Game-changing a game-changer: Soar is putting drones on the blockchain
Just as the rate of drone hardware evolution follows a meteoric trajectory, so does the development of drone services and applications. Exhibiting this rapid evolution are completely new and widely adopted industry practices, such as low altitude aerial surveying utilising drones and inspection of above ground utilities.
Consequent to such rapid evolution, perceptions on drone capabilities are quickly changing. It’s staggering to think that in the last 10 years drones have become standard tools for major industries such as entertainment media, utilities inspections, land management, real estate, mining, farming, and construction. Even the drone pilots are asking themselves new questions. A short time ago we asked ourselves, ‘can I fly there?’ Now whenever faced with a technical issue, we ask ‘can that be done with a drone?’ And while some ideas might sound crazy (marriage proposal by drone), drones make anything seem possible. So when it comes to drones, it behooves us to think in new ways, we need to start thinking ‘like a drone’.
Like many of history’s greats, Abraham Lincoln (emancipator), Nelson Mandela (anti-apartheid), and Martin Luther King (civil rights campaigner), Drones are “the great decentraliser”. It’s not by feat of design, but by feat of circumstance and nature that drones work best using decentralised processes. Considering that drones are complex systems involving an array of components utilising disparate data sources, they’re inherently decentralised.
Top Five Reasons Why Drones are Decentralised by Nature
- GPS (i.e. location information from satellites) is decentralised.
- Options to navigate using on-board or by external control (autonomous or radio control).
- On-board data storage is short term and intended for immediate downloading for external storage and processing.
- Collision avoidance systems depend on input and interaction with other drones.
- Using a common way point and flight planning syntax, drones can be programmed by 3rd party flight planning apps.
While drones are capable of many things, they like to leave the heavy computing to someone or something else: such as cloud computing. As a mobile data capture device, drones are optimised for data capture while the number-crunching fun is given up to desktop and more frequently to cloud processing solutions.
Juxtaposing drones and the bockchain
Prior to drones, if you didn’t own or have access to aeroplane or satellite data, photographers and field scientists were limited to terrestrial on-ground photo taking and data capture. With the advent of drones, the vertical barrier to low altitude photo taking and data capture has forever been lifted. Now looking at photos with an ‘eye from above’ is more common. Field scientists love drones because data can now be captured at low altitudes inaccessible to traditional manned aircraft. So just as drones have eliminated vertical barriers to photography and data capture, the blockchain* has eliminated transactional validity barriers to commerce. Because blockchain distributed transactions can occur with unrivalled confidence, planetary scale cloud-sourced projects like the Soar Global Super-map (cloud sourced drone images from Soar) will soon be possible.
A pre-blockchain analogue to Soar’s Super-map
One large and well known metasearch company has provided a satellite and aerial global map since 2001. Gaining visualisation at both satellite and aerial scale was only possible because one very large company wanted to agglomerate large datasets from suppliers who themselves were capable of acquiring and building them. To replicate Soar’s projected high resolution global super-map, those tens of suppliers used to develop said metasearch company’s map would need to employ 1000’s of autonomous drones operating as drone swarms, often beyond visual line of sight (itself illegal in most countries). However using the Soar cloud-sourced drone image model, photos are captured on a one-man-to-a-drone basis, and the thousands of photo uploads can occur an a networked yet decentralised process sharing fashion only achievable on the blockchain. A project on this scale could succeed no other way than on the blockchain.
The term maverick is used to describe a lone bull who chooses to move apart from an instinctual herd mentality. The term was used by the early oil industry to describe explorers who defied convention and sought to find oil where previously thought impossible or unprofitable. In our age they have become ‘techno mavericks’, men such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others. Had you been a digital currency maverick in 2010, and purchased 100 Bitcoins at $0.008 (the price for Bitcoins on day one) your $0.80 investment in would have been worth $1,790,000 at it’s height on the 15th December 2017.
Great seed changes in humanity have been initiated by maverick men and women. It was their individuality and venturesomeness which lead to whole scale changes in thought and process.
Let’s take a ride on Soar, by joining the global blockchain community, transactions once crippled by centralisation can happen unhindered. Soar welcomes techno mavericks in the making who either want to monetise their drone images, consume high quality drone content using the SkyMap digital token, or fuel innovation and reap the rewards by investing in Soar.
The explosion of drone technology and services has been called ‘the drone hustle’. Join Soar and be a part of it.
*A blockchain, is a growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block,a timestamp, and transaction data. By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of the data. It is “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way”. For use as a distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for inter-node communication and validating new blocks. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires consensus of the network majority. Though blockchain records are not unalterable, blockchains may be considered secure by design and exemplify a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. Decentralized consensus has therefore been claimed with a blockchain. Adopted from Wikipedia, 2018.
