hippie — he really doesn’t. But then he opens his mouth — and he begins talking about cyber republics, and about not thinking about profits, and about doing what’s best for the citizens of a country instead of central needs, and what he says about the internet is more in line with that same intersection than anyone may give him credit for. We start to see beyond his physical image and into the dream-like image he is elucidating for us so easily and yet so revolutionarily. Rong Chen has more in common with Thomas Jefferson than Mark Zuckerberg. He is talking about building a decentralized country online. This has never been done. His vision is very cyberdelic. When he talks about taking down walled gardens, and fenced institutions, and direct contact with the good stuff and no contact with the bad stuff…you kind of hear a little hippie vibe in him. One might even think a young Steve Jobs would dig it, you dig?
Say what you want about early Apple, but their vision was, well, visionary, far out. But even in their conception they used the word customer, not community member, because they were a company and buying their products was the extent of a users participation in the experience of their vision. Elastos, however, is not calling you a customer, but a community member. This is, ironically, what makes Rong Chen more of a hippie than Steve Jobs ever was. In fact, someone recently posted about an experience of asking Rong about his vision after a meetup, and when Rong responded by asking what he thought, what was his advice, not threatened because he is the only genius, but curious because someone else might have a good idea too, he enabled another mini-Rong in the process, leaving him a bit shocked and flattered. Asking another their opinion, and a non-employee no less, is not very Jobs-like at all. But it is Rong-like, and two Rong’s do make a right.
It would seem that there is something extraordinarily not egotistical and controlling happening with Elastos. Taking the important tenets of successful tech projects and then going even further in combining them with the important tenets of co-habiting the planet and working together for the betterment of all is not just the next evolution of the internet, but the next evolution of globalization. This is not about Rong Chen’s ego. This is about a better internet that we all build together.
Kevin Zhang said this week, “Elastos’ mission is to decentralize the internet. Our organization is decentralized too. It is very different than a traditional software company. In the future, the majority of work will be done not by company employees, but by community members. Elastos will eventually become a developer community, the world’s largest working space, no walls, no ceilings, no desks, with everyone working remotely and contributing to the community.”
Woah, sounds like Kevin Zhang is pretty cyberdelic himself.
But how do you express that vision? How do you tell that complex story in a simple way?
Steve Jobs knew nothing about marketing until he met Mike Markkula in 1976, a retired 33 year old from Intel who was an expert in it. Markkula would become an equal partner with Jobs and Wozniak and teach Jobs how to take Apple mainstream. When Markkula started, Apple was valued at $5,309. Within three years it was worth 1.79 billion.
Jobs said of him then, “Mike really took me under his wing. His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”
That will last. Something you believe in, that will last. Elastos is marketing itself, and believes itself to be, the last OS. A universal and revolutionary system of security for the exploding industry of IoT, the global phenomenon of the smart phone, and by extension, a new smart web that will empower wealth generation and data ownership for the individual. No one wanted to give Steve Jobs the several hundred thousand dollars he needed to put the Apple II into production, even with offers of huge equity (they probably regretted that). Markkula gave him 250k because what he saw fit his definition of something you believe in that will last.
In 1977, Markkula wrote a one page document entitled, “The Apple Marketing Philosophy.” It listed three simple objectives: empathy, focus, and impute.
Empathy was to understand what their customers needed. To have an intimate connection with their feelings. Focus was to ignore what was unimportant to the vision so they could succeed at what was. Finally, impute was to deliver marketing that was clear, because even with a superior product, people do judge a book by its cover, and they form opinions based on what they perceive. Therefore, if they are presented with a creative and professional image they will impute those qualities onto the project. They will impute what you present them with onto what you have actually created.
Apple once had what was described as “an ornate Victorian woodcut-style logo.” When they first started to market the Apple II, Regis McKenna, a publicist Jobs hired after seeing his ad campaign for Intel, went to work on brochures that would include a new logo. An art director named Rob Janoff was put in charge of the design, and Jobs told him, “Don’t make it cute.”
Janoff produced two versions. One, a simple apple, the other, a simple apple with a bite out of it. The simple apple was said to look more like a cherry, so Jobs picked the second — and thus the Apple logo contest ended.
Apple was not interested in gimmicks. Their hype was part of what they were actually doing.
They did revolutionize the personal computer and we continue to use their products but it’s not because of a commercial from 1984. They knew how to tell the story of what they were doing in simple, elegant, and edgy ways. They chose revolutionaries as their icons, as their visionaries. They looked to people who had changed society, not to people who had changed technology; they would be the one’s to do that. They superseded their industry by appealing to what unites us as people, not what unites us as customers of technology. They went after the dystopias, and yet, we are again faced with another one right now, the current internet.
Let’s talk about Elastos.
Empathy. Elastos has it. People want to feel safe on the internet. They do not want to feel vulnerable. Rong has spent over half his life getting to the point where that is about to be possible. Given the option, most people would choose to create wealth from the data they already produce and are basically forced to allow corporations to profit from. They do not want to be second-class citizens renting the internet from centralized oligarchs — they want to own it for themselves. Elastos understands these feelings maybe even before most people realize they have them. It’s not about Elastos profiting. It’s about the community profiting.
Focus. Elastos has focused all of its efforts thus far on its groundbreaking technology (18 years of it) and they have succeeded. No one else has created what Rong Chen and his team have. His focus has been exactly where it needed to be and now our focus will be to deliver this vision to the public.
Impute. Elastos is now working on an image that will live up to its tech. We are not a company like Apple, but by presenting the vision of our foundation in clear, creative, and professional ways, we will help people impute those same qualities onto what Rong has given the world.
But no matter what marketing a company chooses, the best way to spread a vision is with evangelists. People truly passionate about something, that tell other people why, is always better than an advertisement. If you really care and love a product or a vision, and explain that to someone else, and they can see your honesty, your transparency, they will more likely buy it or use it than if they are told by a campaign or an ad or a slogan. But why not have both? Clear and simple marketing and a community of evangelists that actually believe in Elastos. That is where the community comes in again. We are working on a rebrand that will deliver our vision in a simple, creative, and professional way. As community members, as evangelists, talking about, writing about, making videos about, and building demos and applications, are ways in which you can market as well. First think about how many people started using Apple products because of an ad they saw, then think about how many people started using them because a friend told them how much they loved using theirs.
We have imagined a cyberdelic fusion of freedom and direct connectivity with advanced computing: a peer to peer platform, on a totally secure OS, with its own economy, all on your phone or device. We are building a new society, a country, a republic where flower power meets coding power, whose aim is not greed but wealth for anyone, and we should be proud.
We are inspired by a lot of visionary ideas, including early Apple, and we plan on delivering our own unique vision in the coming months with a new website, a new logo, and new marketing.
If anyone has thought differently, Rong Chen has. He’s been doing it since 1984, when he came to America, and when Apple launched their famous Super Bowl ad decrying the end of the totalitarian state and the dawning of the Macintosh. Now, let us let Elastos decry the end of the totalitarian internet, and the dawn of the Cyber Republic.
Let us not toast to an Orwellian future, but to just maybe, a Rongian one.
Onward! Upward! Elastos!
Elastos is hiring full-time and part-time community members for technical and non-technical positions: https://medium.com/elastos/we-want-you-elastos-community-recruitment-da0e97694f63
