Aero Wang: Nebulas NOVA will play a key role in transforming Nebulas from a corporation to a community.
This year we have a very important task— to turn Nebulas from a corporate organization into a community-based organization. This is an unfolding process, but we think we have reached a suitable stage because we now have tools based on the blockchain technology itself. — Aero Wang, Co- founder of Nebulas
On October 31, 2008, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper titled: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” which marked the birth of blockchain in our world. The essence of blockchain technology is a decentralized, trust-less, game-based autonomous system. Its real potential is the open collaboration model based on the consensus mechanism.
In June 2017, Nebulas presented a non-technical white paper: “The ultimate mission of the Nebulas Blockchain is to build a self-evolving blockchain system based on value incentive, which will also be the most important development direction in the world of blockchains hereafter.”
On December 31, 2018, the Nebulas core development team launched the Nebulas NOVA testnet version with three core functions. The three core functions are Nebulas Rank (NR), Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP) and Nebulas Blockchain Runtime Environment (NBRE).
While providing decentralized automated incentive protocols and automated system upgrades without hard fork, Nebulas NOVA also provides Nebulas with tools based on blockchain technology for community governance.
During the Chinese New Year, Aero Wang, the co-founder of Nebulas and Antshares (now known as NEO) shared his thoughts on the blockchain industry via the WeChat group of the Public Chain Technology Alliance (“PCTA”) “The Public Chain Technology Alliance Crossing The Bulls And Bears Elite Team.”
There, he shared his thoughts on “some key steps and difficulties for a public chain project to transfer from a corporate to a community” and his expectations for the role of Nebulas NOVA in community governance.
“The story of the blockchain is about a brand-new technological space that reorganizes resources”
In the current industry, one of the key issue that the blockchain industry has to tackle down is the massive application of technology, especially in the actual use cases. But its hard to achieve under the current cost of the existing blockchain infrastructure. Hence we started to focus on technical improvement of traditional, commercial companies instead, which are often application scenarios of consortium or private blockchains. For consortium blockchain scenarios, I am more cautious. I think it’s just a part of the blockchain story, but it can’t be the main focus.
If blockchain is a technological revolution; a consensus recognized by many people and a technology that many people are willing to participate in as well as invest in, then it must be fundamentally different from typical ecosystem application and organizational form of the existing Internet.
Just as the Internet (especially mobile Internet) have changed the way resources are allocated and organized, if blockchain is really a technological revolution, it will definitely open a new way of operating organizations; the required volume of these organizations are massive. Therefore, the story of blockchain is not just a story of a traditional system that improves its efficiency. It must be a story about reorganizing resources from a completely new technological space.
“Most public blockchains face the problem of power centralization of certain nodes, which prevents them from achieving community organization.”
Many public blockchain projects, represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum, are struggled in its community governance and failed to form efficient collaboration mechanisms among its community members. This is mainly because the power of nodes is too large; or the issue in aligning the interest of the operators of the nodes, developers, and token holders.
Further, nodes in the system (or miners in the traditional sense) and the technical teams (or developers) who build the system and the users of the system have no way to reach a consensus through an on-chain way, or we say recognized by the “system.” Existing blockchain technology can’t provide a tool to support on-chain collaboration, so they can only choose to go back to off-chain methods. These methods are via traditional social media and other means.
Even if the three parties (node, developer, token holder) form a consensus on a upgrade via a off-chain environment, consensus cannot be effectively implemented on the system. This is due to the fact that it's up to the node (or miners in the traditional sense) to implement the upgrading. Moreover, when one particular upgrade may not be of benefit to the miner/node whereas it may benefit the developer and/or token holders, the current blockchain technology cannot forcibly bypass the node to implement the upgrade. The power of the node is greater than the power of the entire community.
This is why I think PoW will definitely be a very large issue for Ethereum. Since there is already a vested interest group in the current Ethereum ecosystem, these groups will not easily give up the benefits they have already obtained.
This makes the system have huge inertia; they must pay a large cost to upgrade the system. So far, there are over 1,000 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), but each time they need to upgrade, they have to go wait more than a year, and may only pass a few EIPs in that time frame. We also need to consider the huge uncertainty they face and the risk of a hard fork failure.
If the upgrade and improvements of the blockchain system have high friction and associated cost, then when should we expect it to provide us with a truly useful infrastructure that can be applied? The ability to upgrade is the biggest hurdle of a distributed system and is now a key point that hinders further development of the entire blockchain world.
Therefore, we need an on-chain upgrade mechanism to ensure the consensus of the whole community, without affecting the entire distributed blockchain. A rapid upgrade is achieved in the case of system asset security.
We want a blockchain organization to have the power to determine its own direction. In this system, nodes, developers and token holders, become an inseparable part of this organization, and we want the blockchain system to contain an effective tool for changing the current situation where the power of the node is greater than the consensus reached by the community.
This is a very big issue and Nebulas has been very concerned about it. We believe Nebulas NOVA is ready for the most basic version of the tools needed to solve this problem. This year, we will take a look at its effects.
“Nebulas NOVA, in our opinion, can be regarded as a true Nebulas. It is expected that Nebulas NOVA can solve the problem of blockchain governance more reasonably.”
At the end of 2018, Nebulas NOVA was launched (currently running on the testnet, and the previous version mainnet was launched at the end of March 2018). Nebulas NOVA is, in our opinion, a true Nebulas. It will implement the core underlying elements, as mentioned in the Nebulas Technical White Paper. It will give you the infrastructure of the blockchain that you can and want to actually use.
Nebulas NOVA includes Nebulas Rank (NR), Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP) and Nebulas Blockchain Runtime Environment (NBRE)
In Nebulas NOVA, we have not fully realized the sidechain-based Nebulas Force. However, we implemented an automatic blockchain upgrade mechanism called Nebulas Blockchain Runtime Environment (NBRE). This mechanism solves the most difficult issue faced by existing blockchain. Nebulas Force enables the entire blockchain system to be seamlessly upgraded at low-risk and low-cost without hard fork.
NBRE is one of the many original technologies Nebulas has created for the blockchain world. The implementation of NBRE can not only solve the problem of blockchain system upgrade, but we also hope that it can solve the problem of blockchain system governance.
The decision makers of a blockchain upgrade should not be centralized. It belongs to every participant in the community. Every token user of Nebulas has the right to participate in or choose the direction of future Nebulas development.
So another very important task for Nebulas this year is to turn Nebulas from a corporate organization into a community-based organization, however, this is a gradual process and will not happen overnight. We do however think we have reached a suitable stage since we now have tools based on the blockchain technology itself.
Our biggest concern has been about some blockchain upgrades; fearing a monopoly of the entire system via the miners/nodes (this is the same issue facing PoW blockchains). This makes it impossible for the team to effectively implement the technical vision in a community-based organization. With Nebulas NOVA, this can be avoided via NBRE’s support.
This year, Nebulas will gradually involve the community in the governance of the entire blockchain system, and will also turn traditional off-chain governance into on-chain governance.
Based on the core ideology of blockchain, Nebulas proposes such a vision: “Let everyone obtain value from decentralized collaboration fairly.”
Learn more about Nebulas:
Official website: Nebulas.io
Github: github.com/nebulasio/go-nebulas
Slack: nebulasio.herokuapp.com
Telegram(EN): t.me/nebulasen
Community Forum: community.nebulas.io
Wiki: wiki.nebulas.io
Learn more about PCTA:
Official website: bitsclubvp.io
Contact: contact@bitsclubvp.io
