The Orbs Position Paper: How to Build a Blockchain For Consumer Apps
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
― Joseph Joubert
There’s a tendency in the blockchain space to launch projects with a celebratory technical white paper.
After all, it’s the document of record for your project, a serious undertaking in its own right and the reason most people will want to come along for the ride.
We’re not going to do that.
We’re approaching things a little differently with Orbs by starting with an argument. We are staking out our spot with a position paper.
If just want to skip to the position paper, click here.
This is not a white paper
We’re publishing a position paper and not a whitepaper. So what’s the difference?
- A whitepaper starts with a solution — what your application or infrastructure is, how it will be built and what problem it solves or service it provides.
- A position paper starts with a problem, analyzes it and then provides an arguable opinion on how the solution should be approached.
The Orbs Position Paper is all about our approach to making it possible for established consumer brands to create decentralized, large-scale applications.
We chose to publish a position paper instead of the industry-standard white paper because any solution to a complex problem should be flexible and evolve over time. The approach to solving the problem is important since it determines what types of technical solutions you’ll build now, next year, five years from now, and so on. If you publish a white paper, you’re committing to very specific plans that may make it harder for you to quickly adapt to changes in the market or technology.
Our position paper carves out the specific niche of the blockchain world that the Orbs platform is devised for. It goes into detail on the main requirements of the network.
However, we will indeed publish technical white papers in the near future. Those documents will cover various aspects of the Orbs system, with in-depth descriptions of our unique blockchain infrastructure.
What’s included in the position paper
The Orbs Position Paper includes our design philosophy, our analysis of pressing issues in blockchain development, and the different technical solutions we plan to implement.
Here is a summarized table of contents from the position paper:
- The Orbs vision
- The target audience
- The Orbs platform overview
- Orbs design principles
- The Orbs ecosystem
- The Orbs token
- Architecture overview
- Consensus overview
- Ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLA)
- Achieving consumer scale
- Dealing with compliance & regulations
- Modern deployment paradigms
- Designing for consumers
- The Orbs Federation
The point is to argue
While we hope our vision has resonated with you, we will argue our point. There is still much to discuss as the ebb and flow of blockchain changes day by day. That is why we are staking out our position on flexibility and practicality.
That is why we are publishing a position paper.
If you have thoughts, comment below, join our subreddit and join our Telegram group.
Join the Orbs community:
- GitHub: https://github.com/orbs-network
- Telegram: https://t.me/orbs_network
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/orbs_network
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ORBS_Network/
- Read the Orbs white papers: https://www.orbs.com/white-papers
