AMA with Titan’s Chief Architect, Alan Sorber
All the questions you have about Lumerin, hashpower, and mining, answered by one of Titan’s finest
Hello Lumerians!
We had an insightful discussion with Alan Sorber last Tuesday. Alan is Titan’s Chief Architect and he plays a key role in the development of the Lumerin Protocol.
In case you missed it, here’s a recap of all the questions he answered.
Q: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
A: My name is Alan Sorber, and prior to Titan, I spent over 25 years in a global manufacturing company homed in upstate New York.
I’ve had lots of roles during that tenure, but the most relevant to our upcoming Titan work were Critical Response Leader, Enterprise Architecture, and Cloud Product Owner.
As for Titan specific, a Chief Architect definition usually takes shape with the company’s context or needs. Since we’re still early, I’m covering a bunch of different areas, notably:
- Strategic technology roadmap development across products and internal services.
- DevOps & cloud architecture.
- Information, protection and security
As Titan continues to grow and mature in the industry, I’m bringing my architecture and operations-at-scale background to ensure we can develop and deliver secure, safe, and stable products across our portfolio.
In the short term, my focus areas are working closely with the development team to enable token-distribution and develop automated, functional, and security testing with our CI/CD lifecycle to ensure the Lumerin software can be released safely and updated quickly as the community provides feedback.
If you’re new to Lumerin, we recommend that you watch our explainer video before reading the following questions to understand what the Lumerin Protocol is about:
Q: Could the Lumerin Protocol cause an explosion in the number of small miners, leading to mining becoming less dominated by big farms?
A: It certainly could. Traditionally, as a mining rig or farm owner, your return on investment would primarily come from mining — individually or as part of a pool — , right?
With the Lumerin Marketplace, we open up the potential for an additional revenue stream by selling your hashpower on the market.
For those that do not want the hassle or to invest in the capital IT infrastructure, it gives them an opportunity to still purchase and use that hashpower. Think “public cloud provider” but specifically for hashpower.
To sum up: yes, I think it opens up significant opportunities for both the seller and buyer sides of the marketplace!
Q: Will having a market for hashrate lead to new innovations, such as breakthroughs in energy efficiency and computing power?
A: Absolutely! This is one of the major reasons we’re supporting and delivering Lumerin as an open-source project!
We’d love to see where the global community can take the concept of a decentralized hashrate protocol. Who knows where it could lead?
What other systems — crypto aside — could be ripe for decentralization and ensuring that individuals retain what is theirs? I think we’ll see great input from the community on innovation. There’s a huge wealth of knowledge out there!
Q: Do you think that some market participants could emerge to speculate and trade hashrate for profit?
A: Good question! I don’t think we’re unique in that regard with Lumerin, crypto in general, or really any venture that’s out there.
In fact, that scenario is quite commonplace with any tradable commodity from orange juice to pork bellies to electricity.
While we expect the marketplace to improve innovation and development within the crypto technology arena, I’m sure there will be folks that won’t align to that altruism and try to improve their portfolio and/or game the system.
Crypto is old enough now that there is a good library on “angles” that some folks will take. And of course, with new technology, we open up the space for unintended consequences.
It’s just part of the push-pull of developing and delivering new technology into the global environment. Some will align to the vision and some will want to take advantage of it.
Q: Back to hashpower. Is it possible to store hashrate like an asset or does it need to be used immediately?
Hashpower as a battery is an intriguing concept. With our current plans, when a contract is created by a seller and then purchased, the hashrate is consumed for the duration of the contract immediately.
Since hashrate is a function of electrical power input, I’m not sure that it can be used as the digital version of a battery or capacitor to be stored and used later.
However, being a commodity, it should be possible to create a hashpower futures market like those that exist for many other commodities today.
I’ll have to chew on the “hashpower battery” question a little more. Maybe we’ll have to talk to the guy with all the rockets and electric cars.
Q: What are the minimum requirements for buyers and sellers to participate in the market?
A: LOL. This is one of the questions we wrestle with on a daily basis!
If we think about how we are crafting the marketplace, the sellers will offer a quantity of verifiable hashrate for a certain duration in the contract.
If we start with a minimum quantity of either of those variables, then we may inadvertently set the bar too high and exclude folks that only want to try it out. On the other hand, full variability of all of those inputs could cause those unintended consequences I mentioned earlier.
That said, at this point we’re still reviewing and debating this internally and think that we’ll be looking to some early adopters or contributors to help find the way forward.
We don’t have all the answers, and I think in a case like this — easily tunable and adjustable — , getting input from those in the community would be great.
If you want to contribute and leave us your feedback/suggestions, make sure to pay us a visit on Lumerin’s Telegram channel:
Q: How long do you anticipate it will be before the Lumerin hashrate marketplace is up and running?
A: We are planning to have an MVP version to demo in the first half of this year followed by a general release later in 2022.
Q: When will the token generation event be?
A: We are still targeting sometime in Q1 2022 and hope to announce a definitive date soon.
It’s important to note that we must make sure that the token distribution method is safe, secure and stable. The community and our partner network have put an incredible amount of trust in Titan and we must ensure that we are as risk-free as possible for the TGE.
Q: How will the Lumerin Protocol benefit holders and public sale investors? How will the Lumerin token be used?
A: Early investors get first hand opportunities to help pave the future of the marketplace and how we’ll leverage the token moving forward.
The token itself will enable the decentralized P2P trading of that hashpower, and we will look for other mechanisms to leverage that blockchain and smart contract environment.
Q: Any closing thoughts or statements?
I’ll just close with this: The community and our partners have placed an incredible amount of trust in Titan and our Lumerin Marketplace vision and we owe it to you to ensure that we have a clear path to a safe, stable and secure environment that will last for a long time.
My background is architecture and operations-at-scale so I’m going to make sure that we deliver the products that we promise. That can be relied on to fulfill Ryan’s (Titan CEO) vision of our future!
Did you like this story?
We publish content like this every week, and engage with our community on a daily basis. Make sure to follow us on Medium so you don’t miss anything! You can also subscribe to our blog and visit Lumerin.io for more information. We’ll be glad to have you!
