AMA with Lumerin Protocol developers — Part 2/2
The community’s questions about Lumerin, answered by its very builders
Note: If you missed the first part of the AMA, click here to start from the beginning!
Q: Let’s talk about nodes: How can the community participate in running them? Will they need LMR to stake against correct or malicious validations?
Josh: The idea right now is that anyone can download the node software and run it. Whether they can do that on a Raspberry Pi, Mac, or a Windows machine is still not entirely solidified but it will be in the model that anyone can download and use it.
On the other hand, there’s multiple aspects of the validation. The consensus protocol itself will probably be proof-of-work — don’t quote me on that.
As far as validating hashrate goes, that’s going to be more of a paid service that anyone can collect fees for.
Q: What kind of computer power would people need to be able to run a node?
Josh: Probably not that much. Just to run a simple Lumerin node itself, you won’t need that much computing power. I could see it being similar to a standard Bitcoin or Ethereum node.
You could get away with running it on a Raspberry Pi. You definitely won’t need an MIT supercomputer that can calculate how a galaxy moves or anything like that.
Q: Once the Lumerin blockchain goes live, what are some motivations for people to build on it?
Josh: Once we’re separated from Ethereum and go onto our own blockchain, we’re not going to have to worry about the Ethereum gas fees or getting space in Ethereum blocks.
We’ll be our own protocol, our own network, and we won’t have to compete with everyone else trying to use the Ethereum blockchain. That should lower fees and speed things up. Also, when Ethereum goes down, we won’t, which is not a bad idea.
Q: What’s the benefits of having our own chain versus staying on Ethereum?
Josh: For us, one of the biggest things is gas fees. One of the big issues with Ethereum is if you want to do a transaction, the gas fees might be very minimal to very large. It’s unpredictable and it could basically freeze or clog things up.
If we move out of that ecosystem and onto our own, we’ll just have more control over it and everything should run much more smoothly.
Q: Is there a general timeline on when it’ll go live and how it’ll be deployed?
Lance: Not yet. We want to thoroughly test everything before we put it out there, have a beta that maybe some of the community will be able to access. But going forward, it’s kind of unknown.
Hopefully Q3, but we don’t want to pre-release anything until it’s been thoroughly vetted. The last thing we want is to release something and have somebody find some kind of bug. It needs to be audited and taken a look at with our community.
Q: Could you provide an explainer walkthrough of how the Lumerin Protocol works and how miners and buyers could participate in it?
Josh: Basically, if you have a miner who has an available amount of hash rate — let’s say 100 TH/s with all the miners that they have — , they can basically put a contract out there where they can say: “For this amount of LMR tokens — 1,000 LMR, for example — , I can provide you with 100 TH/s over the next 24 hours.
Someone who wants to buy that hashrate will transfer their LMR to that contract, which acts like an escrow service. Then, the seller starts routing their hashrate to whatever mining pool the buyer wants.
The Lumerin node that we’re developing will facilitate the hashrate getting routed from the mining rigs themselves to the actual location of the pool. The nodes will basically be enforcing honesty. They’ll be making sure that the proper hashrate is going, the hashes being submitted are valid, they’re going to the right person, etc.
Once the contract is completed, the person selling their hashrate can retrieve their LMR tokens from the contract. Everyone’s happy. The buyer gets their pool rewards and the seller gets their Lumerin tokens.
Q: What are some other potential applications of the Lumerin Protocol? What will the initial launch look like and what is going to be added to it as we go on?
Josh: When it launches, the only available product we’ll have is the hashrate marketplace. I’m not promising anything, but there’s also been talk of offering stuff like futures or other speculative forms of trading hashrate. I could definitely see that getting developed relatively quickly, since it’s more of a known financial tool, but I want to stress that that’s not being offered at launch.
Then, as I mentioned before, this is going to be an open-source protocol that anyone can really build on and contribute to. There’s a lot of smart people out there, and I’m sure that when you combine smart contracts and hashrate, there’s just a lot of potential there.
The sky really is the limit, and I’m sure that all the things that we’ll be seeing out there haven’t even been thought of now.
Lance: To jump onto what Josh is saying, one thing that we’ve been “secretly” talking about is NFTs and having a platform for that. That’s something we’ve been toying with and seeing what that looks like.
In addition to that, with all the things we’re hoping to add to the Lumerin blockchain — TBA, of course — , is gaming. I think that is an exciting future that our token could also have.
There’s a lot of different things in there. Merge mining — again, TBA — is something that we’ve been looking at and how to safely do that. I say safely because, as you may have seen lately, some side chains have had some security issues. So again, that goes back to why we want to test, test, and test before we put anything out there.
Essentially, if you think about a Google Play Store, Apple Store, you have these applications that are available for your phone. That’s something that we’ve been looking into. Becoming one of those types of stores, but for dApps.
Q: Do you guys have anything else you would like to add that you feel that the listeners would be interested in hearing about?
Lance: We also have a web wallet and a desktop wallet coming out, which will be multi-platform. That is something that’s being worked on that will be integrating with what Josh and the rest of the Lumerin Protocol team are working on.
That’s something that will be released to help people connect to our hashrate marketplace.
As Josh alluded to earlier, people would be able to download this and modify it. Hence, the whole open source aspect. Anybody looking to work on this kind of thing, or trying to set it up, keep an eye out for GitHub. You’ll eventually start seeing some of our projects and work there and we would love the community to help in any way they can. All help is welcome.
Q: Is it possible to tokenize a Lumerin node?
Josh: We haven’t put any thought into tokenizing a node itself. There’s been talk of an NFT project to tokenize hashrate but the mechanics are still early in the work.
Whether it’s tokenizing an actual Lumerin node or a specific Bitcoin mining rig, that’s still up in the air.
I don’t see why you couldn’t tokenize a Lumerin node itself, but with what the nodes are actually being designed to do, I’m not sure if tokenizing a node would be on the top list of projects to start working on once we launch.
Q: How many developers does Lumerin have? How has the team grown?
Lance: It’s been ever increasing and we keep adding talent onto the team. In addition to that, we’ve also been working with some offshore folks as well. The amount of developers basically fluctuates, but the team has quadrupled since I’ve signed on.
There’s different aspects to our development team: we have the Titan Pool side and the Lumerin Protocol side, so it’s fairly split up.
Q: How will the swap be once we move onto the Lumerin chain?
Lance: That’s still to be determined at this time, but it’s something we’ve been looking into and how we’re going to successfully do that. Obviously, we’ll have to temporarily pause the token while we do that, but more details on that will be out later.
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