The blockchain giant-impact: Overview Scrypta and IdA Node installation
In the beginning was Scrypta, and Scrypta was with IdA Node
In this first article we will present Scrypta, an all Italian blockchain, active since 21 12 2018 14:04:35 (genesis block).
Going to Scrypta homepage, we can read:
Scrypta is a decentralized digital infrastructure that simplifies and makes more efficient managing, archiving and certification processes that feature the economic, productive and social sectors. Scrypta flexible system allows creating full architectures for unlimited projects and brand new use cases.
In this series of articles we want to show how true this is, trying to use this technology in a simple case of use. This first article is dedicated to the first impressions given by the presentation of Scrypta and the installation of a Scrypta Wallet and IdA Node.
Overview
The first resource to read, to get a clear idea of the project: we find the Light Paper, so with a general description that gives us information about the idea of the project and the technologies used. The main part of the infrastructure, from our point of view, is the Interconnected dApp Node, with which to communicate for writing data (including multimedia files, using IPFS). There are no smart contracts, the code can be written in any language and communication with the IdA Node is via API REST.
We decided to carry out these experiments using Raspberry, in particular the latest model, the Pi 4 B, 4GB of RAM.
Wallet installation
We are on the Raspbian buster 32-bit operating system, so we are looking for a guide to installing the Wallet on a Linux platform. We found a section, Wiki Scrypta, entirely dedicated to guides and documentation.
The guide seems well done, so we simply proceed with a copy and paste; apart from some differences in the import of repositories everything proceeds, but during the build there are problems with boost library. Scrypta code is no up to date for new version of boost!
There are two solutions: the first, which honestly should not be a solution, is to downgrade the library in question and all its dependencies, in this case too many; the second is to directly modify the Scrypta code. However, neither of them is really user friendly.
The project is completely open source, so we open an issue. Looking on the Internet, the problem found is not new, so we can identify the methods to change and solve the problem. We make a pull request and proceed. Now we complete the installation.
The wallet works and responds to requests.
You can find our guide here. (After these operations, the Scrypta team contacted us, showing itself to be completely available for explanations and information about the project. )
IdA Node installation
As previously explained, for our purpose the Ida Node is the core. It offers various services in addition to the basic commands to send transactions, such an interface to IPFS, a dApp engine (still in development), Trustlink and others.
As we done for the wallet, we look for a guide; It say us to simply launch a install.sh that includes all necessary dependencies. First we modify it, adding the repositories for our architecture and skipping the installation of already satisfied dependencies.
One step back…
Here we discovered that we should have switched to a 64-bit system. Our Raspberry model has 4GB of ram, a 32-bit system is not able to address so much ram, in fact during the installation of mongodb we have encountered this warning.
There are some unofficial guides to switching to Raspbian 64-bit, like this, but we have preferred not to deal with this and opt for a system ready for use
Looking for a 64-bit operating system we found Kali Linux, so again flash the OS and reinstall the Wallet.
…Now we’re here!
Reinstall the IdA Node lauching the modified install.sh; now the installation is complete!
The credentials of rpc and the path of the lyrad service must be set and finally run the Ida Node!
All these steps are described here.
Conclusion
Now what? This is just the first step, the base. Try to install a node and let us know if you have encountered any other trick.
In the next article we will describe our experience about the complexity of using this technology, we will test the communication with our IdA Node making some transactions; we will define the use case to be implemented and we will write the code.
